Monday, October 31, 2011

Everybody likes Persimmons!

I've been slowly building up my little stash of persimmons in the fridge.  I've now put two containers of persimmon pulp in the freezer:

 
To date, I have five pounds of pulp in the freezer.  Not anything to crow about, but since they are the only wild fruit I've been able to harvest this summer / fall, I'm pretty happy.

For the first batch of persimmons, I used my handy-dandy food mill:

I love my food mill!  But it just didn't work very well for the persimmons; there was still a lot of pulp left even after cranking & cranking, so I scooped the remaining pulp / seeds out of the mill and put them into a basic kitchen seive.  And continued to smoosh out the pulp with my hands.  Definately worse than cleaning out a pumpkin (and I hate cleaning out pumpkins.....squishy icky sticky mess), but there was still persimmon-goodness left and the heak if I wasn't gonn'a get it!

Cleaning the food mill was also a huge production.  The seeds would get stuck underneath the spinny thing and the goo covering the seeds made it almost impossible to wash, spray or bang them out.  I think there may still be a seed or two in the mill.  Hopefully they will dry and fall out the next time I use it.

The persimmon tree I've been gathering from is on the fence line by Ms. Melman's pasture.  Whenever I go up there (at least once a day) I pick fruit from the ground and then give the tree a good shake to get more to drop.  And as soon as I do, the mule and mini come racing over to the tree.  Since the tree is actually in the fence, they have half of the tree and I have half of the tree.  So they are more than happy to see me come around because half of the persimmons fall on their side. 

I just recently found another lone tree on our property but the fruits weren't very good.  Most of them had dried up on the branches and when they did fall, they just didn't seem good enough to bother with.  I was happy to leave them on the ground though, as this guy seemed to be enjoying them:

There are also four small presimmon trees in the goat yard, but it's almost impossible to harvest the fallen fruit when there are four goats fighting for the best position under the tree in order to get to get to them before I can.

I'm hoping to get at least another five pounds of pulp before all the fruit is gone.  And maybe by then I'll have decided exactly what I'm going to do with it. 

3 comments:

  1. LOVE the turtle picture! I have always liked turtles... this made my day. :)

    Hope you get all of your persimmons processed. I've never had them before, I'm looking forward to reading about how you use your pulp.

    Have a nice day, Carolyn. :)

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  2. The color of the persimmon pulp is really lovely! I have never eaten them either, can't wait to see what you do with all that pulp!

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  3. I'm so curious about what you'll do with it, and I agree that the color is lovely! Good work!

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