A Grape-Full Garden

An unexpected September 15 freeze put an early, and, at the time, tragic-seeming end to garden production. Yet, in the days since I’ve several times found myself wondering how I could have dealt with any more food to can, freeze and dry. It seems I’ve spent every spare moment between Brightside’s weekend events chopping and grinding and sieving and stirring.

Even still, there are bushel baskets of apples calling out to me from the sun porch, a final tray of ripening tomatoes aromatically importuning me from the kitchen, and a crisper drawer of Gypsy peppers whispering my name.

The most auspicious, if somewhat overwhelming, harvest of the season has been grapes.

Seven years into Brightside’s vineyard experiment, I harvested four heaping bushels of fruit from 15 producing vines. This is wonderful news, indeed. However, the unusually early freeze lent an unanticipated urgency to the process. The freeze damaged some clusters on nearly every vine, especially low-hanging fruit. Interestingly, the vines nearest the ridge-top were the least damaged while those farthest from it took the hardest hit. This counter-intuitive state of affairs is actually consistent with many years of accumulated evidence of a thermo-cline across the lower third of the garden, where temperatures are certainly lower, if just by a death-dealing degree or two.

This is all to say that if I was not going to let my first significant grape harvest rot on the vine, I had to pick it, separate the damaged fruit from the good stuff, and process that second harvest to some stage of safe storage—quick! And that’s what I did. I froze about three-quarters of the harvest as whole grapes or unsweetened juice. My intention is to start my very first batch of wine next month. The rest I canned as gourmet treats Grape Puree and Grape Essence. Yum-yum!

None but a few quarts of cherry tomatoes were pretty enough for market this year. Only about a bushel of my favorite slicers, Lemon Boy, Old German, and Rutgers had vine-ripened prior to September 15. These were delicious, but not at all pretty, so we relished them fresh while I processed the overflow into marinara. All the green tomatoes that were not burst and blackened by the freeze, I picked soon after and laid out on trays to see what might happen. Some began to rot, but most have ripened. And although they are an unlovely lot, they are sweet and delicious. All that we can’t eat fresh will make marinara or broth.

I’ve got sweet mama squash (a winter kabocha variety), about a bushel of remaining spaghetti squash, and a handful of pumpkins to address. But not before the rest of the apples. Cider anyone? That’s a project for the week of October 23.

After that, grapes! Brightside's winemaking adventure begins in earnest.