Blog Archives

Spontaneous Pneumothorax

8/29/2011

Stuck in the hospital with no fruit.

I had a great time at the GCFSG pear tasting, until about 6 pm. I had just come in from picking pears from the demonstration orchard, when I bent over to pick up my camera back, and felt a sharp, sudden pain in my chest. I thought it was a muscle cramp at first, but the pain started to radiate throughout my torso. I hung around and took it easy until I felt I could safely drive, told Yvonne I was sorry for leaving early, and came home.

My wife made me go to the ER, and I'm glad she did because it turned out I had suffered a 'spontaneous pneumothorax'. In other words, my right lung had ruptured and collapsed. They were able to insert a chest tube and re-inflate my lung, and I've been recuperating in the hospital ever since. I'll post pictures from the pear tasting as soon as I'm released.

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Pear Cider Failure

8/22/2011

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Freshly pressed pear juice in 1-gallon jug.

Sadly, my attempt at turning my neighbor's pears into a delicious cider failed. I've made many many batches of hard cider using juice from the grocery store, using Green Deane's hard cider method. After getting all the pears crushed and pressed, I poured the juice into a one-gallon glass apple juice jug. I added a tablespoon of champagne yeast, added the airlock, and put it in the cabinet under the sink to ferment.

When I checked on it the next day to see if fermentation was occurring, I found a huge mess. Apparently the fermentation was so vigorous that juice and sediment bubbled out of the airlock, splattering all over the place. I took a little taste to see if there was any sugar left. It still tasted sweet, so I racked the cider into plastic soda bottles, and put them back to carbonate.

The next day the soda bottles were hard and swollen. The fermentation had not slowed at all, and the soda bottles had become high-pressure carbon dioxide bombs. The pressure was so high that the plastic bottles had deformed and stretched, so much so that the bottoms were pushed out and they couldn't stand up on the counter. I immediately threw the bottles into the refrigerator to kill the fermentation, and spent the next few days slowly releasing the pressure a little bit at a time.

Once I was convinced the bottles wouldn't explode when opened, I cautiously opened one in the sink. Psssssssssh! It bubbled and bubbled and bubbled. The carbon dioxide concentration in the liquid must have been at the maximum saturation. Once the effervescence calmed down a little bit, I took a test sip. Ugh.....It tasted like a permanent marker. The yeast had used up every last molecule of sugar in the juice, leaving behind a pretty terrible tasting, yet super-carbonated beverage. Too bad.

So what went wrong? My theory is that there were lots of wild yeasts and other microorganisms on the skins of the pears, and I probably could have made a cider without adding any yeast at all. Adding the champagne yeast to the already inoculated juice created a situation where there was a lot of yeast competing for relatively little sugar, and a microbial feeding frenzy ensued. The end result was the driest, worst tasting, most carbonated, and most alcoholic brew I have ever tasted or hope to see again. If I ever make cider this way again, I will either take great pains to carefully wash all the fruit before pressing to remove the wild yeasts, or will just let the wild yeasts do the work and not add any of my own. I'll probably just eat the pears instead of juicing them, and let St. Arnold take care of the brewing.

Champagne Yeast

Big Cider Mess

Racking into soda bottles.

Diffusing an explosive situation.

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Melons

8/18/2011

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Photo by Evans Veggie Farm

As I've mentioned before, I don't have a vegetable garden. It's not because I don't like vegetable gardening, or that I don't think growing produce at home is important, it's just a matter of limited resources. With two little kids and a full time job, I have time to manage either the fruit trees or a vegetable garden, but not both. Second, Dr. Wife and Boy #1 don't like a lot of vegetables I do (tomatoes, hot peppers, and black-eyed peas), and I'd rather grow something we all like and can enjoy together.

Fortunately, I have found a perfect source of locally grown organic vegetables in Evans Veggie Farm. We're very proud to be an inaugural subscriber of their community supported agriculture (CSA) program. Every two weeks, the Evans family delivers a big box of fresh-picked organic produce and two-dozen farm-fresh eggs right to my door. Not to sound too much like a commercial here, but if you live in northwest Houston or the Hempstead area, check them out. Get the highest quality organic food while supporting a local family business. Everybody wins.

Last week, we opened our box to discover a huge, perfectly ripe, canteloupe-like asian melon. Its sweet fragrance soon filled the whole kitchen, and I was suddenly very thankful that Dr. Wife doesn't like melons. After the kids went to bed, I pulled it out of the refrigerator and sliced it in half. The intensity of the aroma was incredible. It was very juicy, but unlike supermarket melons the juice wasn't watery, but almost like a light syrup. I ate the whole thing over the next two days, and was sorry there wasn't more. After seeing how Mr. Texas is using melon plants as a living mulch around his citrus trees, and tasting such a remarkable piece of fruit, I am determined to try growing melons myself next year. Until then I'll just have to be patient, and hope there are more melons coming in my next CSA delivery

Photo by Evans Veggie Farm

Delicious Melon

Super Sweet Orange Flesh

Perfect Summer Time Dessert

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Pressing the Pears

8/15/2011

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Ripened Pears

My big box of pears were finally ripe this weekend, which meant it was time to start juicing. The pears had all turned from light green to a light yellow, and had gone from being hard as rocks to soft and melting. I can't tell you how delicious some of these pears are. They are very very juicy, with an almost grape-like or wine-like quality to the flavor. Its a real shame they're so small. Needless to say, I am now a huge fan of real pears, and will never look at those hard d'Anjou supermarket pears the same way again.

I set up the Squeezo, and with the help of the beautiful Dr. Wife and Boy #1, began pulverizing the pears. The soft pears were much easier to send through than the rock hard ones, and it didn't take long to make a grand mess. I was struck by how quickly the crushed fruit and juice oxidized and turned brown. We cranked and cranked, and once the plastic bin was almost full of pear pomace, I prepared to load it into the press.

Here's where I made a mistake. I didn't want to pay the $30 for the special cider press bags, so I just asked Dr. Wife to pick up some cheesecloth from the grocery store. First of all, the cheesecloth wasn't wide enough, so it didn't contain the pomace very well. Secondly, it wasn't nearly strong enough. With every couple turns of the press handle, a piece of the cheesecloth would rupture, splurting juice and crushed pear out on the deck. So after making an even larger mess, I just got a metal strainer from the kitchen, and used that to separate the juice from the pear pomace. Probably not the most efficient method, but it much cleaner.

After going through five to six gallons of pears I wound up with one gallon of brown, super-sweet pear juice. I poured the juice into a one-gallon glass apple-juice jug to begin making cider. Juicing pears is a lot of work, and unless the cider turns out to be truly remarkable I probably won't be doing this again. The pears themselves are delicious enough already.

Into Squeezo

Dr. Wife and Boy #1

Pulverized Pears

Pears in the Press

Drinking fresh pear juice.

Full gallon jug, to be turned into pear cider.

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Premature Pomegranate Pick

8/11/2011

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Pomegranate Taste Test

I was checking out my pomegranate trees earlier this week, and even though I know its early, some of the fruits looked so good I just had to try them. I picked one of the Garnet Sash, and one of the 'Unknown' pomegranates.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had ordered a Red Silk pomegranate online from Growquest, and even though they immediately charged my credit card, they never sent me my tree. I called and emailed and hounded them, and only after reporting them to American Express and the BBB did they ship me a very sad little pomegranate tree. It was bent in half and crammed into a box, with no label. Someone had written 'Grenada' in pencil on the inside of one of the cardboard flaps. So it could be a Red Silk, a Grenada, or something else. They taste good though.

I got the Garnet Sash from the Arbor Gate in Tomball. I wanted this variety because Urban Harvest describes the fruit as being "large, dark red fruit with deep-red, partially edible sweet-tart seeds." I have since learned from Pomegranate expert Lee Sharp that the variety marketed as Garnet Sash is really the variety Elf, which is described as having a "mottled greenish-yellow" rind. How's that for a bait and switch? The fruit gets badly sunburned, but the taste seems largely unaffected, and it is a very productive little tree.

I brought the fruit in, cut them in half. There was a little coloration inside the Unknown pomegranate but not much. The arils tasted very very tart, with just a little sweetness. Hopefully they'll get sweeter with a little more time on the tree. The Garnet sash had no color inside, but the arils tasted very very sweet, with hardly any tartness. I mixed the arils from the two fruits together, and popped a small handful into my mouth. The result was an almost perfect blend of flavor, tartness, and sweetness. Very refreshing in this scorching weather. I'll check the pomegranates again around the end of the month to see if there's any change in ripeness.

Unknown Pomegranate (Red Silk?)

Inside the Unknown Pomegranate

Garnet Sash Pomegranate

Inside the Garnet Sash

Down the hatch!

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Field Trip - Moody Gardens

8/8/2011

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Citrus Tree Outside the Blue Pyramid

This is going to be a very short post. It is very difficult to take pictures when you're carrying a very tired 2-year-old, so I'm sorry there aren't many photographs from my trip to Moody Gardens this weekend. However, I did see fruiting palm trees everywhere. I couldn't find any fallen fruit, and I was not about to climb any trees that tall. I don't know if they were date palms or not, but some of them were just loaded. There were also several citrus trees planted in the landscaping, and many unusual tropical trees and plants in the rainforest pyramid. I'll have to go back someday when the kids are older to fully appreciate their botanical collection.

Fruiting Palm Tree

Zulu Fig?

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Pawpaw Follow Up

8/4/2011

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Pawpaw Seedling

Way back in November I planted four pawpaw seedlings that Danny Gabb had been kind enough to share with me. They were already dormant, and they didn't look great, but I was excited to be planting something so unusual (at least for me). I planted them in a row in the front yard in an area where they would get dappled shade, and I could easily keep an eye on them. I watered them, fed them, babied them......and nothing happened.

Spring came, and while the rest of my trees burst into life, the pawpaws stayed dormant. They finally decided to come to life in mid to late April.
I was very exited that 1) they had survived the terrible freezes of February, and 2) they had survived being transplanted. Pawpaws are notoriously difficult to transplant, and as a pawpaw novice I was worried that I may have killed them. They all put on leaves and began to grow, and I continued to try to give them extra attention.

Then one died suddenly. Then another. By June I was down to two, and they weren't looking very good. The two remaining pawpaws stopped growing, and have never put on another leaf after their initial flush. Now in August, the leaves look sad and yellowing, and I have little hope that they will take off and really establish themselves.

When I planted these seedlings, I also planted several pawpaw seeds in a large pot. They germinated in April, and have been growing beautifully ever since. The plants I grew from the seeds are half as old and twice as big, with beautiful green leaves, and continuous growth. The success of the container-grown plants leads me to conclude that the problem has to be the soil. The soil in the front yard is a tough sandy-silty clay, which just doesn't drain that well.

This winter I plan to dig up the two survivors and put them in pots. I'll continue to try growing pawpaws in containers, but I obviously don't have the drainage and/or soil conditions they need to grow them in the ground successfully. I'm thinking of replacing them with another multiple-variety plum tree, and maybe another persimmon tree to add to the fall fruit harvest. If you've had success growing pawpaws, I'd love to hear about it.

Pawpaw Seedling

Pawpaw seeding right after planting in November 2010.

Pawpaw grown from seed in container.

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Asian Pears and Persimmons

8/1/2011

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House on the Corner

We've been walking the dog/kids by this house on the corner for several years now, and I had noted that there was a persimmon tree and an unidentified pear growing over the fence. However, this is the first year that I have seen the pear tree loaded with fruit. So this weekend I waited until the kids were down for their naps, and walked back over there to get a closer look.

After snooping around the fence for a few minutes, I rang the doorbell, and was greeted by two barking dogs and a UT college student visiting his parents for the weekend. He said his folks weren't home, but that he would be happy to show me the fruit trees. In addition to the persimmon and Asian pear visible from the street, his parents also grow several varieties of vegetables, citrus, and jujubes. I'm not a jujube expert, but their 15-ft tall trees looked like Lang to me.

The persimmon is a Fuyu or Fuyu-type non-astringent persimmon which produces bountifully every year. I've never tasted the fruit from this tree, but I'm hoping I will be allowed to collect a sample this fall. The birds go crazy over the fruit when they start to turn orange. I was very impressed with the quantity and the size of the fruit considering how dry this summer has been, although this may be due to supplemental irrigation.

The Asian pear tree was loaded to capacity. A few weeks ago one of the scaffold branches became so heavy with fruit that it actually broke. The fruit is small, approximately the size of a golf ball, yellow, and slightly russeted. I don't know if the fruit was so small because of the drought, or because they were not thinned out in the spring. The mocking birds were happily attacking the fruit, and there were so many pears I was told I could pick all the fruit I wanted. I picked a half-gallon and brought them home.

A test bite on the way home was disappointing. I had often read of Asian pears being described as being "mild flavored", but these were "no flavored". To me they tasted sweet and watery, but they had no acidity or flavor to balance the sweetness. I tried several more at various stages of ripeness, but the result was always the same. I posted a picture on the Texas Rare Fruit Growers forum, where it was possibly identified as being the variety 20th Century, which is consistent with other descriptions I have read of this cultivar. Too bad. I had planned on adding an Asian pear tree to the front yard this winter, but now I'm having second thoughts. Hopefully the varieties Hosui, Shinko, and Ya Li are better flavored, but I will definitely want to try them before I plant a tree.