The Easiest Fruit to Grow for Survival, Plus, How to Make Blackberry Fruit Leather

If I could only grow one kind of fruit or berry, I think it would have to be blackberries. They grow wild in many parts of the country, but they are also incredibly easy to grow in your yard or garden. They pretty much take care of themselves. All we do is fertilize them with organic fertilizer in the spring, spread mulch around the canes, and keep the area weeded. That's it. Complex spraying regimes are unnecessary and our bushes have always been untroubled by insects or diseases.

'Triple Crown' blackberries require a trellis while 'Chester' blackberries do not.

You can find varieties of blackberries that will grow well in USDA hardiness zones 5-10. We live in zone 5, so we bought two varieties of thornless blackberries that can withstand cold temperatures. The 'Triple Crown' variety is my favorite. It does require a trellis to support its long, floppy canes. Those long canes, however, yield huge numbers of berries, up to 30 lb PER VINE.

A 'Triple Crown' berry cluster.

After all the berries have been harvested for the year, you have to cut the spent canes back and tie up the new canes that grow to take their place. Simple. 

Blackberries! And a few raspberries. Raspberries are pretty easy to grow, too, but
they are not nearly as bountiful producers for us. 

Blackberries are also exceptionally nutritious. Each cup of berries contains 50% of your RDA of Vitamin C, plus large amounts of fiber and cancer-fighting antioxidants.

About the only drawback to blackberries is that the fruit is highly perishable. If you pick them when they are dead ripe on the vine, you really only have a few days to eat them before they are past their prime. They are easily preserved, however. 

I can blackberry jam and freeze many pints of whole berries to use in cobblers later in the year. You can also dehydrate the berries whole or try this recipe for blackberry leather (aka fruit roll-up). The leather will last up to a year when stored properly. 

How to make Blackberry Fruit Leather: 

Based on a recipe in The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves. 

There are only two ingredients in this recipe: 

5 lb blackberries

1 lb applesauce. I used sweetened applesauce that I canned myself. 

The first, and most difficult, task is to seed the blackberries. You can stew them and then press the softened berries through a fine-mesh sieve, but that will drive you bonkers and possibly stain your entire kitchen with blackberry juice. It is much easier to use a food mill of some kind. 

I recommend this Roma Food Strainer. It definitely will get the job done.  

My Roma Food Mill, ready for action. 

I use the berry screen attachment (sold separately) and it keeps every single one of those tiny blackberry seeds out of the juice. I usually pass the pulp through the mill three times just to make sure I get out all of the juice and then I feed the remaining pulp to my chickens.

The blackberry juice and applesauce mixture

Stir in the applesauce and you are ready to make fruit leather. (The applesauce is used to improve the texture of the final product. You can't really taste it.)

I have an Excalibur Dehydrator that I really like and recommend. If you don't have a dehydrator, you can try making this in your oven, though I haven't tried it and can't vouch for it. You would want to keep your oven at the lowest possible setting, use parchment paper instead of plastic wrap, and check on it often. 

Assuming you have a dehydrator (and if you are a gardener or prepper, you really should!), this is how to proceed:

Line the dehydrator trays with plastic wrap, taking special care to make sure the wrap is secure. I left an 1" margin on both sides of the tray so the air could circulate more easily.

Fruit on the prepared tray

Spread the fruit mixture on the plastic wrap. You are looking for a depth of approximately 1/4", but you want the edges to be thicker than the center. That will help the whole sheet of fruit dry evenly.

Loading up

This recipe filled 6 of the 9 trays of my Excalibur. I set the temperature at 135 degrees. After about 5 hours, I checked on the leather and it was making excellent progress. I turned it down 20 degrees, just to make sure that the leather remained pliable and did not get brittle. After a total of 15 hours, the leather was at the perfect consistency. It was tacky to the touch, but not wet. The time it takes your batch of leather to dry will be dependent on many factors - your dehydrator, the humidity, how thick you spread the fruit, etc.

Done!

Then all you have to do it remove the plastic wrap from the tray and roll it up like a scroll.

I cut each roll in half so they would could fit in quart canning jars for storage.

Next, I used my Food Saver's accessory attachment to vacuum seal a clean, used canning lid to the jar.

Et viola! A healthy, homemade snack that will last until next year's blackberry harvest. If I can keep it hidden from my kids, that is...

September 2001 in Review and October Preps

September 2011 Preps

What did you accomplish in September? We had amazing weather all month long. We had very little rain or cloudy days and the highs were consistently in the 70s. The end result was picture-perfect fall weather. That encouraged this lazy woman to soak in the sun instead of prep or experiment with solar cooking devices.   

Even our sewage lagoon (our clay soil prohibits a septic tank)  gussied
itself up with a cloak of sunflowers this month. 

I did buy two bushels of apples and canned and dehydrated them. It was the first time I've used my Excalibur 9 Tray Food Dehydratoron something besides herbs and I was really impressed with how well it worked. I ended up with 3 quarts of dried apples that I'll use for desserts this winter and another 2 quarts of apples that I sprinkled with cinnamon and dried into crispy chips. The kids love snacking on those. I also made 3 pints of apple butter and 15 quarts of applesauce. Added to what was left from last year, we are fully stocked with apple goodness.

Our lovely weather is encouraging the garden to keep producing, albeit slowly.

I have enough green peppers frozen to last me until next summer's harvest. There are probably another 50 peppers still out there, so I think I'll try dehydrating the rest of them. We're still getting green beans from our remarkable zombie green bean patch and our raspberries are giving us the best harvest we've had from them yet. Not enough to can, but certainly enough for multiple batches of raspberry bars and fruit salad.

In between furious bouts of leisure and intermittent sprinklings of food harvesting and preservation, I also added some store-bought food to our food storage. I picked up some canned goods on sale at the grocery store as well as more clarified butter, coconut oil, freeze dried fruit, and tomato powder online. We are also prepared to stay warm during a winter power outage. And I'm excited to say that we were able to save up most of what it will take to buy the chicken coop of my dreams.

Oh, we also got one of these:

Christened "Goldie Butterscotch", but mostly called "Bunbun"

Mini Me has been obsessed with rabbits for about 2 years. We broke our "no pets in the house unless they live in an aquarium" rule and bought her this little guy for her birthday. Of course I also had to quickly buy a couple of months of food storage (timothy hay and alfalfa pellets) for the rabbit! That is not to be confused with using the rabbit for food storage. I don't think Mini Lops make good eating and it would definitely not be worth the trauma to our little rabbit lover.

What's in store for October: 

• I'll be returning to the Sun Oven. I'm bound and determined to cook something properly! I think I'll go for bread next. 
• After it frosts (Our frost date is quickly approaching ~Sigh~), we'll plant garlic. This will be the first time we've tried to grow garlic. Last spring we bought some garlic starts from the nursery as an impulse buy. They didn't do very well and therefore don't count! We bought a pound of "Music" variety organic seed garlic from Peaceful Valley.
• We have TONS of green tomatoes out there. I'll definitely have to do something with those before it frosts. I have several solutions in mind, so stay tuned for that. 
•  Maybe I'll do something with our pie pumpkins. We have about eight of them and while I enjoy using them as decorations, I'd like to try and cook at least a few of them. 
•  Hubby Dear and I will begin the infamous chicken moat this week. We priced out several options for fencing and discovered that this project is going to be more expensive than we thought. I'm sure it will also be more difficult than we thought, too. That's generally the way projects are at our house. Since we have never built fence before, it should be a grand headache adventure. 
• I'm still saving up for the chicken palace, but I should have some money in the budget to buy some miscellaneous preps. I'm not sure exactly what I'll buy, but it will definitely include food storage and probably more books. I'll keep you posted. 

So that's me. What did you do in September and what do you have lined up for October? 

August 2011 in Review and September Preps

I'm a bit late with my monthly summary, but here it is. To cap off a very interesting August, both of our water heaters died last weekend. It took five days for the parts to come in and for the water heaters to get fixed. No hot water when you have four young children home making messes all day in the middle of canning season? Life gets complicated and everything takes about twice as long to get done. It's going to take a few days to unearth my house from under the debris of dirty dishes, kids, and laundry.  I'm hoping September will be a better month.

August Garden:

Here's the bad news: the germination rate hasn't been great for our fall plantings.

Cauliflower hanging in there

We have a few tiny cauliflower and broccoli plants.

The Box of Death

This is the box we have christened "The Box of Death". All the strawberries we planted last spring died and now only one cabbage seedling remains. Lots of seedlings sprouted, but they mysteriously died. What gives?

Brandywine tomato plant gone wild

Our tomatoes are in a holding pattern. The insanely hot weather of July and early August caused the plants to drop flowers rather than produce fruit. Now the weather is better and flowers are setting, but we have to wait until the fruit is produced and ripe.

But there's good news.

The pumpkins are looking great. It won't be long before they're ready to pick. Our cucumbers and cantaloupe are consistently producing, too.

I'm harvesting and drying tons of cayenne peppers.

Green beans in September?

And, miracle of miracles, we have fresh green beans! Lots of them! Hubby Dear picked nearly two pounds just yesterday.

I reported last month that the green beans died, right? Well, in two of the boxes, the green beans bounced back and began producing with the mild weather we've been having.  How strange is that? It's fun to have some garden serendipity instead of garden catastrophe.


August Preps:

• In addition to the odds and ends I picked up at Cabela's, I bought some more items for our long term food storage: local honey, oil, mayonnaise, molasses and evaporated milk. I broke down and shelled out the mega bucks for a case of dry milk. We are getting so close to having a full year's supply of food. Exciting!
• I also added to our three-month supply: dry carrots, dry fruit, cornstarch, granola bars and cereal. My family is a crazy bunch of cold cereal addicts, so we have to build a big stockpile of it. Cereal is getting more and more expensive (like everything else these days) so it's a challenge to find bargains. 
• Speaking of stockpiles, my budding toiletry stockpile was getting out of control. I had been just pitching items in the cabinets in our master bathroom and it was pretty chaotic. To solve this problem, I bought five storage bins and divided the stockpile into five categories: oral care, body wash & soap, skin care, deodorant, and hair care. The bins should hold about a year's supply of these toiletries for my family and items are much easier to find now.  

The beginnings of my hair and skin care stockpile

• I added these two books to my library:  Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition and The Organic Fruit Gardener. 
• I've canned a bit of salsa, spaghetti sauce, pickled peppers, and cucumbers. I have two dynamite recipes to share with you soon. 

What's coming up this September? 

• I'm so excited! Global Sun Oven is lending me a Sun Oven to take for a test drive.  I can't wait to put it through its paces. Will it really work? Is it worth the hype? Is it better for baking cookies than my mini-van? You'll be along every step of the way.
• Of course I'll continue building our food storage. I plan to dehydrate a bunch of herbs and freeze pesto. Apple season is upon us so I'll begin canning applesauce, apple butter, and try my hand at dehydrating apples, as well. 
• The advent of cooler weather reminds me that we need to get a back-up form of heat for our house. We plan to get a wood stove at some point, but for now, a propane heater will have to do. 
•  I'm cutting back a bit on my prepping budget this month to start saving for my chicken coop. Hubby Dear and I are going to begin building the chicken moat this month. Since the two of us are ridiculously un-handy, that should be fun times indeed. Thankfully our marriage is strong enough to survive the trials and tribulations that are sure to unfold. ;) 

What did you do to prep or in the garden during the month of August? What do you have planned for September? 

My name is Emily... and I'm an applesauce-aholic.

The applesauce I made last month has been a big hit with the whole family. It kicks Musselman's and Mott's respective tushies. I have been eating, breathing and dreaming of applesauce. I can't help it. I keep making more of it.

In my spare refrigerator is another two bushels of apples. Over the next few days, all 80 lbs of apples will be turned into more applesauce and apple products of all descriptions.


A rainbow of apple products, made by me

On the left is the Chunky Applesauce I made last month. I had to peel, chop and smush all those apples by hand. Next is the same thing, only cooked with the skins on and processed through a food mill. Even though the skins were eventually removed from the sauce, they still gave it a pink color. The third sauce is called "Rich and Spicy Applesauce". It has the addition of brown sugar and spices. Yum! The last jar is full of what I call "brown gold" - apple butter.

One factor in my new applesauce addiction is my handy dandy new food mill. Someone recommended the Roma Food and Vegetable Strainer to me and wow, will it ever revolutionize my canning. A whole new world of canning possibilities is now open to me from tomato sauce to ketchup to pumpkin to... applesauce. :)

The food mill, set up and ready to go

I had a very hard time putting the food mill together for the first time. I pretty much have zero mechanical aptitude, but I managed to get it together eventually. The second time was a snap, though. I'm slow, but I learned. :)  It is pretty sturdy and should last a lifetime, provided I don't figure out a way to screw it up. There are different strainer cones available for different types of produce. It comes with one that is for soft, squishy foods like tomatoes and apples.

First, you core and roughly chop the apples and cook them until they are soft.

Then you load up the super-sized hopper, turn the handle (The Thinker and Mini Me love to help with this part) and voila!

The pulp comes out one way

And the waste goes out the other

The result is a smooth, skin and seed-free sauce.

I need to buy more canning jars. The applesauce awaits!