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Gala of Grapes

By Eliot, on August 10th, 2012

Okay, I am getting really hokey here.   I know.   I just can’t help myself.

I am a sucker for alliteration.

As Pepper-palooza draws to an end, our grapes were ready for harvest.   So prepare yourselves…for……

During the weekend of July 28, we began our harvest.    I went out on Saturday morning at 8:00 and picked two and a half 5 gallon buckets full.    (Our bees have found the grapes and once a bird makes a peck or two, they dive in for the juice.   I had to dodge  them as I picked and one became my escort around the yard for the rest of the morning.)

These were the grapes in mid-June.

Here they are now.

Picked for “table eating” on the patio.

Harvest time.

How many pounds?

So, when I reported to The Hubs that I thought we had enough to make jelly, jam, and wine, he scoffed.

Then I put him to work pulling each and every grape off the stems.    After he had prepared four pounds for me for jam plus a 6 gallon bucket full of nothing but grapes, he planned a trip to the brew store for supplies.

We had made wine once just for fun.   We signed up for a mini-wine making class at a local winery about five years ago.   The vitner there taught us to make wine with frozen Welch’s white grape juice.   We “bottled” it in gallon milk jugs.

It was drinkable.  🙂

I have read that you need thirty-four pounds of grapes to make one case of wine.   I am pretty sure we have at least twenty pounds in the cooler.

So what can you expect during our Gala of Grapes?   Definitely some jam (from The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook), some jelly (from my Great-Grandmother’s recipe for Wild Grape Jelly), and hopefully some wine.

Adventures, Garden, What we're growing, eating, and doing.   , , ,  
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18 comments to Gala of Grapes

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