It's Muscadine Time

While walking down our driveway to check the mail, Tricia and I noticed the skins from many grapes on the blacktop.  I immediately thought that the many birds in our yard (blue jays, cardinals, mockingbirds) had been eating our muscadines!  But upon closer inspection of the grape skins on the road, I realized that they were not muscadines but our neighbor's grapes that are on a trellis near our driveway.  Those birds have been plucking the grapes off their vines, then flying over and sitting in the limbs of our live oak trees while they eat.

Observing that reminded me that I needed to check on our muscadines.  The week prior when I inspected them, they were beginning to turn purple.  Close, but not ripe.  On the way back from the mailbox, we passed by the muscadine vine and looked in.  Some are now ready to pick.  Not all of them, but we'd better pick the ripe ones before the birds get them!

I began to prune back the branches with no fruit on them allowing us access to to the interior of the vine to pick all the purple fruit.  We had to keep a sharp eye for wasp nests in the vines.  Those things love to build their nests in there and then fly out to sting you if you don't kill them first.  Fortunately no wasps this time.  

As we pick, sometimes unripe ones come off with the ripe ones.

Tricia ate a few as she picked them.  Muscadines have 2 or 3 seeds in each one so there's a lot of spitting when eating these.  They are juicy and sweet.  Our first picking netted a good bit in a colander.

We'll snack on these and then head out in a few days for another muscadine picking session.

Muscadine Time!

It is raining here everyday.  The ground is saturated and the garden, grass, and landscaping is growing very quickly.  The muscadine vines have spread out this year farther than they have in years past.  I'm going to have to think about how to trellis them better.  Many of the muscadines are ripe and ready for picking.  The muscadines, heated in the summer sun, are sweet and rich and so tasty.  I poked my head under the canopy of the vines to begin picking.

I should have been more optimistic in my container size, though.  I filled up the little quart-sized container in no time at all.

I brought these in to Tricia in the kitchen as she was preparing supper.  She started munching on them.  The grapes are filled with seeds - three or four in each one, but the flavor and sweetness is intense.  I grabbed a bigger container and headed back out to our mini-vineyard to pick.

As I was reaching in the foliage and pulling out handfuls of grapes, all of a sudden, something caught my eye.  What in the world?  Wasps were flying all around me!!  I took off running, spilling my muscadines in the process.  It must have been a funny sight for the neighbors to see me high-stepping like that.  I never got stung, though.  I still have a little pep in my step.  Would you look at that wasp nest tucked away up there?:

Now, this was a dilemma.  I didn't want to get stung, but I didn't want to leave the muscadines unpicked.  I had to kill them.  But how?  A cup of gas would do the trick, but I don't want gas or any other poisons on our grapes.  Aha!  I went back inside and got a cupful of warm tap water and mixed Dawn dishwashing liquid in with the warm water in a thick solution.  Then I stirred it up.

By the time I got back out there, the wasps had settled down and were back on their nest, laughing, no doubt, about how they made me run and spill all my grapes.  I'll have the last laugh, though.  I crept up to the wasp nest and doused it with warm soapy water.  Bullseye!  The wasps couldn't fly with the thick soapy concoction on their wings.  They fell to the ground where I promptly squashed them.  I pulled the nest off of the vine and through it to the ground.

I flipped it over to view that red, bad boy.  He's dead.  

Now in peace, I was able to continue my muscadine picking.

There's a pretty good bit still left on the vines.  I'll need to harvest every afternoon.  I noticed that the birds have discovered the ripened grapes.  They leave the skins of the grapes on the ground beneath the vines.  We'll keep picking each day until they're all harvested.  Then I'll research on how to properly prune muscadine vines.

Soaking Okra and Checking out the Side Yard

My wife and I often talk about how strange it is that some years certain garden crops just absolutely produce so much that we can't eat or store it all.  We share the bounty with family and friends.  And then other years, when we do everything exactly the same, we experience crop failure or the crop may produce, but not very much.  It is very odd.  We try to examine the inputs to see what happened so that we don't repeat the error.  Oftentimes, we can't find what went wrong.

Last year our okra crop was lackluster at best.  The year before, we discovered a recipe for "Oven fried Okra" and this was a game-changer.  Previously, we ate okra primarily in gumbos or cooked down with tomatoes and onions or we had an okra curry recipe that we enjoyed.  The oven fried okra with panko bread crumbs was a favorite of ours and we ate it often.  

Okra is normally a big producer.  You have to pick it every day as it grows faster than kudzu.  Last year, our okra failed - big time.  We have no okra in the freezer.  This year things will be different.  This weekend I readied the seed.  I'm planting three of our favorite varieties: Clemson Spineless Okra - this is our old standby.  Dependable.  Hardy.  Prolific producer.  Next, we have Burgundy Okra - this variety is burgundy in color.  We like things with color.  It doesn't produce as much as Clemson and when you cook it, the color fades, but it it a nice variety.  Finally, we have Beck's Big Okra - a short, fat, variety with a number of ridges on the pods.

When I say 'readied the seed,' here's what I mean:  Okra seed is tough.  It is hard as a ball bearing.  If you would just put it in the ground, it would take a while for the seed coat to soften and germination to occur.  I began soaking my okra seed in warm water 24 hours in advance of planting:

By soaking the okra seed, you are jump-starting the germination process.  It speeds up the process and allows you to see sprouts in a couple of days after putting them in the ground.  After 24 hours, the seed is soft and the hard coating is swollen and coming off.  I dropped them in the ground.  In no time at all, okra sprouts are popping up out of the ground!

We will check back in on the okra later.  For now, let's mosey over into the side yard.  Right next to the Irish Potato patch, I have some Thornless blackberries planted.  The two varieties I have came out of Arkansas and are named after Native American tribes - Navajo and Arapahoe.  We've been pleased with these plants.  They produce berries almost as big as a man's thumb!

As you can witness from the photo above and below, they are full of flowers.  It won't be long before we'll be picking the sweet berries to eat!  One thing on my 'to - do list,' is to take some cuttings and plant more blackberry bushes to expand our berry territory.

Finally, the muscadine vines have put on lots of leaves, displaying a hopeful start to another good producing season.  

My camera wasn't focusing in right, but I believe you can still make out the tiny clusters of muscadines in the photo below.

We are hopeful for a good crop this year.  Regardless, we'll have a good time in the outdoors soaking up vitamin D and enjoying nature.

Making New Wine

In this post from earlier this month we talked about picking 32 pounds of grapes from our neighbor's grape arbor.  That's a lotta grapes!  I realized in that post, I promised to let you know what we were gonna do with all the grapes and never did.  Well, I'll make good on my promise tonight.

We've been picking and eating muscadines from our own vines, but with all these, we have a plan.  We decided to make New Wine.  New Wine is a non-alcoholic wine made with fresh grapes.  New wine contains the nutrients of grapes with many enzymes, but none of the alcohol.  We've done this years ago and decided to do it again.  We'll show you how we do it.  We use Jordan Rubin's book, The Maker's Diet, for directions.

We washed the grapes and then ran them through our old juicer.  It is an old contraption, but it does the job.  Tricia fed grapes into the hopper and the juicer juiced the grapes, sending juice out of one spigot and the pulp and skins out another.  It can get quite messy and requires a concerted effort to clean up the sticky kitchen afterward!

I ran the food mill, further processing the pulp and skins to get more juice out of them.  I theorize that this is where a lot of the flavor comes from.  The mill works good, but I bet that if you washed your feet and stomped them in a big vat, that would do the job as well.  (Except that no one would drink the wine).

Here is a look at the grape juice once we were done:

Once we've finished processing, we have a lot of seeds, pulp, and skins left over.  We feed all this to the chickens.  Nothing goes to waste!

The 32 pounds of grapes yielded 2 and 1/2 gallons of juice.  It kind of looks like split pea soup.

To make new wine, you need whey.  Tricia had just made some kefir, so she had some.  She measured out 1 cup of whey for the juice of 32 pounds of grapes.

 and split it up accordingly and poured it into each jar.

Then a Tablespoon of kosher salt total is divided up between the 2 1/2 gallons of juice.

Once this is done, stir to mix in the grape juice, whey and salt.  Cover the jars and leave at room temperature for 3 days.

After two days, cover and move into the refrigerator.  Flavors will develop and get better over time.  It may not be pretty.  It is actually quite an ugly looking drink.  However, it is refreshing and tasty!

The Neighbor's Vineyard

And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase.  He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly; and suffereth not their cattle to decrease.  Psalm 107:37-38

Sunday afternoon our neighbors were in the yard, and we walked over to talk to them.  They had brought over some fresh fig cookies and several bags of apples, and we wanted to thank them.  It is so good to have good neighbors.  We were standing in the shade visiting underneath their vineyard.  They are taking care of their parents who aren't in great health.  This keeps them very busy.

As a result they mentioned that they wouldn't have time to pick their grapes and offered to us to feel free to pick as many as we'd like.  Well, that's an offer we can't pass up.  Our muscadine grape vines are juveniles.  Our neighbor's grapes are old and established and produce lots more than ours.  We took them up on their offer.  Tricia grabbed our ladder and a few buckets and started picking grapes in the neighbor's arbor.

Tricia finally gets a "raise"

I found a shady, comfortable spot to pick!  Mr. Bill, our neighbor's Dad who planted the grapes also built the trellis the grapes grow on.  He was a Drilling Superintendent for an oil company, so the trellis is made with drill stem.  This grape trellis will be standing for the next 200 years!

While our muscadines are dark red when ripe, these are a shiny golden-green when ripe.  Some have a pinkish tinge.  The ripe ones are also soft to the touch.

They are quite large - bigger than a shooting marble.  More like the size of the "plunker" marbles we used to play with.

In no time flat, we picked this Tupperware cake cover and two and a half bucketfuls!  We weighed them when we brought them inside and they weighed 32 pounds in total.

The grape vines are healthy.  Just look at all the foliage!

When picking, we clip the bucket on the hook on the top of the ladder meant for holding paint cans when you are painting.  That little hook works fine for this application as well.

We brought all the grapes inside.  What in the world are we gonna do with 32 pounds of grapes?  Well, on Thursday night, I'll post Part 1 with more details about our Great Grape Project of 2020.

This Years' First Picking of Muscadines

Muscadines are a grape that is native to the southeastern - south central United States.  If you take a walk into the woods in our area, you'll find them growing wild along the banks of the bayou with vines growing high into the trees overhead.  In May 2014, we planted our own muscadine vine in the side yard and we have it on a trellis made from a cattle panel.

Each year we pick more and more muscadines!  This year appears to be a bumper crop.

I like to eat them right off the vine while they are warmed by the sun.  The muscadines are so flavorful.  They have probably 3 to 4 seeds in every grape, but that's okay.  We just spit them out.  I like to pick them when they are a deep red coloration and soft.  The harvest goes on for a while, so every day you can go out and pick some.

I was planning to go and pick some the other day, but Russ beat me to it.  We've been eating on these in the kitchen.  Tricia reminded me to be careful while picking as there is a wasp nest amongst the muscadines.  I don't want to get stung while picking and eating.  That would put a damper on the fun.

Tricia and I planned on going to the vines to pick this afternoon after work; however, we started visiting with the neighbors under their grape arbor and eating their grapes.  We talked and snacked on their grapes for so long, we didn't ever make it to pick from our vines until it was time to go eat supper.  Tomorrow is Friday.  We'll make time to go pick tomorrow or this weekend.

The Grapes (Muscadines) of Wrath

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Tricia and I, in our late afternoon routine, hands and walk the property line, stopping each day to inhale deeply the fragrant new crisp white magnolia blossoms. If there is a fresher fragrance, I haven't found it.  We'll comment on the fruit on the trees and admire the bright pink blooms of the crepe myrtles.  We'll pass by the pasture and comment on the cows eating grass with their heads down and how nice and carefree it must be to be a MILK cow as opposed to a BEEF cow.

On the west side, we stop by the vineyard.  Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit.  We have a muscadine vine that is loaded down with grapes.  We'll pick about a pint of them each day as the ripen gradually in the summer sun.  The purple ones are the best.

There are plenty green ones right behind the ripe ones, ensuring that we'll enjoy muscadines for days, or maybe weeks, to come.

Each year the vine encompasses a larger portion of the cattle panel upon which they grow. The ground is not particularly rich in this area of the yard, but the muscadine doesn't seem to mind and ekes out its existence on the poor soil, providing us grapes to snack on each summer.  

We pick them each day so that the birds don't get to them first.  Sometimes we eat them right off the vine, their juice warm from the sun and buttery to the taste. They are full of seeds, though, and keep you spitting.  The skins can be a little tart at times, but we still enjoy them.  Everyone needs a muscadine vine.

Each year I keep thinking about making some muscadine jelly, but we always end up eating them all before the jelly-making commences.  Next year we make jelly!

Checking In On the Muscadines

Back in May 2014 we planted a muscadine vine out in the side yard.  It has grown and we pick muscadines off of it each year.  The yield seems to increase every year. Last year Russ taught me how to effectively prune it to maximize production.  It seems to be pretty happy despite the fact that the soil in the side yard is poor and compacted.  If you dig with a shovel, it is like digging in a parking lot - hard and packed earth.  I've been amending the soil and will continue to do so until I get it where I want it to be.

Meanwhile we are still going to get a nice crop.  I like to make jelly with the muscadines.  Tricia likes to come out to the "vineyard" on late summer afternoons and eat muscadines right off the vine when the fruit is sun-warmed.  Delicious!  I guess if there is a downside to these, it would be that they have many seeds and you have to spit a lot.  Back in THIS POST FROM 2013 I chronicled how we made new wine with some grapes from our neighbors.  If we have a nice enough harvest, I'd like to try to make a batch of new wine with muscadines and see how it would turn out.

This year I've found a recipe to make muscadine syrup and I'm going to try that.  It seems like topping a homemade blueberry and pecan pancake with muscadine syrup.  Forget Wheaties.   That, my friends, is the breakfast of champions!

Clusters of Muscadines

Stay tuned and later this summer, I'll post how the muscadine syrup making experiment goes.

Picking Muscadines

A couple of Saturdays ago Russ and I went canoeing on the bayou.  As we hiked through the thick undergrowth carrying "The Garfish" to the water, Russ (the Horticulture major) was scoping out all of the different plants growing in the low lying area and something caught his eye.  When I asked him what he was looking at on the ground, he told me that there was red fruit all over the ground.  When I walked over, I immediately knew what it was – muscadines!  They grow wild around here and they vine high into the air in the woods supported by tree limbs.  They stretch way up into the canopy of the tall trees and are unreachable by humans – but the birds sure find them!

It reminded me that I needed to go check on our muscadines.  Oftentimes people make a big mistake in planting different types of fruit trees in their yard that aren’t indigenous to our area, diseases and climate.  This results more often than not in crop failure.  That’s why it is a good idea to consult with the LSU Cooperative Extension Office to see which varieties grow best here and then seek out and plant them.  So rather than try to grow grapes that might not work in our area, we chose a variety that thrives and survives down here – the muscadine.

We planted our muscadine vine and have it trellising on a piece of livestock panel right near the pumpkin patch.  It is still relatively small, but will continue to grow and eventually fill out the trellis.

The Muscadine Vine

The fruit is ripening now.  It starts off small, green and very hard and slowly matures into a burgundy color and then a deeper red, almost black color.  You can see the varying stages of ripeness in the photo below.

Ripening muscadines

We like to wait until they are at their ripest (very dark color) and pick them then.  The funny thing about it is that with most fruit, we like to chill it in the refrigerator prior to eating, but we have found that the muscadines are best eaten right off the vine when they are still warmed by the hot summer sun.  The sweet, warm grape juice is so flavorful.  These aren’t seedless grapes.  There are about 3 or 4 seeds in each muscadine, so you’ve got to be ready to spit.

We eat a lot of them right off the vine, but a few of them make it into the house for us to enjoy.  We spit the seeds into the compost bucket and quite a few of them come up in the garden.  I’ve never tried to transplant one of the muscadine seedlings, but maybe I will in the future. 

This is only our second muscadine harvest, so we don’t have a huge harvest, but as our little vineyard grows and the production increases, we’ll make some jelly with some in addition to eating them right off the vine.  We also want to research to see if you can make grape leaf rolls with muscadine leaves like you can with regular grape leaves.  Muscadine leaves are a little smaller, so it may not work.  I especially like the timing of the muscadine harvest as they ripen right after the figs ripen, leaving staggered harvests so we aren’t overwhelmed with everything getting ripe at the same time.  

Picking a few Muscadines

Walking around the yard yesterday afternoon, I first watered the pumpkins and cow peas and then watered the muscadine vine that I have growing on a trellis made from a hog panel supported by two T-posts.  Over the course of the year, it has put on lots of new growth.  Once the fall gets here and the vine goes into dormancy, I'll have to read up on how to prune a muscadine vine and try my hand at pruning.

Muscadines are native to the Southeast portion of the United States.  We have lots that grow wild in the woods and provide food to birds and other animals.  We planted this one here in the side yard and it is happy in its location and seems to be growing nicely.

Muscadine Vine

It is putting on a fair amount of fruit this year, considerably more than last year, but still not what I would consider quantities that would enable us to make jelly, grape juice or new wine.  Next year will be the year that we get the bumper crop of muscadines.

There are many different cultivars of muscadines.  We actually bought this one at a local nursery, and unfortunately, I don't know the name of this one.  If you look below you can see some of the fruit that it is putting on.  I notice that the birds may have shared a little in our crop this year, but only an immaterial amount.  Next year I'll likely put up something to scare off the birds, or I may get Benjamin to position himself nearby with a .12 gauge shotgun to thin out some of the feathered thieves.

Some muscadines turn a bronze color when ripened, while some turn a reddish-purple color, and some stay green.  This particular variety turns a reddish color. The fruit ripens at different times, so each day we walk out and pick those that are ripe off the trellis.  Muscadines are VERY sweet.  The skin is tougher than normal grapes and they have three or four seeds in each grape.

I like to pick them and eat them right off the vine by piercing the tough skin with my teeth and letting the warm muscadine juice fill my mouth, spitting out the seeds and then chewing up the skin and flesh of the wild grape.  Sweet.  Delicious.

Some are ready to pick.  Some need to ripen in the sun for a few more days

We pick a bowl each day and put in the fridge and snack on them.  It is a good, healthy snack and everyone at our house enjoys eating them.

It won't take long for the bowls of muscadines to disappear, but next year, if the Good Lord's willing, after pruning and fertilizing, we'll have a nice quantity harvested so that we can put up some muscadine jelly and possibly make some new wine like we showed you in THIS POST, only with our own grapes!