Lying Pears

Here is one of the pear trees, a few weeks ago. It looks the same today, but the foliage is yellower and not as thick. It is October, after all. Loaded with pears, seemingly. One other of the four pear trees still has a lot of fruit on it as well; the other two are earlier varieties and are long gone. We had a massive pear harvest this year from the antique Bartlett and the Comice, and so I wasn't in any kind of a hurry to harvest the last two trees. The only pressure I felt was that it would be nice to get the pears off the trees so that I could put the horses to graze in the orchard pasture before the first frost killed the grass. The horses would eat any pears they could find and founder. 

Yesterday evening while I was out with there goats, I saw and heard a flock of starlings knocking about in the pear trees. Figuring that the pears must be getting ripe if the birds were starting to peck at them, I decided to go out and get them down as soon as possible. Today I went out to gather a sackful of pears to trade to a friend for some pumpkins. I made a terrible discovery:

 The majority of the pears, seemingly intact and gorgeous, had in fact been eaten out by wasps. The trees were hung with hollow pears, thin-shelled and delicate like christmas tree ornaments,  and filled with yellow jackets. I think what happened is that the starlings peck at the pears, making a small wound, and then the wasps are drawn to the leaking juice and enter the pear through the hole and eat it from the inside out.

To make matters worse, the pears that hadn't yet been attacked were - although full sized - just as hard and green as they were a month ago. At that time, I picked a few pears and set them on the table to ripen, but they never did. They just sat there, stubbornly green. Homero, bizarrely, eats them like this, and so I didn't know if they would have eventually ripened or what, but I figured it couldn't hurt to just leave them until they started to fall on their own.

Above you see all the pears I could find which are solid - there are twenty-six of them. A few of them have bird strikes, but none have been invaded by insects yet.  But how to ripen them? I thought I remembered treading that some varieties of pears need to be chilled before they will ripen - and so a quick google search seems to confirm.  Supposedly, I should gold the pears at 32-35 degrees Farenehit for at least a week and up four months, and then bring them to room temperature for 7 - 10 days. How exactly I am supposed to do that I haven't the foggiest clue. I could refrigerate them, but I don't have room in my fridge for 26 pears. And my fridge isn't that cold, anyway. Nights this time of year average 55 degrees, so leaving them outside isn't likely to help.

That's probably the best I can do, though. As I said, we have already enjoyed a large and delicious crop of pears this year, so it isn't a tragedy if we don't make full use of this last harvest. Alternatively, my husband can eat them all green, the way he likes them.

Link: an extremely comprehensive guide to European Pear varieties, with photos and information about siting, disease tolerance, and uses. Great site. http://www.usapears.com/~/media/Files/Research%20Website%20Docs/Pear%20Encyclopedia/Pear%20Encyclopedia%2003-2011.ashx

Fruitocolypse (Or Pear-mageddon)

This spring, I was all aflutter over the lack of bees during flowering time (What's Wrong With These Pictures?) but the bees must have been there, because the orchard is going crazy. Above is one of my four pear trees, each of which is absolutely loaded with fruit. If I remember right (which I most likely don't) we have a Comice, a Red Bosc, an Anjou, and a Bartlett.

Three of the trees, including this one, are young trees we planted ourselves, but the fourth - the Bartlett - is a hoary old beast some sixty years old. It has on years and off years, and this is definitely an on year. It looks to have some five hundred pears on it. Some of those will drop off immature, of course, and others will be lost to scab or other infirmities, but that leaves plenty of pears for us. And the neighbors. There will be enough pears to feed the Russian Army, as my mother used to say.

Pears make good pie, and pears can be canned as sauce, especially mixed with apples, blueberries, and blackberries. Pears can be dehydrated (though I hate dehydrating stuff) and late ripening pears can be stored wrapped in paper in a cool shed.  Pears can also be fed to livestock (carefully; in moderation) and pears can be given away to friends and neighbors.

Alas, pears cannot be pressed for juice, at least not with the equipment I have. Pears turn to mush and gum up the works. I can throw a few pears in with a batch of apples, but I can't just press pears by themselves.

What else can you do with pears? Have pear fights? Ideas, anybody?

My Daughter's Garden

While we were gone in Oaxaca last year, my daughter Rowan and her boyfriend Phil decided to use the greenhouse and enlarge the garden area and put in a serious garden. They wanted to have a booth at the farmer's market, and while that turned to out to be bit beyond the capabilities of first year gardeners, they did in fact create a serious garden. Besides eating out of the garden all year, they have provided enough to give to friends and, just recently, to do some preserving. 

Above, you can see the greenhouse is full of weeds - but it is also full of lemon cucumbers, herbs, hot peppers, and tomatoes. Below, the two clawfoot tubs make lovely herb beds. Behind them, the remains of the kale is visible. 

 The sunflower patch went crazy, and the bright pink and magenta colored sunflowers look beautiful in the evening sun. I love sunflowers, although I always planted the mammoth yellow ones that produce edible seeds. If I was too lazy to gather all those seeds - and I usually was - at least they provided food for local fauna. Rowan, however, likes choosing unusually colored and rare varieties of all her plants. In addition to the pink sunflowers, she planted purple brussels sprouts and peacock broccoli, cheddar cheese cauliflower and deep red corn.

Today, we gathered quite a harvest. The tomatoes are finally ripening, and Rowan and I went out this morning and picked about twenty of them. A few of those and the last jalapeños went into a fresh salsa.  There were four eggs today - not much but better than usual - and six new ripe plums. I can only gather the plums as they fall from the tree, because the tree is home to approximately seventeen million big fat garden spiders, and I am a weenie. 

There are also lots of pears. We have several pear trees, and the ones I gathered today were Comice pears, my favorite. Ten of them are resting in a box on the kitchen altar for ripening. Hope they ripen up nicely; sometimes they do and sometimes they don't and I'm not always sure why. There are also lots of pears on the old Bartlett tree, but they are suffering from severe scab, as you can see in the picture below. I can peel them and use them for sauce, or I can throw the badly deformed ones to the goats. I may have to spray next year.

That's it for the farm's harvest, but we also have a lot of produce from the neighbors that I have to do something with. The other day, when the little girl who lives next door came over the play, I gave her a jar of blueberry jam to take to her mother. She did, but about ten minutes came back across the fields, staggering under the weight of a tote bag full of produce. The bag contained six ears of corn, a fat cucumber, three enormous zucchini, and a few pounds of sweet cherry tomatoes. We made short work of the cherry tomatoes, but the rest of it is still covering the kitchen table. 

Ah, August! 

The Pears Are Upon Us!

Help! Once again, the pear tree has completely exploded with pears, and although we have been eating pears as fast as we can (and letting the goats and the chickens have their share), there are still too many pears! The kitchen table is covered with ripening pears. I have made two gallons of pear sauce, but it hasn't made a dent. The children take pears to school for lunch every day, but to no avail. Today I gave the farrier a dozen pears by way of a tip.

What more can I do with so many pears? I'm thinking of dehydrating - we all like dried pears - but my dehydrator can only hold perhaps six or eight pears sliced thinly. The oven, set to it's lowest temperature, may be able to hold another ten or so. Then I've heard that you can dehydrate fruit on the dashboard of your car if you park it in bright sunlight. I bet the broad dash of the van could hold a dozen pears.

I used to make a fantastic cake that I called (for lack of a better name) pear-walnut-sour cream cake. Maybe I should make a few of those. Maybe they freeze well - what the hell, it's worth a try.

Applemania

Pressed fifteen gallons of cider yesterday. A guy came with a pickup truck half full of gorgeous honeycrisps. I only kept four gallons, because I ran out of containers and because the guy is a serious homebrewer and offered to make up the difference in wine. Um, yes please!

There was a five gallon bucket of apples leftover. Today I used those, plus the last of the holy pears to make a gallon or so of pear-and-applesauce. It is delicious. So delicious, I'm not even bothering canning it, because I know we will eat it all within a couple of weeks.

The Parson's Pears

These aren't our pears. I mean, they didn't come off of our antique pear tree, which inexplicably produced only about a dozen pears this year, instead of the hundreds it popped out with last year. These are the pastor's pears which I picked from the pear tree in the parsonage (say thatten times fast.). She said to take as many pears as I wanted, so I did. The container they are in is a half-barrel, so you can see that's a lot of pears.

I realized at some point afterwards that I didn't actually want to process that many pears - pears have a short window, once off the tree they ripen quickly, and ten minutes after that they are nothing but fragrant mush. So I gave away about twenty-five or so, and have about forty left to process today or tomorrow, whenever they seem perfect.

I need to scour my cookbooks for pear recipes. I used to make a fantastic pear-ginger-sour cream cake with walnuts. Wonder if pecans and yogurt would work just as well? We'll find out. Then I remember from last year a delicious kind of pear pie with cheddar cheese that my Aunt Christie sent me a recipe for. I'll certainly make that again. Hope wants to dehydrate some. And I want to can some in syrup - which I've never done before. For some reason I'm candy impaired, I can't ever make anything that involves melting sugar come out correctly. And yes, I have a candy thermometer.

Ooh, candied dried pears!

Piles of Pears!

Help! All the pears ripened at once! We have about seventy-five perfectly ripe, delicious pears! My dehydrator is full of pear slices, my oven is full of pear slices (at 170 degrees, it works just like a dehydrator), I made pear-ginger loaf for dessert tonight, and we are all sick to death of eating them out of hand. I'm trying to push some of them into the trade network, but it has to happen FAST. A pear goes from perfect to past-perfect in no time flat. 

Next year we will be smarter; we will pick them five at a time off the tree.

Pear Problem Solved, and Cidering in the Rain

Well, that took all of three minutes. 

I should have done my google search before I wrote the last post and revealed myself as a fruit ignoramus. Pears, apparently, do not really ripen on the tree at all, and ONLY ripen after picking. I just have to wait. If I am impatient (what do you think, kids?) I can put them in a paper bag with a ripe banana.

Meanwhile, I have lots of nice apple cider to drink. A family with four kids came out today with fully a bushel of apples and we pressed for two hours, even though the rain was varying in intensity between drizzle and downpour. The cider is probably slightly dilute, but man is it delicious. I guess the apples are finally ripening up. I've been so impatient for cider that I've been using apples that aren't totally ready, with predictably disappointing results. But this cider - mostly Gravenstein, I think - is great. I'm going to heat some up with cinnamon and cloves and see if it doesn't help the nasty head cold I'm developing from standing around in the cold rain like an idiot.

Pears Aplenty

Early this past spring, I hired a guy to come out and see what he could do with the lovely antique pear tree that shades the garage. Last summer, it had produced only about a dozen little, gnarled pears, and I wondered if it might be made to do better. The man said it was in fine shape, and ought to bear many more pears after a good pruning. Then he basically shaved the poor tree and left it bare naked. I thought he'd killed it, but he was right.

I've been watching the pears get bigger all summer, happy to see that there are indeed many, many more of them. This past week I thought they were looking pretty full sized, so I went over to investigate and saw, to my surprise, that they were already falling off the tree of their own accord. So I picked all of them that I could reach. I don't know, technically, how much a bushel is, but I bet it's not twice as many.

I don't understand these pears. They are big, bigger than most grocery store pears, but they are all hard as rocks. You can bite into them, barely, but the flesh is dry and crumbly, not nice at all. I poured them into a drawer for storage, and they made clinking sounds, I kid you not, as they tumbled together. I don't have the vaguest notion what to do with them. I need to look in a book and see if pears ripen off the tree or not. Maybe I could boil them and can them in syrup? 

Maybe I could buy a slingshot and keep them by the bed as personal protection.