Grapes

So, we have been pretty quiet in terms of talking about the garden this year. Really. Go look at previous years! It's not that it's not going well - it is. But, does everyone want to hear about our garden really? Again? Sure we have tomatoes, peppers, beans, potatoes, (really really wonderful) garlic, basil (coming out of our ears), and corn. Sure we've had carrots, radishes, lettuce, and squash. Yeah - been there done that.

What's new this year? Well, number 1,we've severely cut back on the number of tomato plants. Last year we had around 25. This year we're down to around 12. It's made our yard look more like a real garden than, say, a field owned by Ragu. What's really new is our grapes. Sure, you've seen pictures of our grapes before, like the one below. The grapes are the ridiculously large mound at the left side of the image. See that mound of green? That's them going over the arch we were supposed to use at our wedding. Megan's since cut the vines back so going through the arch isn't a limbo contest.


We started these mostly as a privacy barrier for summer. We thought they'd look nice and in addition provide a visual barrier for dinners out on the patio etc. And, if we happened to get a few grapes out of the deal, we'd be more than happy. We bought 4 types of grapes and let them run over the fence surrounding that part of the yard. They've done an (obviously) excellent job of doing so. Last year we had a few grapes, with few being the keyword. This year, it's a little different.

As Megan pointed out to me, that's not such a great picture. One, you have no cue for how deep that container is. Well, to give you some visual help here, the corn is about 8" long. So, because I was too lazy to measure this, that container is about 24" x 16" x 14". It's not filled all the way to the top and these measurements aren't real, but even being conservative gives that as being at least 1.5 bushels of grapes right there. Now, that sounds impressive. It does. It's way more than we thought we had till we started picking. What's more impressive is we haven't picked all the grapes yet. Recall I said we had 4 plants? Yeah, of the total vine length we have, we've picked off maybe 1/3 of the total distance. Seriously.

You know, it takes a while to de-stem and wash that many grapes! So, what are we gonna do with all of these grapes? First off, we set some aside (and gave some away) for eating. The rest we are going to mash up and make juice out of. What will we do with the juice? Oh sure, I suppose we could make jelly. We're the Taylors though, not the Smuckers. (That and I don't have any canning gear). Instead we're going to take the juice and do a few things with it:

1. Make popsicles. Yummy! We have some Edy's brand real juice popsicles already, but we want to make our own!
2. Grape sorbetto. Again, could it be yummier? Is "yummier" really a word? It is now.
3. Grape italian ices.

Everything we've read says the juice freezes fine so we'll have plenty for all winter long. Jealous yet? You don't have to be - come on over and have a popsicle.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned how great the raspberry/dark chocolate chip ice cream was I made a little over a week ago. I guess I'll have to save that for the next taunt, I mean blog entry.