Fuyu

Right now the orchard is full of trees with fuyu persimmons turning from light to darker orange.  Fuyu persimmons are a type of persimmon that can be eaten when they're firm.  You don't have to wait for them to get soft to eat them (like the Hachiya variety), they're sweet and non-astringent when they're hard.

At the orchard we have a four different varieties of fuyu persimmons.  We have  Jiro, Izu, Giant fuyu, and an older original round fuyu.  In general, the fuyu varieties taste similar but have slightly different shapes and sizes.  Jiro, Izu and Giant Fuyu are squarish with four separate sections.  The older original round fuyu is rounded with a sharp tip at the end.   In the photo above you can see the round type of fuyu at the very left, next to one of the square types.  At the right is a Hachiya persimmon.


Here's what's at the Fruit Stand now: 

• Persimmons--Lots of Fuyu and Maru and limited quantities of Hachiya and vodka-treated Hyakume
• Apples--Golden Delicious, Fuji, Mutsu, Granny Smith, Pippen
• Asian Pear--Olympic and Okusankichi
• Pomegranate--white variety
• Quince
• Jujube
• Vegetables--tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, zucchini,  tomatillos
• Winter Squash--Red Kuri, Butternut, Delicata, Acorn, Kabocha, Spaghetti
• Pumpkins and Gourds--at the fruit stand or pick your own in the pumpkin patch
• Eggs--from chickens at our orchard
• Honey--from bees at our orchard

Jujube, Gourds & the Fruit Stand

This year seemed to be a good year for Jujube.  Although we have only a few jujube trees, each has a big crop of fruit, so we have lots of jujube at the fruit stand.  The photo at the left shows ripe jujube.  You can eat jujube when they're light brown and crunchy, or when they get darker reddish brown and drier and their flavor is more concentrated.  We've also been picking olives over the past few weeks and have most of them curing now. We now have Quince and white pomegranate at the fruit stand, too.

Last week the first Sierra Foothills Meat Buyers club delivery happened at the orchard.  Through the Sierra Foothills Meat Buyers Club you can order local meat, poultry and eggs online, then pick up your order at our orchard or at one of the other locations in Placer County.  The new order form for October is now online.  The delivery date for the orchard is Friday, Oct. 22nd.  Orders need to be received by the Sierra Foothills Meat Buyers Club by Monday, Oct. 18th at 5:00 PM.

This coming Sunday, Oct. 10th is Placer Farm and Barn Tour.  Placer Farm and Barn tour is a tour of nine working family farms and vineyards in placer county with demonstrations, art, music and activities at the various sites.  Otow Orchard isn't a featured site this year, but a few of us are going to help at Pine Valley Ranch in Auburn.   To buy tickets for the Placer Farm and Barn Tour, click here.  We'll have the fruit stand at the orchard open from 10-5 as usual that day.   


At the left is a photo of a volunteer gourd plant that grew up the side of the tomato cages in my garden.  This one plant produced over 30 gourds, (more than any plant that I actually planted by seed myself).  We have gourds and pumpkins for sale at the fruit stand now.  We have a pumpkin patch to pick your own pumpkins in again this year, too. 

Here's what's at the Fruit Stand now:

• Apples--Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Mutsu
• Asian Pear--Shinseiki, New Century  (yellow varieties) and Shinko, Yoi, Olympic (brown varieties),
• European Pear--D'Anjou
• Plums--Casselman
• Figs--Black Mission, brown variety
• Pomegranate--white variety
• Quince
• Jujube
• Grapes--Thompson seedless, Kyoho
• Vegetables--tomatoes, eggplant, sweet peppers, hot peppers, zucchini, summer squash, tomatillos, red torpedo onions, herbs
• Winter Squash--Red Kuri, Butternut, Delicata, Acorn, Kabocha, Spaghetti
• Pumpkins and Gourds--at the fruit stand or pick your own in the pumpkin patch
• Eggs--from chickens at our orchard
• Honey--from bees at our orchard

2010 Hoshigaki Orders

We have the new 2010 order form for hoshigaki (dried persimmons) up on this web site now.  If you'd like to order hoshigaki to be sent to you by mail, please order as soon as you can, because we fill your order according to when it was placed.  You can find the order form under the "Hoshigaki/Persimmons" tab at the top of the page. To make an order by mail, print out the order form and mail it to us with a check.  Sorry, we don't take credit cards. 

If you'd like to pick up an order of hoshigaki at the fruit stand, you don't have to fill out the online order form.  To arrange to pick up an order at the fruit stand, please email us and tell us what amount you'd like.  We'll either write to you or call you back and tell you when we expect it would be ready.  If you're able to come out to the orchard yourself to pick up an order, you don't have to pay for shipping, and you can also buy smaller amounts than a pound. 

It's important to keep in mind that the process of making hoshigaki is weather dependant.  Since we don't know how much sun and heat we get, we don't know ahead of time how much hoshigaki  we'll be able to produce.  The fruit may ripen more or less quickly and we never know when it will get too soft to peel.  In the past few years we've had to stop taking new orders sometime in December.  We'll post here on the web site when we can no longer take orders this year.

In the orchard, the persimmons on the trees are starting to have blushes of orange.   When they have color, but are still hard, we can start peeling them for making hoshigaki (dried persimmons).  It seems like it will be a few more weeks before we will be ready to start peeling the first persimmons, but we'll have to wait and see what the weather brings.  After we begin,  it will take around 6 weeks for the peeled persimmons to dry and become hoshigaki. 

In the photo above you can see fresh, unpeeled hachiya persimmons next to hoshigaki in its finished state.  The skin has been peeled, but nothing has been added.  The white powder on the outside is natural sugar from inside the fruit that forms on the surface towards the end of the drying process.   

Between Peaches and Persimmons

Right now we are between peach and persimmon seasons, which are the two busiest times of the year.  There have been a few weeks of relative quietness at the orchard, giving us time to catch up on some projects.  Tosh has spent time lately re-modeling a part of the fruit stand building to make more more room for drying persimmons inside and to have an improved public restroom.   He also dug out a spot at the edge of my garden with the back hoe for a new garlic bed.

To make a new garlic bed, I had to make a liner with aviary wire, then fill it back in with layers of compost and soil.  We plant the garlic only in the beds lined with wire this way, because otherwise gophers get in and eat most of the garlic.  Ideally, garlic shouldn't be planted in the same place for three years, so each year we should be making wire-lined beds for it to be rotated into until we have enough space.  We hadn't had time to make new beds for the garlic to be rotated into for a few years though, and it seemed like this year's garlic didn't grow as well.  Hopefully this year will be better.

In the photo below you can see the wire liner in the ground, just as it was beginning to be filled in.  If you look closely, at the edge of the bed you can see a big difference between the dusty decomposed granite soil that was dug out and the dark fluffy compost.  The soil and compost is all filled in now, so this coming weekend we can plant the garlic.

At the Fruit Stand

At the left you can see a wheelbarrow full of winter squash at the edge of one of the gardens at the orchard.   Most of the winter squash has been harvested, so we now have some for sale at the fruit stand.  Also new at the fruit stand are Comice pears, Red Torpedo onions, and large brown Olympic Asian pears.

Here's what we have at the Fruit Stand now:

• Apples--Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy
• Asian Pear--Shinseiki, New Century, Yali (yellow varieties) and Shinko,  Yoi, Olympic (brown varieties),
• European Pear--Comice
• Plums--Casselman, Kelsey, Friar
• Melons--Ambrosia, Hannah
  
• Figs--Black Mission, brown variety
• Grapes--Thompson seedless, Kyoho
  
• Vegetables--tomatoes, eggplant, bitter melon, sweet peppers, hot peppers, zucchini, summer squash,  tomatillos, red torpedo onions, herbs
• Winter Squash--Red Kuri, Butternut, Delicata
• Eggs--from chickens at our orchard
• Honey--from bees at our orchard
• Organic winter vegetable seedlings--from Peas and Harmony

Pick up Local Meat and Eggs at the Orchard

Otow Orchard is a new delivery site for the Sierra Foothills Meat Buyers club.  You can order locally grown and produced meat, poultry and eggs through the club online, then pick up your order at the orchard.  The producers are local, family-owned operations.  Livestock are raised on Sierra Foothills range and pasture and produced with no hormones or antibiotics.  The pasture-raised eggs are certified organic.  If the orchard isn't convenient, there are also pick up sites in Auburn, Penryn, Truckee and Lincoln.   

The first delivery time at the orchard will be Friday, October 1st, from 3:30 to 5:00 PM.  There's no membership fee, but a $4.00 delivery charge is added to your order. 

The Sierra Foothills Meat Buyers club is organized by the Placer-Nevada County Extension service.  Currently they are selling meat and eggs from Flying Mule Farm, Coffee Pot Ranch, High Sierra Beef and Sinclair Family Farm.

Plant Sale Extended for Sept. 11 & 12

The remainder of the organic winter vegetable seedlings from last weekend's sale will be at the orchard plant stand this Saturday and Sunday.  Peas and Harmony will have winter vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, onions, pak choy, lettuce and Asian greens.  

We have lots of nice apples at the fruit stand now.  From our orchard we have crunchy Red Delicious apples, and from the neighbouring Koyama farm we have Northern Spy and Golden Delicious apples.  We also have lots of ripe brown and Black Mission figs.  The peaches we have left are the last of the season firm and sweet cling peaches.

Organic Plant Sale this Coming Weekend

This Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 4th and 5th), Peas and Harmony will have an organic vegetable and herb plant sale at our orchard.  

They'll have Fall and Winter garden plants such as onions, broccoli, cauliflower, mustards, cabbages, lettuce mixes, arugula and Asian greens.  For more info about the sale, see peasandharmony.com .

This Fall, we won't have organic plants for sale from Peas and Harmony over an extended period of time.  The sale will be just for this weekend.  If you need to make arrangements to pick up plants at other times though, you can contact Julie or Alison through the website.

End of Summer, Start of Fall

We've had amazingly fluctuating weather this past week.  On Wednesday it was 108 degrees, then on Saturday the high was 76 degrees with a few sprinklings of rain.  It was like July and October in the space of a few days.  Towards the end of this week the temperatures are supposed to reach above 100 again. 

Because of cool and fluctuating weather during the spring and summer, tomato harvest started very late this year, and seems to be at its peak right now in my garden.  Over the weekend I picked lots of boxes of tomatoes, along with the first winter squash.  The squash is a bit early, and the tomato peak is about a month late.

In the orchard, Faye Alberta peaches are all picked and we moved on to Rio Oso Gem and O'Henry's.  Now we have just a few more trees of late variety peaches left to pick for the fruit stand.  We harvested a lot of ripe figs from the fig trees and we have sweet grapes from the Koyama farm next door.   

Here's what's at the fruitstand now:

• Figs--Black Mission, brown variety
• Grapes--Ribier (seedless, purple, limited quantity)
  
• Peaches--Faye Elberta, Rio Oso Gem, O'Henry (all yellow freestone varieties); and Philip (yellow cling)
• Plums--Casselman, Kelsey, Friar, Elephant Heart, Duarte
  
• Asian Pear--Hosui and Shinseiki (yellow varieties) and Shinko and Yoi (brown varieties)
• European Pear--Bartlett
• Vegetables--tomatoes, eggplant (Ichiban and Listada de Gandia), green beans (Kentucky Wonder),  bitter melon, sweet peppers, hot peppers, zucchini, summer squash,  tomatillos, Swiss chard, oregano, mint
• Eggs--from chickens at our orchard
• Honey--from bees at our orchard

Bitter Melon

Bitter Melon is in season now.  We grow two types of bitter melon, a spikey, more pointed type and a smoother, more oblong variety.  We try to pick them green, but a few have ripened to yellow and peeled open like a flower to reveal sticky and sweet bright red seeds inside. The photos at the left and below show a bitter melon that's just starting to open. 

Bitter melon is in the squash family and is mostly used like a summer squash.  The texture is like chayote or cucumber.   Bitter melon is supposed to be medicinal and good for digestion.  Salting and rinsing it takes away some of the bitterness, but some of it always remains.

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Faye Elberta Peach Time

Faye Elberta peaches are now ripe at the orchard.  We still have 49'er, Rio Oso Gem, Suncrest, and Gene Elberta peaches, too.  If you'd like flats of Peach seconds for canning or freezing, let us know ahead of time and we'll reserve some for you to pick up at the fruit stand.  You can either call or stop by and ask.

Faye Elberta peaches are part of Slow Food's Ark of taste, along with quite a few other varieties of peaches and plums that we have available right now.  Rio Oso Gem, Suncrest and Silver Logan  are all peach varieties included in the Ark of Taste.  Elephant Heart, Mariposa and Laroda are all varieties of plums that we have in the fruit stand now that are also included in Slow Food's Ark of Taste. 

Kelsey Plums

Kelsey plums are very large green heart-shaped plums that are yellow inside when they're first picked.  Although Kelsey plums are sweet and ready to eat even when firm and green on the outside,  as they get softer the skin and inside becomes yellow to pink.  You can eat them in all their different stages of color and texture.  Kelsey is an old  variety of Japanese plum similar to European Green Gage plums.

 In the photo above you can see a box of just-picked Kelseys with a natural wax bloom that makes them look blueish.  In the photo below, a Kelsey is cut open so you can see the inside.  We now have Kelseys for sale in the fruit stand in various stages, from green to yellow-red.