drying fruit | organised castle

I showed you a few months ago in this post that we had netted the entirety of our three espaliered fruit trees – one nectarine and two nashi pears. That decision proved to be really successfully with us not losing any fruit to the birds and other wildlife.

We have removed it gradually as the fruit ripened on each tree. First, were the nectarines, then one nashi and a couple of days ago we removed the netting completely and picked the nashi pears from the last tree.

There were well over 100 fruit.

GMan had stewed and frozen all of the fruit from the first tree and did about another 40 of these. I am now experimenting with dehydrating slices of them for snacks and have given some to the Community Pantry.

The next job was to fold the netting up and put it away for next season. We spread it out so that we could remover any leaves or debris and it noticed a jagged hole of about 8cm across in the middle of the netting. I am not sure whether it was caused by an errant branch growing through or a possum munching through it.

Anyway, I decided to mend the hole before packing the netting up. It is nothing fancy but will work well.

A few days ago I saw an ad on Facebook for a hands-on workshop on ‘Summer Fruit Tree Pruning’ in a town about 45 minutes from us. This seemed like a perfect opportunity so GMan has signed up and is going along on Friday. Hopefully, he will be able to apply his new-found knowledge to our trees.

We have a fig tree that we planted about 5 or 6 years ago and for about the last 4 years we have been able to pick enough figs to enjoy a good feed during the relatively short season. Invariably, the birds get some and some go rotten, particularly the last couple of years when we have had a lot of summer rain. This season has been mostly warmer than usual and fairly dry.

I have been picking and eating figs when I am in the garden for the past few weeks so yesterday I started picking some and realised that there was an enormous number ready to pick. Here is the result. Yes, that is my hat that I collected some in.

I ended up with 5 kg of figs so it made sense to preserve some for later use. I love fig jam but we don’t really eat much jam so thought I would trying drying them in the dehydrator.

I filled the 4 trays with cut figs.

24 hours later I have semi-dried figs.

I am going to store them in the refrigerator as there is still some moisture in them. Meanwhile we still have plenty of fresh figs to eat at the moment.