It must be fall - pressing apples for apple juice

One of my favorite garden times of year is in the fall when we use the apples we have grown for a myriad of purposes (pies, apple butter, applesauce, apple quick breads) but most especially when we press the apples for juice with our 30 year old apple press.  We purchased it when we lived in Santa Cruz in the early 1980's.  We are still using it and it functions well.  Here are some pictures of the process featuring my wife, Illijana.
We are using apples from our ten planted varieties which were picked between two and three weeks ago then left to ripen and mellow in and under our house.  We also used two varieties picked at our neighbor's house.  Usually we try to freeze the juice, but we ran out of room this year in our freezers so we are doing a "lower temperature" pasteurization for the 24 quarts of juice we pressed.

Illijana, press, apples

Washing tub, cutting out the "bad parts"

Turning the hand crank to press the apples

Flowing juice

Cleanup

Spreading pulp in garden bed for organic matter

Planting a "legacy" tree - Olea europaea or Arbequina olive tree

Olives have been part of my life since the beginning.  My mother had a story about rubbing olive oil on me as an infant, and olive oil was part of our daily diet, no doubt influenced by my family's Sicilian heritage.  I decided to plant an olive tree here at home to leave as a legacy tree for those who live here in the far off future.  Because temperatures are increasing here (and I think they will continue to do so due to human caused global warming) I think olives may well be able to fruit here on the far northern California coast.
I found a beautiful large pot in which to plant the tree.  I want to limit its height to its lower range of 8-10 feet tall.  Here are pictures of the planting.

Making sauerkraut

     We have been harvesting lots of produce lately, freezing some for our winter use, giving some to the food bank, and today we made sauerkraut which will ferment for 4 - 6 weeks in a crock, and will then be hot water bath canned.

Kaitlin cabbages

     This particular batch was made with green cabbage ( Kaitlin variety from Johnny's Seeds), carrots, pickling salt, dill, and caraway seed.  Here are some photos of the selected cabbages, the process, and our lovely crock.

Cut in half
Illijana cut up the cabbage into strips and added the cabbage, the seasonings, and the carrots to the crock pot.                                                                    

Jim grated up the carrots.

Here is a good picture of the crock and the grated carrots.

Illijana loaded the crock with the cut cabbage, layered in the carrots, salt, dill, and caraway seed, and then packed it all down with a wooden mallet.  We added a bit of boiled then cooled salted water to cover the top, and set it away to become sauerkraut in 4 - 6 weeks.

The garden at sunset

It was a lovely sunset tonight on the northern coast of California.  My wife Illijana took some photos of our gardens in the golden light of the sunset and here are a few of them.

Back flower bed

Orange reflection on the ocean

100 day peas

     Here on the cool and foggy north coast of California one of my favorite vegetables to grow is fresh shell peas.  The peas usually take twice as long to come to full size as the packages suggest, but this year they took only about 1 1/2 times as long due to our warmer than normal spring and early summer.
My favorite variety is Knight and I planted the first planting of the year on April 12th of this year.
     I soak the peas overnight to start, coat them with inoculant to help them fix nitrogen onto their roots, then put them into the soil about an inch deep.  I cover them with remay or other cloth to discourage birds from attacking the seedlings, stake them with branches or bamboo stakes, and wait.
     The first shell peas took 100 days this year, and here are pictures of the first picking.

Knight shell peas

I then spent time shelling the peas.  My dog happens to love peas so between the two of us what makes it into the bowl is reduced 10%.  Here is a picture of the shelled peas (part of tonight's dinner.)

 Bon appetit!

The July garden

The garden is in full flowering mode.  We have been busy collecting lots of raspberries (see previous Scarecrow pictures), picking loads of broccoli and zucchini, and enjoying the flowers.
Here are two views of the back garden flower bed.

This is a picture of the center bed out back which features lots of dahlias, double Shasta daisies, a Lavatera plant, and the tall spires of echium (tower of jewels).

Here is a pic of the lavatera:

Finally, not to ignore the veggies, here is a picture of the newly emerged final pea planting of the year.  These are shell peas.  Pumpkins are growing in the background surrounding the artichoke plants.  The large leaved plant in the foreground is rhubarb.

The garden this week

Here are a few pictures of the garden this week.

Illijana and the scarecrow (protecting raspberries!)

Aromatic rose arch

David Austin rose (transplanted this year and doing better)

Dortmund Kordesii climber rose

alstromeria in full bloom

Dortmund and front garden bed

Moss Terrace daylilies beginning to bloom (with echium)

broccoli, beets, parsnips, summer squash

peas, squash, jerusalem artichokes, celery

roses, valerian, going toward upper beds

roses

Leontine Gervais rose over dog run, echium, ocean

Planting strawberries

To finish the strawberry bed project detailed in the previous posting, I planted strawberry plants in the new raised bed today.  We used a variety of strawberry named "Albion" which is an everbearing strawberry with disease resistance to verticillium wilt, phytophtora crown rot, and resistance to anthracnose crown rot.  And they taste great!
The first photo shows the planting process, and the second shows the completed planting.  I dig a hole with a trowel, put liquid fertilizer in the hole (we use Maxsea, a seaweed based fertilizer), and place the plant roots in the hole, and cover them up.  We should have edible strawberries in late May onward.  Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Building a garden bed for strawberries

     Over the last several days Illijana and I have set about to construct a dedicated strawberry bed in our garden space.  We needed a sunny spot and found one that fit near our greenhouse.  We dug up the grass at the edge of the gravel pad we had put down for the greenhouse, dug up the weed mat that underlaid the gravel, moved some of the gravel, and laid out the bed shape.

Cutting the edge

Laying out the bed shape

The next step was to construct the raised beds using recycled deck boards given to us by our neighbors.

 

We laid out the boards, cut them to size, and used an Illijana inspired design nailing them together.

I then used a garden fork to loosen the soil at the base of the bed (like a double dig technique).  In the background you can see some of the soil conditioners I used in the bed.

I amended the soils we gathered from around the yard with a mixture of blood meal, bonemeal, cottonseed meal, greensand, and lots of compost.  The next photo is of our compost screener (a recycled plastic bread tray) as we loaded compost from the bottom of the pile to place in the new bed.

Finally, after many loads of soil, amendments, and compost were added, the bed was done.  Here is what it looks like before the planting of the strawberry plants.