Trimming Blackberries

This year we did not start trimming blackberries until the initial grape pruning was done.  But luckily the days are getting longer ...  and a bit warmer :)

After

Before

Work in Progress....

First Blackberry Blossom

Blackberry Season

We are in the middle of a drought - at least on our farm.  There have been downpours just a few miles away, several times, but our grass is brown and our garden is in a sad stage.  We've been irrigating the blackberries as much as possible, since harvest time is starting.

Nonetheless, there are berries.  In the last week, we picked over 850 lbs and about 1/3 of them are beautiful.  The others were cleaned and frozen and will be used/sold for making jams, shrubs, or wine. We will still be picking for a while - and hoping for rain!

We do have fun picking them, even in the heat...and they are delicious.

Rachel is picking in the summer heat

Elena loves her berries

Delicious

We'll still be picking for a while - and hoping for rain!

Making "Fruit-leather"... and Jerkey

Samantha got us a "kick-ass" dehydrator for Christmas. The first thing Jeff made in it was - of course - deer jerky, which turned out great.

But then we experimented with making fruit leather - the fruit roll-up kind of snacks.  We thawed out some of our seedless blackberry puree (the same kind we use for making jam), and then cooked it with SureJel and sugar, only we used more than twice the amount of fruit than the jam recipe calls for.  This thickened the puree enough to be able to spread it on the trays of the dehydrator.   I should mention that we got non-stick silicon sheets for the trays - which was very helpful.





We also spread out some of our homemade applesauce on two additional trays.  We let the fruit dry for about 8 hours,then peeled them off the sheets onto a cutting board.  We then sliced and rolled up the dried fruit puree.  They turned out really well, more tart than sweet, and absolutely delicious!

Blackberry Harvest 2015 - Final Results

It was another great year for our blackberries:  We started picking on July 11, at least two weeks earlier than in 2014, and we stopped picking on August 10th - when we stopped tallying.  There are still stray berries out in the patch for breakfast cereal or pancakes.

Nearly a whole month of picking!  (No wonder I did not find time to update our blog).


The "official" grand total of picked blackberries for 2015 was 2018.36 lbs.  Of this, we froze 838.36 lbs, and 1190 lbs of berries were picked into pint and quart boxes.

Assessing Winter Damage

The 2014/15 winter was harsh - maybe not record breaking, but awfully cold.  The good news is that we had a lot of snow, which helped to insulate the roots of plants.  The other good news is that we never experienced a period of warming temperatures in early spring, only to dip into deep cold again.

All in all, we could have done worse.  It seems that our grapevines sustained no winter injury at all - mainly due to the fact that we only planted hybrid varieties, which we selected for cold hardiness appropriate for our growing zone.

We did loose a few blueberry bushes, but those had been weaker plants going into the winter.  Also one of our Asian Pear trees did not make it.

However, our blackberries did get hit by winter damage: probably between 15 - 20% of the fruiting canes are damaged.  Luckily this does not mean that the plant itself is dead, there will just be less berries.  (we had expanded our blackberry patch, so we probably come out even at harvest time compared to last year)

Some of our herbs did not survive the cold winter either - not surprisingly, the rosemary did not make it, but neither did the marjoram.  All other perennial herbs are growing fine and the dill self-seeded again.

Some Jam Experiments

It was time to clean out the freezer and use up last year's berries!  We still had several containers of frozen strawberries, and a whole lot of bags of frozen blackberries.  Luckily the strawberries were ready to be used for jam, since we froze them as puree. The blackberries needed to be thawed, heated and run through the food mill to remove seeds before we could use them.

We set all the berries out to thaw on Friday, and Saturday morning at least the strawberries were ready to use. While the blackberries were slowly heating on the stove (in a 22 quart pot), we decided to experiment a bit with rhubarb-strawberry jam.  Roughly we used twice as many strawberries as rhubarb, plus lemon juice - the trick was to know how much total fruit to use in order to get a nicely set jam.  After the initial runny batch, which had the consistency of apple butter, we reduced the amount of fruit by a cup, and ended up with a soft jam, slightly tart, but nicely balanced with the sweetness of strawberries.

Here is our recipe for strawberry-rhubarb jam:

• 1 and 3/4 cups of cooked rhubarb (chopped cleaned rhubarb is heated with very little water and cooked until soft)
• 3 and 1/2 cup of mashed strawberries (can use fresh, we used frozen "chunky" puree) 
• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 4 cups of sugar
• 1 packet of low-sugar SureJell  

We followed the SureJell instructions for cooked jam.  This sized batch made 4 pint sized jars of jam.

The blackberries yielded enough puree for 5 + batches of jam.  We kept the extra out for smoothies :)

Still Pruning!

Good news is that we finished pruning all the blackberries - including the newest patch behind the house.   Once the pruning and weeding was finished, Lars and Jeff set the remaining trellis posts.  Jens came this weekend and helped run the trellis wires.  It looks great.






We've continued the grapevine pruning as well - at least whenever the weather is decent enough to go out there.  Luckily with the time change, we do have some more daylight in the evening.  Hoping this helps us get the job done faster.

Fall Finishes

Garden:


Our garden is definitely finished for this season - the last vegetables to harvest this year were load of peppers (of all things).  They did really well and we managed to get 3 large bowls of peppers right before the first frost.



Berries:
Jeff completely finished pruning, weeding and mowing the large blackberry patch.  He also tied up all the remaining primocanes to protect them from being blown around by winter winds. Tina finished weeding all the blueberries, and we even found time to tie up our sparse raspberry patch.



Yard:

Not too much for us to do at the farm, except for finishing one last mowing  But when we visited Zach and Rachel in Ohio last week, Tina and Toben had a blast raking up all their maple leaves.









Apples:

We are NOT yet finished with processing apples, as a matter of fact we just bought another "bin", which is roughly 20 or so bushel.  We've been making and canning apple sauce and will be pressing more cider this coming weekend.

Blackberry Post-Harvest Maintenance

As soon as we finished picking the last of the blackberries, we started cutting out the old fruiting canes and tying up the new canes for next year's crop. 

While the root system and crown of blackberry bushes are perennial, the canes of the plant are biennial.  During the first year of the cane's life cycle (primocane year), it grows and initiates fruit buds.  The second year (floricane year), the canes will bloom and set fruit, then die once the fruit is ripe.  Primocanes and floricanes are present at the same time in a bramble patch.   So we are currently cutting out the dead floricanes, and tying up the primocanes for next year.  It takes two people about three hours to clean up a row of 100 bushes.

BEFORE

AFTER












  


Debris in the Middle

Still found some berries



August 4 Harvest Update

All of a sudden, everything is ripening at the same time!

• BLACKBERRIES:  Still picking and processing blackberries.  As of today, we have picked about 1700 pounds of berries.  Grammy and Koty came to visit for the whole week and helped to pick.  They took a trunk full of berries back to Bedford County. Tina made 4 batches of jam yesterday and the rest of this weekend's berry harvest was frozen.

• POTATOES:  All our potatoes were harvested this week, we ended up with over 18 bushel.  They are spread out on the upper floor of the barn to dry, before we put them in crates and keep in a walk-in cooler for the winter.

• CORN:  Yes, our sweet-corn batch #1 is ready.  We've been eating it all week, but the individual kernels were not really filled out yet.  But they were today.  We sold some at the produce stand and then husked and blanched 4 bushel.

Blackberries!!

The reason we have not posted anything on our blog for a while is that the blackberries have ripened.  We picked nearly 900 pounds of berries in the last week and the only reason we did not reach the 1000 pound goal is that we got rained out today.   We made it through 11 of our 13 rows one time so far.  That means we have two rows to go and then we will start over for the second picking.



So what do we do with all these berries?  The perfect ones get picked into quart or pint containers, which we sell at the produce stand, via Craig's List and at two local produce auctions.  We had flats of pints at the auction on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.  Each flat hold 12 pints, and this past week we took 648 pints to auction!

The imperfect berries get sorted out, washed, drained and frozen.  Freezing the berries ruptures the cell membranes of the fruit and more juice can be extracted.  We will use these frozen berries for jelly and wine later. 

Leif (who is visiting with Anja this week)  LOVES berries and is a real helper.  He knows how to pick just the ripe berries, and though he loves to eat them,  he picks them and puts them in boxes, just like  the rest of us! 

 

Blackberries in Full Blossom

We came home from our vacation and were stunned to see the drastic changes that took place at the farm in just one week.  Everything had grown so much (including the weeds).  But the most amazing sight was an acre of blackberry bushes in full blossom: 

Spreading Lime - Manually

We recently bought 3 tons on lime (that is 6000 lbs, which sounds a lot heavier).  We intended to use our lime spreader, and pull that behind the tractor between the grapes and blackberry rows.  Turns out, the lime spreader does not really work with the lime we got...it just plugged up.  So this weekend we shoveled lime onto the small wagon, which Jeff then pulled slowly with the tractor between the rows, while Lars and Tina shoveled the lime back off, "flinging" it along side the plants. (Some of us were better "flingers" than others)  One wagon load of lime was enough for 4 rows at a time.  We could manage 2 wagonloads, then we needed a break.  At this point, we are nearly done, just more more wagonload to go - what a great upper body workout!

Working with Berries and Grapes

Pruning! That's mostly what we did this weekend - blackberry bushes and grape vines.

Pruned Chambourcin vine

Sammy and Tina trimmed blackberry bushes, while Lars ran the weed-whip alongside the finished rows.  We are almost done with the brambles, but still have a way to go with the grapes. So happy that we finally changed time - that will give us one extra hour in the evenings to work outside.

This is what the finished bramble rows look like!

Jeff plowed a new plot for the grapes today (the 430 new vines we ordered and which should arrive here just before Easter).    We had planted peas on that spot last spring, spread lime and then planted winter wheat as a cover crop last fall. The grape vines should be happy there.

Pruning Berries

Once in a while we do get a relatively warm day - meaning something above 35 degree Fahrenheit (about 2 degree Celsius).  On those days, Jeff does venture out into the berry patch and works on pruning the bushes.  Lars will join him when he get home from school as well, and they are making some decent progress.  It won't be much longer when pruning will be all-consuming.  Personally, I can't wait until we change time and I'll get to work outside in the evenings.

Fall Garden Maintenance

For the past few weeks we have been concentrating on getting all plants ready for the winter.  Each weekend, we get a little more done and the farm looks a bit more cleaned up.

The blackberry rows are an arduous task, we can only work a few hours on this at a time, so it is taking a while.  We not only trim the stems, but control how many stems per bush we want to keep - selecting the strongest and making sure none of the branches shade out other stems.  Then we manually pull the weeds around the bush, just within weed-whip range.  All the trimmings are dropped between the rows.  Eventually, Jeff will run the bush hog through each row, which pretty much destroys even the thickest bramble branch.  Then we will run the weed-whip along the rows to clean up the final weeds.



BEFORE

AFTER

This weekend, Tina finished the final weeding and rototilling on the "Jam Garden", and planted a few more red raspberries (they were on super clearance at Lowes).  This garden now has 3 rows of blueberries, 2 rows of strawberries, and one mixed row of black and red raspberries, plus one gooseberry bush and two black currant bushes.

Blackberry Wine Progress

This evening we syphoned the "Blackberry Batch #1" from the fermentor into 3 five-gallon carboys and 1 one-gallon carboy.  We added the airlocks and labeled each jug.  Now we can listen to the "bubbling" and watch the sediment slowly settle on the bottom of each jug.  The carboys will all be covered with dark bags to keep light out.

We also took out the nylon bags which held the blackberries for the "Blackberry Merlot" batch from the fermentor.  We hung each of them on a drywall screw from our beam that spans the kitchen, and let gravity do its job- we collected nearly a gallon of extra juice this way, without pressing the berries (afraid that pressing might crush the seeds and lead to bitterness).