Blue Mountains Seasonal Review

Seasonal Notes

It's good to take stock and make notes every season. Fruit and Nut Network members Kris and Marnie share their experiences from different places.

...From the Mid Mountains 

by Kris Newton

My summer raspberries are really getting into their stride, and I’m picking a bowlful every few days; I’m enjoying Jonathan and Cox’s Orange Pippin apples, with the majority of varieties yet to come; and my main crop of figs is starting up (the early, breba, crop of Black Genoa was amazing!).

Unfortunately, the almost sub-tropical environment in the mid- to lower-Mountains is also encouraging all sorts of fungal growths, like black-spot;  I need to make time to get out with the milk spray and get into my fruit trees (and my tomatoes and roses).    

So far so good in my experimental greenhouse - there’s more vegetative growth than anything else, which I’d expect in young trees;  but I do still have one mango left on the little dwarf mango tree, so I’m hoping to try harvesting this soon :-).  

I’ve moved most of my expanded citrus section into large pots, and now have a 'Citrus Annexe' under the eaves (to protect from any frost) along the long north-facing wall of the house.  All have put on significant new growth, and the older (2-3 years) ones are flowering well.

...in the Upper Mountains

by Marnie O'Mara

Summer is the season of plenty here in the mountains.  Our garden has provided us with an abundance of produce over the past few months - we've eaten our fill, shared with friends, swapped for things we don't grow but others do, frozen, dehydrated and bottled enough to get us through the less productive Winter.


At a recent Kitchen Garden Produce Swap we swapped some cucumbers for a large quantity of crab apples. I know lots of people have these in their gardens and think they aren't the most useful of fruits. We brought home about two kilos of crab apples from the swap as we wanted to make enough pectin to see us through the next berry-jamming season. We also used them to make two batches of fabulous fizz, one lot paired with rhubarb. The result was delicious - thirst quenching and not too sweet.

Our three apple trees are very sensible - they pretty much stagger the ripening of their fruit so that when one is finished the next begins (actually, my very practical hubby carefully chose which trees to plant with this in mind). This means we have been able to pick apples every day during January and February - and today, the first day of Autumn, we still have lots of apple days ahead.


This year we have also have a bumper crop of grapes! This is the vine's third season - last year we had a few good sized bunches, and this year there are masses of huge purple/black bunches of beautiful, juicy grapes. I see the birds eyeing them off, longing to get stuck into the fruit, however our garden cage keeps the birds out and our precious bounty safe.




Surveying our garden this morning I see that we'll soon be picking kiwi fruit and cape gooseberries.

Have seasonal notes for the lower mountains or elsewhere in the mountains? We'd love to hear from you! More news from the Fruit and Nut Tree Network.

Making Wild Cider

There have been a lot of windfall apples this summer in Katoomba. A few big gusts when the apples are ripe is all it takes, and the community gardens has a whole heritage apple walk full of trees, so the faintest waft brings down a whole fruitbowl full. So over Christmas when the winds blew and the rain came, apples came along with it.

When suddenly faced with kilos and kilos of not entirely perfect apples there’s really only one thing left to do. MAKE CIDER

I rope in a couple of friends, and being 21st century pioneers, we follow instructions from the interwebs. We find many experts in the world of ferment online, and within that vast collective, some who seem passionate as well as thorough in their reporting of the process to earn them the title in our conversation as “proper cider geeks”. And so it is, that we (that’s me and my cider drinking chums) take the ‘one in seven chance’ that all the work we put into juicing may produce something which we can’t actually drink by following their instructions.

Why do this? Well there are yeasts out there in the wild in the air and which live on the apples themselves, its these guys we’d like to employ here. Most cider you buy in the shops is made by first zapping the local yeasts on the fruit and then introducing predictable cider producing yeast. We could do that but then we’d have non local yeast and not very complex flavours, and it would definitely work (where's the fun in that?). We’re putting our windfalls in the hands of the locals so if good yeasts make it out on top in this ecosystem, then we’ll have a truly local cider with interesting, complex flavours as a result. We may even feel confident enough to do it again. We have minimised the risk of introducing other bacterium by sterilising our equipment first, and hope that our diverse apple community brings with it some strong and healthy yeasts to produce a human friendly ferment.

The normal way to make cider is to crush the apples and then press them. However, unable to find a cider press locally at short notice (if you have one there are apples galore still to process, so please get in touch) a friend kindly offers the use not one but two juicers.

 

It’s not the same as crushing and pressing, but it is what’s on offer, so in the grand spirit of necessity being the mother of cider invention, off we go. We arrive at the house of juicers with two large and very strong reusable shopping bags full of apples. Two masticating juicers (these have slow rotating blades which emulate a chewing action to liberate maximum juice), chopping boards and knives are laid out at the ready, and our task is all the swifter for it. 

 

Much chopping and juicing ensues. We stop to allow both juicers to cool down a couple of times from our mammoth effort, and within 2 hours (tea break not included) we’ve cut off the very bad bits, and chopped and juiced 33 kilos of windfalls. Our haul produces around 15 litres of juice which we pour into a fermenter pail for a first fermentation. 

About 5cm of solid foam forms on top which we scoop off. Because we make beer at home we also have a hydrometer, we take a reading and it comes in around 1.044, which is a little lower than the recommended density, so if it works this cider probably will be relatively sweet.  We test the juice at this stage, which is sharp, acidic and very very appley.

yes, it's quite hard to get a reading

Now we just have to wait.  Primary fermentation takes 1-2 weeks. I’ll post and update and let you know how it goes. And if you make cider from apples let us know how you make yours, do you crush and press, or juice? 

There are plenty of apples to ripen still, come down to the community gardens on a Friday morning at 10am if you'd like to arrange to take some apples and try a cider making experiment yourself :-)