Last harvest of the Sonoma County season - Hachiya persimmons. An amazing year.
Best use: pick as late in the winter as possible, slice 6 mm thick via a mandoline, and dehydrate (11 hours, 135 degrees F (57 C). Then eaten like candy. Extra slices can be frozen in ziploc bags.
The harvest for a very late summer season is officially over. in contrast to a horrid tomato and eggplant year, our peppers excelled in production. Currently making pepper relish, hot sauce, and pickled jalapenos to last through the winter.
After several years of wondering what to do with the mature olive trees on our property, we found a local farm (Gold Ridge Farm) that presses olives by reservation. 130 pounds of olives made three gallons of flavorful, spicy oil. It took us a few hours to pick and sort, and we’re already looking forward to next year.
2023 was a fantastic year for our small home orchard. Our eighteen trees produced over a thousand pounds of apples, which we sweated on shelves for two weeks before making into juice. We pressed ours using the only free community apple press in the United States. We also made vinegar and dried apple rings.
Pinto bean harvest for 2023. Short bush bean that produced pretty well despite a white fly infestation - one 3x12 foot bed produced about five cups of dried ‘Quincy’ pinto beans. We wish we had grown more.
Learnings on various styles of trellis:
1) Tripods worked pretty badly across the board. Cucumbers didn’t climb, and beans were too dense to harvest.
2) Two-sided planar A-frames worked great for the other beans.
3) String trellises worked OK for the tomatoes, but it was such a bad tomato year that production was very low. Next year we’ll try hog panels for the tomatoes, and tie them up along the full plane.
Beans are sprouting - both Haudenosaunee Skunk limas, and Christmas Pole limas.The growing season has begun.
Lots of trellis experiments this year, trying to maximize reuse, minimize cost, and expand sturdiness. Last year, some of our pricey ‘texas tomato cages’ fell over with the weight and wind. This year, we’re trying cheaper structures, using twine with reused poles built into horizontal and vertical structures for beans, plus some ‘sandwiching’ techniques with twine on the peas to keep them growing up, not out.
#organicgarden #trellis #sustainability #sebastopol #Sonomacounty
