Sadly, 2023 was “the summer that wasn’t.” The Land of the Midnight Sun was, instead, the Land of the Midnight Rain and Mid-day Rain. One friend quipped that his location only had three rains - but one lasted 28 days! In fact, local
weather reporters said that this has been the coolest summer since 2008.
The temperature was not as much of a problem
as all the rainy and overcast days. For us, I think the longest stretch of consecutive,
sunny days was 4, and those were few and far between.
For someone who tries to raise a lot of our
own food, this was a sad state of affairs. My vegetable gardens were pretty
much useless. Seeds, seedlings, and
bulbs rotted in the ground, and those that grew were leggy and thin. Cauliflower and broccoli never set
heads. Sunflowers never flowered. Even the plants protected from rain in the
greenhouse, were underwhelming.
Fortunately, though, 6 different herbs did well on a covered
porch, so I dried or infused them in cooking oils and we harvested GALLONS of
berries which love this ecosystem in sun or rain. Yea!
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Our manual food mill
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Our boreal forest has acidic soil, from the spruce
trees.
So berry bushes are common under story
plants.
Wild raspberry bushes grow in
such dense stands that I have to cut them back with a weed whacking blade to create a path or to encourage anything else to grow in that area.
I love wild high bush cranberries, though, and nurture hundreds of those plants, pruning dead branches and suckers,
culling weak ones to give healthy ones room to grow.
Some of the plants now tower above the “normal”
height as slim trees.
Little blueberry
bushes hug the lake shore.
We kayak to
gather a handful at a time.
Even our dog
likes to eat those berries right off the bushes.
In addition to enjoying the wild berries, I have planted many
others, such as haskaps, red, white, and black currants, raspberries,
saskatoons, gooseberries, and strawberries. I enjoy their flowers, foliage, and of course, the tasty fruit, which range from sweetest (saskatoons and strawberries) to tartest (currants and cranberries). All of them are chock full of vitamins and anti-oxidants.
By various preservation methods, we enjoy them throughout
the year. Those without big seeds are
the easiest to use. Some, I freeze
whole, to pop into pancakes, pies, or muffins or snow ice cream in winter. Others I store in vinegar. Most I pressure can for
shelf stable juice, jam, jelly, chutney, and other concoctions, like barbecue
sauce (See recipe below).
The first harvest of the year is haskaps from five bushes that line the south side of our cabin.
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About a gallon of currant juice
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They range in size from 6x5x4 to 3x3x4 ft.
The fruits have a knobby, elongated shape,
like one’s little finger, with dark blue-purple skin.
They taste like a cross between a blackberry
and a concord grape.
After eating our
fill straight from the bush, we harvested about 1 ½ gallons, mostly for a
delicious jam. I love it with corn pancakes.
Domestic raspberries
spread as prolifically as their wild brethren. My original 15 canes now
fill 4 rows, about 14 feet long, each, plus scattered other plots, plus all the
canes I have given away to friends or yanked out of adjacent gardens that they invaded. We harvested about 6 gallons and finally
stopped because the rain battered the remaining fruit. We use this bountiful harvest in various
ways. Bryan recently made a batch of
beer with 5 lbs of raspberries. I add
some to a batch of pinot noir (that I make from a kit of concentrated pinot noir juice - Fontana brand, about $69 to make 6 gallons).
I make many jars of spicy barbeque sauce this time of year with one
berry or another. This year: raspberry.
None of the currant recipes I find on line seem to bother
about the many seeds, but the variety we planted has lots of them for the size
of the berry, and since they are bigger than raspberry seeds, I do not like
them in a final product. High-bush cranberries, too, have a
large, flat seed. So both of these
berries I process into juice, syrup, or jelly, netting 4:1 yield – that is
4 gallon of fruit yields 1 gallon of fruit.
The procedure of separating the fruit from the seeds involves
several steps, several counter tops, and makes a mess, so I prefer to harvest many gallons over
several days, freeze them, and then set aside several hours to process the
fruit, and then pressure can it.
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Red currant bushes
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When I started out, I poured raw berries into the hopper but the act of grinding squirted juice all over the kitchen. Since then, I heat the berries in a big pot first, to pop the skins. Then I let the pot cool overnight. The next morning, after breakfast, I assemble the food mill and clamp it to the
kitchen table, next to several rags and two big bowls. In the sink, I place a cheese cloth lined colander over a large pot. I
ladle the juicy berries into the top hopper and start manually turning a metal arm
that draws
the fruit down into the
grinder.
The juice pours into one bowl,
while a pulpy, seedy bolus is extruded out into a second bowl.
Our
food mill came with several grinders, each with different sized holes with
helpful usage labels like “salsa”, “berries” and “apples.” However, we found that the “berry” grinder
cannot handle the seeds of the cranberries and currants. They clog the mechanism to a full stop, which
we then have to dismantle, clean, and reassemble. A MESS.
So we use the “salsa” grinder which does not clog, but allows a lot of
seeds to escape into the juice bowl. Now
what? After I process the fruit, I pour
the seedy juice through the large cheese cloth lined colander
in the sink. Then I squeeze out as much
of the juice as I can into the pot. When I have hens, I feed them the pulp and seeds. When I don't, I dump them in a location where a future bush might be a pleasant addition. Major clean up of sink, table, floor, pots, bowls, and mechanisms ensue.
When I have accumulated about 2 gallons of juice, it is time
to pressure can it in order to make it shelf stable for future enjoyment or for
gifts. For my size canner, I sterilize 7 quarts or 14 cups
of glass mason jars in hot water in the pressure canner while heating the juice on another
burner. I ladle hot juice into hot jars,
screw the lid onto the canner, and process for about 15 minutes. Easy. If
I want to make jam or jelly, I mix a 1:2 ratio of sugar to juice and bring to a
gentle boil, cooking it down to thicken it.
With a candy thermometer, I endeavor to get the temperature to about 220
F. If all goes well, the mixture will
thicken into jam. If not, I have fruit
syrup. What’s not to like? I also enjoy drinking the sweetened juice hot
or cold.
When I was a single mom, I looked at those small, expensive
plastic containers of berries with envy. On occasions when I bought one or two, my boys and I devoured them in a minute. I feel so fortunate now, to live in a setting
where so many delectable berries grow so prolifically… even in such a cold and
dreary summer, when little else did.
RECIPE: SPICY
BARBEQUE SAUCE WITH BERRIES
I make this is large batches. The recipe below is for a small batch, in
case you would like to try it out and tweak it for your tastebuds.
Beer: 1 cup
Vinegar: 1 cup
Molasses: 1 cup
Berries: 1 cup of mashed
raspberries or 1 cup of currant or cranberry juice (Blackberries would be good, too)
Tomato paste: 1 6 oz
can
Chipotle in adobe sauce:
1 pepper, chopped, and a tablespoon or so of sauce
Add herbs and spices of choice. I add coffee and cloves to “darken” the
flavor, several cloves of garlic, and chili powder.
Enjoy.
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