Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Believe it or not, harvesting pears can be tricky. Unlike apples, pears cannot ripen fully on the tree and they have to be picked weeks before they’re fully ripe. That’s good news for the supermarket, where they want the fruit to wait in warehouses or trucks for weeks on end before it hits your table. But how do you harvest the perfect pear from a backyard pear tree?
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Autumn is cider season, but that means more than apple cider. Pear cider is a delicious way to enjoy the season and preserve pears at the same time. While the process of making pear cider is similar to making apple cider, the taste is as unique as a pear itself. Whether you enjoy pear cider fresh or ferment it into hard pear cider (known as perry), it’s well worth the effort.
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In planning our heirloom apple orchard, we were looking for a few hardy, reliable crabapples to act as pollinators. Most commonly crabapples are used for pollination, but the fruit are left to the birds. In my research, I was surprised to find that Dolgo crabapple is both an excellent pollinator, and produces incredibly tasty fruit. Double win!
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Peach trees are normally associated with warmer temps in the south. Pensylvania Amish country is about the furthest north that you’ll find commercial peach orchards. I joked a while back that with climate change, we’ll finally be able to grown Peaches up here in Northern New England. It turns out, there are already a number of cold hardy peach tree varieties that are grown in zone 4, but it takes a bit of work to get them to fruit.
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Keeping apples fresh all winter is easier than you might think. While most store best at around 34 degrees, a cool basement is sufficient to get nearly the same results without the effort of refrigeration or building a separate root cellar.
Simply wrap each apple individually in newspaper and place into boxes, with space between each apple. Check in on them periodically for discolored paper, indicating that an apple is spoiling. Every once in a while, unwrap a few to see how they’re doing.
I’ve successfully stored Newton Pippin Apples, one of the very best keepers, for 14 months using this method. Just a box, some newspaper and a basement. No special tools necessary.
Many varieties don’t really come into their own taste wise until they’ve been stored for at least a few months, but once they do they’re well worth the wait.
Newton Pippin apples in late March, after 6 months in storage.
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I have this dream of someday growing all our own food for a full year right on our homestead. We’ve been slowly expanding our orchard and fruit production over the years, working toward that dream. We now have a steady supply of fruit year-round, either fresh off the plant or from the root cellar.
With the long Vermont winters (zone 4), a supply of fresh fruit can be a challenge. The growing season is only 100 days long, which leaves another 265 days mostly eating root cellared crops. Fruits with a good storage life are essential to ensuring that you have fresh fruit throughout the cold months.
You need more than just late bearing storage fruits to stay supplied. If you’re going to have a year-round supply of homegrown fruit, you’ll need to plant varieties that fruit very early in the spring as well.
It all comes down to planning. You’ll need to select varieties that fruit very early, as well as varieties that fruit regularly all summer. Then still more varieties that fruit very late and store well.
Yellow Transparent apples ripe in early July in Vermont (Zone 4). While most apples bear in the fall, a few varieties of summer apples bear very early and can supply you just as your fall stores are running out.
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Pressing cider is a great way to preserve the tasty goodness of apples all winter long. Cider can be canned as fresh juice, frozen or fermented into hard cider, all of which keep for months if not years.
The trick is, how do you make cider without breaking the bank? We spend years saving up for a double barrel cider press, and I had to promise it’d be my birthday present every year for the next decade. Those things aren’t cheap!
I recently had a reader named Sasha contact me and tell me about her homemade cider press that she put together from recycled materials in minutes. She’s seeing yields comparable to our fancy press and for free!
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Early summer apples were once essential to maintaining a year-round food supply. Late storage apples are harvested in October or November, and under the best conditions might keep until April or May. That leaves just a short break until the earliest summer apples begin ripening in June or July depending on your location.
With global trade, early apples are no longer popular since you can get fall varieties shipped halfway around the world to meet demand any time of the year. If you’re looking to grow more of your own fruit and concerned with keeping a year-round supply, try planting the earliest apple: Yellow Transparent.
Yellow Transparent apples ripe in early July in Vermont (Zone 4).
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I’ll admit, I have a lot of romantic notions about a root cellar. I’d love to build one, a real one, dug deep into a hillside here on the homestead. Unfortunately, our land has a very high water table, and an underground root cellar isn’t an option. The truth is though, “root cellaring” has very little to do with whether or not you have an actual root cellar.
Reading Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage for Fruits and Vegetables really opened my eyes to all sorts of spare places that could be used to keep food fresh all winter, even if my dream of a dug root cellar never materialized. Not only does the book take you through the requirements for each type of food you’re storing, it also provides plans and ideas for root cellaring just about anywhere, even in an apartment.
Most homes have an area that stays cooler than the rest. A nook where the heat of the wood stove doesn’t quite penetrate. Maybe it’s a room along the north wall, the back of a closet or pantry, or just a spare nook in the basement.
Newton Pippin apple, hands down the very best storage apple variety.
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I love cider. The ritual of pressing it, enjoying it straight, fermenting it, canning it, mulling it and quite frankly just smelling it.
At 25 I knew what I wanted for my 30th birthday, and I started saving. Double barreled cider presses don’t come cheap, and they’re not particularly easy to make either. Even if you do choose to make your own, there’s quite a bit of cast iron hardware that will set you back roughly 1/3 the cost of a finished model, and then you still have to come up with the wood.
To celebrate our press (and my birthday) we had a cider pressing party, and everyone brought empty carboys, mason jars and just about every other container in the house along with buckets and buckets of apples. We pressed around 100 gallons of cider that day and converted it into hard cider, cider vinegar, cider jelly, cider syrup and plain old canned cider to enjoy mulled in the wintertime.
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