A Crafty Beast in the Garden

It's that time of year where we're picking muscadines off our vine in the side yard garden.  Muscadines are a type of grapevine that grow in these parts.  They have thick skin and a lot of seeds, but the grape itself is very tasty.  I like to eat them sun-warmed right off the vine and spit the seeds on the ground.  We have many young muscadine vines coming up all over the place now.  Russ took one with him to his home and is adding to his vineyard.  He has his vines growing on a hurricane fence.  Our vine gets bigger every year and it is trellised on a cattle panel supported by two t-posts on the ends.  Russ was a horticulture major and explained to me that if we had pruned our vine properly, it would have made more grapes this year.  When the plant goes dormant, we'll give it a haircut so that we have a more abundant harvest next year.

I keep a watchful eye when picking muscadines.  Red wasps love to build their nests under the canopy of grape leaves.  They are hard to see and then when you reach in to pull some grapes off the vine, they fly out and sting you.  Last year I was fortunate to see the nest before they got me.  It was as big as a belt buckle and full of angry aggressive wasps.  In the old days, I'd cut a Dr. Pepper can in half and fill the bottom with gasoline and douse the nest with the gas.  It 'freezes' them instantly.  This method is a no-go for killing wasps around things we're going to eat.  It would not only kill the wasps, but would kill part of the muscadine vine, too.  So I put a generous amount of Dawn dishwashing liquid into a cup and swirled some hot water in the cup.  I through that on the nest and the wasps fell to the ground, unable to fly.  My leather boot put them out of their misery and I plucked the nest off the vine and stepped on it, too.

As I was searching for ripe muscadines and keeping my eyes peeled for wasps, I spotted this dude:

It's only a harmless garter snake, but it made me immediately think of Genesis 3:1 that says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.  And he said to the woman, "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"

We have numerous garter snakes all over the place.  They're small and slither under the French doors.  We have to constantly pick them up and throw them back outside.  They eat frogs, lizards, geckos, and worms.  All their favorite foods are around our house, so we're constantly in contact with them.  Sometimes, their desire to get into the house gets them in trouble.  Last week one got slammed in the French door by accident, suffering an injury not unlike the one mentioned in Genesis 3:15.

The serpent I saw in the muscadine vine, fortunately, did not speak to me!  I am under no restrictions from which tree (or vine) in the garden from which I can eat, so I continued picking a bowlful of delicious muscadines.

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.