It's Grape Season in Niagara

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Now that Fall has officially arrived, our latest foraging trip resulted in an amazing find of wild Grapes. These small fruits with a rather large seed are now fully ripe and can be found covering the odd tree and bush throughout the farm. It was obviously time to pick them.

Wild Grapes atop a Mulberry tree

This Grape is easy to steam juice. The result is a very dark, tart and sweet drink. For us, it makes one of the best jellies.

Dark and delicious wild Grape juice

Having collected as much wild Grape as we can process this time of year, it reminded us of our row of old Concords.

We found these Grapes just over a year ago. We cleared the rows but have not yet been able to re-trellis them.

This Spring we crudely pruned them in the hope of generating more fruit. Since then, we have pretty much forgotten about them. We eventually let the weeds take over.

Going back to the Concords this week, we noticed quite a few were well developed and ripe as well. So it was now time to weed and see what we could harvest.

Time to pick the Concords

The results were surprising. Within the fast growing weeds, primarily Golden Rod, we found a "ton" of Grapes. It seems our pruning really awakened these plants. Although most were ripe, there was still a good amount of green unripened fruit, particularly where the Grapes were not exposed to the Sun.

Hidden from the Sun, some Grapes are still green

The Concords make a great juice and jelly. But the amount of green Grapes works out perfectly well for us since we have more than a couple of uses for this great fruit.

Last year, we experimented with the making of verjus (literally French for "green juice"). The juice of unripened Grapes is very tart with a hint of Grape flavour. It is actually ideal for use wherever you would normally use Lemon juice.

Selected unripened Grapes ready to make verjus

Since last year's verjus lasted no more than a month, we decided to make a lot more.

Unlike the steam juicing process we use for all our Grapes, in this case we need to be a bit more forceful to fully extract the juice. As a result, we crush them (using a food processor) and we press them through a cheese cloth. We then filter the resulting "sludge" to get a clear liquid.

Our process is still not ideal; we are aiming to eventually get a clear liquid. For the time being however this will do the trick.

A glass of this year's verjus...a little tart for drinking but perfect to use instead of Lemon juice

This may be dreaming, but we think that eventually we might actually be able to replace all Lemon juice in our Tea Room and canning activities with verjus. This would be a great way to keep our work local and perhaps more sustainable.

We'll close this week with a picture of the next crop: Kiwis. The trellised Kiwis have done surprisingly well this year. The berries are large and growing in beautiful clusters.

The Kiwis are looking promising

Interestingly, the plants that are now trellised seem further ahead of their counterparts which are growing amid the wild Grapes, wild Roses and the odd Mulberry tree that cover most of our untamed land. Even their leaves are now turning yellow and beginning to fall. It seems that the invasive plants provide a certain amount of cover and protection for the Kiwis. Regrettably these same Kiwis however are much harder to pick and have less fruit and less developed fruit...so definitely not a permaculture solution.