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.

Another Thing we do with Muscadines

First off, we were blessed to receive almost none of the effects of Hurricane Ida.  That was mostly felt on the southeastern part of the state.  

Two days ago we were talking about the muscadine harvest that gets bigger every year as our vine grows.  We eat most of them just snacking on them, but tonight I'll show you another thing we do - we make New Wine with them.  New wine is full of flavor, fizzy, refreshing with none of the alcohol that regular wine has.  Here's how we make it:

After picking we thoroughly wash the grapes.

We use a very old juicer.  I think it is called the Juice Man, or something like that.  I think it was invented shortly after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.  We feed the grapes into the hopper and it spins into a mechanism that juices it.  The juice comes out one end and the pulp and seeds fill a bucket on the other end.

The juice is pretty thick, with some pulp in it.  It is sweet and sticky.

Here is the bucket full of muscadine skins and seeds.  I like to get everything I can out of it.  I thought about running it through the juicer again...

But instead, I squeezed it through a muslin cloth.  This has an extra benefit as some of the red color from the skins comes out which gives the wine a red tint.

The recipe comes from The Maker's Diet, by Jordan Rubin.

New wine only has 3 ingredients: grapes, whey, and salt.

Add 1/2 cup of whey.  This separates from the yogurt when Tricia is making kefir.

Then you add 1 tablespoon sea salt:

We pour it all into a big jar, cover, and sit it on the counter at room temperature for two days.

After two days, put it in the back of the refrigerator and 'forget about it' for a good while.  We start drinking it when it is about 3 weeks old.  It looks horrible, but the taste is delicious and something that you look forward to every year during muscadine harvest.

High Time for Muscadines

Seven years ago my son worked at a nursery in Forest Hill, Louisiana.  He brought home a muscadine vine and we planted it in the side yard.  Muscadines are a grape native to the southeastern United States.  We used a cattle panel wired between two t-posts for a trellis.  Each year we've watched it grow and have picked many muscadines off of it.  It keeps getting bigger and bigger and we've installed extensions to the trellis to accommodate its growth.

They are delicious!  They have a deep flavor that is good even eaten off the vine while warmed by the sun.  They are full of seeds, so you better be ready to spit!  My oldest son solves that problem by eating the seeds.  Can you imagine?

The variety we have is ripe when it is dark.

At the peak of the season, you can pick a couple of quarts of muscadines.  There's always a bird's nest in the middle of the vine.  It is such a nice hiding spot for birds.  Birds certainly have to be careful around our house.  Our cat, Ginger, is a hunter.  She routinely hunts and eats birds, squirrels, rats, mice, moles.  She'll leave their bloodied and half-eaten carcasses on the back door welcome mat to proudly show us what she's done.  This morning there was a young cottontail rabbit that Ginger had killed.  The bad thing is, when Ginger eats her kill, it makes her sick.  She threw up all over the hood of our car while it sat in the garage today!  That was a long explanation to say "birds like to build nests in the middle of the muscadine vine to stay safe from Ginger, the crazy, murderous cat.

Here is a nice shot of a quart of fresh-picked muscadines, plump and beautiful.

Here is a photo of a few days' of the muscadine harvest:

Tomorrow I'll show you something else we do with them besides snack on them.

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.