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season: early-fall
section: putting up
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- apples come in waves now. sauce, butter, dried rings, cider, vinegar. early apples for sauce, late ones for keeping.
- pears can in light syrup. or cook to butter. or slice and dry on screens.
- muscadines arrive in late august and run ten weeks. jelly, juice, and the hulls go in the freezer for winter pies.
- pawpaws drop from late august through september. scoop the pulp, freeze it, eat within a year. they do not keep on the counter.
- sweet potatoes need curing. four to seven days at eighty-five degrees and ninety percent humidity sets the skin and turns starch to sugar. then store at fifty-five to sixty. below fifty-four they get cold-stung and never come back.
- winter squash cures five to ten days at eighty to eighty-five degrees, then keeps at fifty to fifty-five in dry air. wipe each one with diluted vinegar before storing to slow rot.
- cabbage to kraut. two percent salt by weight, packed under its own brine, fermented three to six weeks at sixty to seventy degrees.
- the second fig crop comes in. jam the rest before frost.
- green tomatoes at first frost. chow-chow, chutney, fried.
- black walnuts and pecans start dropping in late september. hull within two weeks or the husks stain everything they touch.