The hard frost ends the season for most garden crops where I live in Missouri. Sometimes I look forward to it just for the reprieve from garden work, but it does require a flurry of activity. In this video, I harvest some of my tropical crops and find a way to make use of dry beans that aren’t quite dry.
It was time to test the grapes and decide if I needed to start harvesting yet. I got out my trusty refractometer to see what the sugar levels were at.
There are a number of factors involved in deciding if it’s time to harvest grapes. It’s a balance between grape quality and suitability and readiness for winemaking. And it also all depends on the season–whether you got a lot of rain or very little. This was a great season for my grapes because we didn’t get any rain for the first three months of grape development, so the fruit got really sweet and the acid levels had the chance to lower somewhat.
Using the characteristics of plants in ways that are symbiotic with other plants and that help the gardener and the garden is one of the foundations of permaculture. I learned this trick from some other people at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage who have been applying comfrey in this way in their gardens.
This is a later season tour of my vineyard, when many of the grapes are getting very close to harvest. It’s been a good season, without much rain, which, though bad for almost everything else on the farm, is good for the grapes.
I’ve been growing a strange fruit for the last few years in my flower garden, but it also produces a fairly tasty and nutritious fruit. Got any guesses as to what it might be? This video is a little tour of a few unusual fruits perfect for a temperate zone permaculture planting.
