Rami Zurayk is putting up food from his farm for the winter. My permaculture buddies are harvesting, I assume. Sharon at Casaubon's Book writes long and masterful posts on storing food.
I don't have much of a garden, and I only have a few items in the pantry - enough to feed us for a week, not six months as Sharon recommends. But all this seasonal harvesting and storing and blogging pushed me to make Crockpot Chutney this afternoon, using the pears and apples from our trees.
We neglect our fruit trees sadly, since neither one of us is a farmer and I have been preoccupied with school, writing, and the children. The pears gave us a bumper crop this year despite our lack of care, so I chunked up the last of them for this chutney. The apple tree needs attention - its fruit was small this year, and sparse (my kid messes with them in early spring, and then we haven't been watering). What fruit I did pick from the tree was quite tart and tasty, though. A few of them went in.
I used only ingredients I had in the pantry - so no ginger, which would be nice. But I did put in raisins, apple cider vinegar, walnuts, cinnamon sticks, cloves, and some cardamom. Brown sugar I have too much of, since I don't bake with it often.
I intend to freeze most of it - canning preserves is for next year. I hope to do some plum jam next summer - we always have way too many plums.
Off the property, the neighbor's fig tree hangs down over the public sidewalk, full of fruit. They are Vietnamese or Chinese and have told me I can have whatever figs I want, since they don't eat them. Loquats, on the other hand, are popular with everybody and the neighborhood children can be seen going into vacant lots to steal the ripe fruit when it's in season. There are also two mature carob trees next to the nearby elementary school which drop fruit in their time - nobody harvests carob in California. I wouldn't know what to do with it.
I may go harvest olives from the street trees my father used to favor... that would be a fun project, to put up olives this autumn. It's very "permaculture" to forage olives from ornamental olive trees. In the 1980s in North Carolina we used to receive shipments of Lebanese-style cured olives from our relatives in California, who harvested from street and yard trees. They stored the olives in giant plastic corn oil bottles. California olives cured to the Mieh-Mieh taste, labeled "Mazola Corn Oil." Why not? Now all my relatives are too successful to bother with this sort of project, and only my dad cured olives in recent years.
I'll let you know how the backyard chutney turns out.
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