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Archive for the ‘fruits’ Category

A little off the sides and top

Posted in farm, fruits, photo, tagged , , on October 3, 2011| 1 Comment »

Avocado grove getting trimmed.

The avocado season is over at Bee Heaven Farm. The last of the big, plump Donnie avocados got picked weeks ago. The lull between picking fruit and and blooming season (usually around January) brings off-season maintenance. Almost every year the tree trimmer comes to cut back all the avocado trees. Call it their summertime haircut, with a little off the sides and top.

Trimming happens for practical reasons. Farmer Margie Pikarsky explained, “You don’t need a tall tree to produce fruit, and you don’t get a proportionally greater harvest just because it’s tall. Harvesting a tall tree is way more labor-intensive and requires special equipment — at minimum a tall ladder, at best a cherry picker.” Avocados are picked by hand, and Margie’s pickers either climb the tree or go up an orchard ladder, which has a tripod-like leg to keep it standing up by itself. Margie added that “a shorter tree (about 15 feet) is MUCH more hurricane resistant.”

A little off the sides.

When you have a grove of 90-some trees, you need to bring in some serious cutting power. The man who trims trees showed up early one morning with a very impressive machine. Imagine a bobcat whose operator not only drives the machine but also controls an articulated arm mounted at the top. This arm can reach up or down, swing around from side to side, or turn from horizontal to vertical. At the business end of this arm is a revolving metal piece, and three spinning circular saw blades are attached to it. Those revolving blades cut through branches smoothly and easily. The whole rig looks like something Freddy Scissorhands dreamed up.

And a little off the top.

The tree trimmer drove his cutting machine up and down the shaggy rows of the avocado grove. He maneuvered the arm to first trim the sides of the rows, and then made a final pass to level the tops. Branches fell onto the safety cage of the bobcat and onto the ground. Scraggly trees transformed into huge boxy hedges, like something you might find in a giant’s formal garden.

Sadie (under tree) and Pedro (with pitchfork) gather cut branches.

Once the tree trimmer was done, there was a mess to clean up. Pedro used a pitchfork to grab and pull out cut branches that had snagged in trees. Sadie went after branches lying underneath. They were tossed on the grass in between the rows. Then Margie came with the bush hog to chew up fallen branches and turn them into coarse mulch. (A bush hog is a tractor attachment that looks and works like a large, heavy duty mower.) Margie made a few passes up and down each row, and gestured for me to step aside, but I stood my ground, taking pictures. I quickly realized that it wasn’t a good idea for me to stand off to the side as the bush hog went by. Twice I got hit by bits of flying branches, once on the foot and once on the arm. No blood lost, just a moment of surprise. (I think Margie was trying to warn me not to lose a camera — or an eye.) Lesson learned: don’t stand too close to a working brush hog!

Margie mulches branches with the brush hog.

What looks like a severe trimming is not bad for the tree. In fact, trimming keeps trees healthy and vigorous. They will grow new branches and look less and less boxy as the months go by. “Avocados flower and fruit on new growth, so trimming after harvest is finished gives them time for a couple of new growth flushes before blooming begins, thus increasing chances of a good yield next season,” Margie explained. More new growth means more fruit and more deliciousness in summer!

After the trim.

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Mystery pears

Posted in fruits, market, photo, tagged , , on September 14, 2011|

Pineapple pear

Nothing says autumn like a fresh, crisp, juicy pear — from Florida. Yes, pears grow in the northern part of our state! Farmer Ara Morenberg recently delivered five bushels of two different varieties of heritage pears from 3 Rivers Farm. Her fruit is available at several local farmers markets this week, and online from Bee Heaven Farm.

These Florida pears don’t look like your typical grocery store pear. They are shaped much like an apple, and their skin is spotted similar to an Asian pear. They stay hard when ripe, with only the slightest give. Their flesh is crisp and juicy and only slightly sweet, not meltingly soft and sugary like a Bartlett pear. In fact, these old Florida varieties are a hybrid of Asian and European pears, bred for disease resistance.

Ara recently purchased a five-acre property in Lake City, which came with an abandoned grove of heritage pear trees which hadn’t been sprayed or cared for in years. The parcel was originally part of a 100-acre orchard, and she thinks there are several varieties of pears growing on it. “I am guessing that we have Flordahome, Hood and Pineapple right now. The previous property owner said we had five to six varieties but did not know the names,” Ara wrote in an email. “The extension agent said that they could be even older than the above named varieties, and that we may never know the specific varieties other than calling them Florida pears, because the property has had pears on it for a minimum of 50 years.”

Ara (right) explains the differences between two kinds of pears to Margie (left).

Of the two varieties that came this week from Ara’s farm, Hood might not be one of them. A quick internet search revealed that Hoods are light green, do have the typical long neck, but don’t have reddish-brown spots. However they could very likely be Pineapple pears, which match having a short-necked shape and spotted color, and have a bit of tartness to their flavor. They are huge for pears, about the size of a softball.

And… they could be sand pears, or at least that’s what Farmer Margie Pikarsky was told when she was selling them at the Pies & Thighs pie contest on Saturday. She told me that “a couple of people, upon seeing them, immediately exclaimed ‘Sand pears! I grew up with these!’ ” They are called that for their gritty, hard texture. Sand pears (pyrus pyrifolia) could be any of several varieties commonly grown over 100 years ago in the old South.

Sand pear

Whatever the names and cultivars, Lake City folk call them canning pears. “What they mean by that is that they can be cooked with,” Ara explained, “and they don’t eat them fresh, but instead baked, relishes, chutneys, canned, etc.” I found an easy recipe for apple tart that could be used with sand pears instead. Or you can skip the formalities and eat them raw, and enjoy their mildly sweet flavor as is. I cut up a sand pear and put it in chicken salad, instead of using apple or celery, and it added crunch without any obvious, strong flavor.

Delicious, nameless, ancient pears of mystery and delight! You can order online no later than 3 pm on Thursday Sept 15 from Bee Heaven Farm’s Summer Store. (Pickup in person at the farm or another location.) Or, look for them at the FIU, Verde Gardens and Upper Eastside farmers markets this week and taste a bit of old Florida history for yourself.

FIU Farmers Market, Maidique Campus, 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami. Wednesdays, noon to 3pm.

Homestead Harvest Market at Verde Gardens, 28000 SW 127th Ave., Homestead. Fridays 4 – 8 pm.

Upper Eastside Market, NE 79th St. and Biscayne Blvd., Miami. Saturdays 9-2 pm.

North Florida pears at Upper Eastside Farmers Market last Saturday.

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Chewy dried bananas

Posted in fruits, photo, tagged , on August 9, 2011|

Bunches of blotchy and bruised bananas.

Sadie was working in the barn the last Saturday when I came to pick up my summer fruit order. She was sitting at a table with several bunches of blotchy bananas. They didn’t look very good, but when Sadie peeled one, the flesh was perfectly ripe and ready to eat. Because the skins weren’t pretty enough, the bananas would be used in another way.

The drying rack filled up with sliced bananas as Sadie cuts up more.

Sadie trimmed bruised spots, and cut thick slices, almost a half inch thick. Those were laid on a dehydrator drying rack spaced about an inch apart. When the rack was full, it went inside the large dehydrator humming in a corner. It already held several racks of bananas and star fruit in various stages of dryness. The fruit will take several hours to dry. Then it will be put in the Fruits of Summer dried fruit mix that Bee Heaven Farm sells at farmers markets in the winter.

Sadie showed me a plastic bag full of dried banana slices and offered me some. “I think it tastes like banana bread,” she said. The thick slice was chewy and sweet and had an intense flavor. “I like thick ones. Thin slices dry up too crispy,” she continued. I reached for another slice and chewed slowly. Yeah, it tasted something like banana bread, only better — there weren’t all the other ingredients to dilute the flavor.

If you have a dehydrator, making dried fruit is easy to do. All it takes are a few hours or overnight. Dried bananas and other dried items keep well sealed in a plastic bag and refrigerated.

Halfway dried banana slice hot out of the dehydrator.

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Mmmmm mouthwatering mango jam

Posted in food, fruits, photo, recipe, tagged , , on July 31, 2011| 1 Comment »

Kattia documents the arrival of Redland mangoes.

A person can move away from Miami but their craving for flavors of the place will stay for a long time. Case in point, friends Kattia and Chris moved away about 10 years ago, and live in tropical fruit exile all the way up in Sanford. If they want a fresh mango, they have to go to the store and settle for fruit imported from Mexico. They complained those out-of-season offshore mangoes just don’t have the flavor, juiciness and aroma of a home grown mango from Miami. And why should they? Imported fruit is picked half-ripe, then dunked in hot water to kill pathogens, which also kills taste.

I told my friends about the bumper crop we had this summer, and they asked when I was coming up. Right away, I replied, and loaded up my car with sacks of plump red and golden Kent mangoes from Paradise Farm, and headed north on I-95. About four hours later, I pulled into their driveway, and Kattia and I lugged eight pounds of mangoes and a box full of empty canning jars to her kitchen. 

“When life hands you mangos, make jam!” said Kattia with delight. (If this sounds like a familiar adventure, she and I made lychee freezer jam two summers ago.) The canning process she followed wasn’t all that difficult, even for a novice like me. “The trick to making cooked jam is to have everything ready and waiting to go,” she said. 

First, we made sure that everything we needed to use was clean and ready. Jars, rings and other utensils were run through the dishwasher beforehand. (If you don’t have a dishwasher, sterilize everything in a big pot of boiling water to kill any dangerous bacteria that can spoil food and make you sick.) 

As the dishwasher hummed, we peeled, seeded and chopped mangoes. Six cups of fruit were destined for jam, and went into a big pot to cook. (The rest of the fruit was stuffed into the freezer.) Lemon juice was added “to wake up the taste of mangoes,” and pectin was stirred in. “Pectin is what makes the jam set,” Kattia explained. “Pectin and lemon help mangoes give off juice.” She also added a bit of butter to reduce foaming as the mixture cooked.

Mashing chopped mango as it cooks. Note 5 and a half cups of sugar, and rings in the background, ready to go.

Out came the potato masher, and the fruit was smashed into smaller pieces, to the texture of rough applesauce. Heat was raised to a rolling boil — when you stir, bubbles keep forming — and the fruit mixture was stirred constantly. Sugar was quickly added, and stirred until everything came back to a rolling boil for one more minute. (If you think five and a half cups is a horrifying amount of sugar, keep in mind that this is called a low-sugar recipe. A regular amount would be 10 cups.)

When the mango mixture got soupy and looked translucent, it was time to fill up jars. “It helps to lay out everything you need because assembly goes quickly,” Kattia said. She set a wide mouth funnel into a jar, and ladled mango mixture up to the very neck. Next, using a magnetic grabber, she fished a lid out from a small pot of simmering water, centered it on top of the jar, and screwed on a ring. The filled, sealed jar was then turned upside down on a towel on the counter.

“With the inversion method of canning, the fruit goes to the top of the jar, and the air goes to the bottom of the jar,” Kattia explained. “When you flip it over, the air goes to the top, and creates a vacuum, and it seals the jar.”

Jam cooling upside down. When a jar is flipped over, the air inside will rise to the top and create a vacuum.

The jars stayed upside down until they were cool to the touch. This took about an hour or so. Then we turned them right side up and tested the seal. A properly sealed jar lid was hard, without any give. Two jars had lids that popped or flexed a little, and they went back upside down for about 15 minutes longer. (If that still didn’t do the trick, the jam would have to be eaten right away — what a tragedy! — or processed in a pot of boiling water for long term keeping.) The whole process took about two hours, including prep and filling jars.

Voila! We had jam! It wasn’t that difficult to make. The hardest part, and it’s not really that hard, is to track down canning supplies. Kattia bought jars, lids and canning paraphernalia at a nearby Super Wal-Mart. If your local store doesn’t carry what you need, you can find canning kits and jars online. Labels would be helpful if you’re making a batch to give away. 

When we were done, pretty golden jars of mango jam were lined up on Kattia’s counter. The sweet tropical taste of Miami’s summer had been captured to savor for later. (It’s not the same as having fresh mangoes, but the stash in the freezer comes close.) I drove back home with several jars, some to keep and some to share. My jar is meant for for medicinal purposes, as it were, for later in the year. A bit of sunshiney mango jam spread on buttered toast will chase away any gray winter blahs!

Kattia’s Mango Jam

6 cups mangoes, peeled, seeded, chopped
juice of 1 lemon
3 Tbps. low or no-sugar pectin
5 1/2 cups sugar
1 pat of butter

Peel, seed and chop mangoes. Put them into a large pot with lemon juice and mash with a potato masher. Stir in butter and pectin and keep stirring. Raise heat to a boil. Skim off any foam. Then quickly stir in the sugar a bit at a time until it dissolves. Keep stirring at a rolling boil for 1 minute longer. When the mixture looks transparent, it is ready to put into jars.

Ladle mango mixture into a jar up to its neck. Do not overfill, as you need an air space. Wipe off any spills and put on the lid and ring. Place jar upside down on towel to cool. Repeat with other jars until all your mixture is used up. Let jars cool to touch, then turn over and test seal. If the lid pops, flip it over to sit for a few more minutes, or refrigerate.

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Redland fruit arrives in Central Florida

Posted in fruits, location, market, photo, tagged , , , , on July 18, 2011| 2 Comments »

In front of the store in Winter Park.

Last week I was up in Sanford visiting with friends Kattia, Chris and Holden. Kattia knows I’m a big fan of Whole Foods, and took me to visit the store at Winter Park.

Hardees in front and Donnies on the left.

The first thing I saw when I walked in through the front door was a heap of Florida avocados. They looked suspiciously familiar. I peered closer and saw the sign: Bee Heaven Farm, Homestead FL. “Kattia, look! Margie’s avocados!” I shouted, astonished by the presence of Redland raised Hardee and Donnie avocados. (One Hardee was starting to ripen and showed dark red streaks. It will turn burgundy red when it is completely ripe.)

Hardee avocados from Bee Heaven Farm.

The fruits were right under a spotlight and their green skins glowed in the light. They made the California Haas avocados stacked behind them look dark, drab and unremarkable by comparison. I pulled out my camera to take a picture. Kattia and her son Holden made theselves scarce over by the bulk bins, and the employee stacking produce looked at me with curiosity.

Massive mamey from Health and Happiness Farm.

I then noticed mamey stacked nearby, and looked more closely. The sign said Health and Happiness Farm, Homestead FL. “Kattia, look! Sal’s mamey is here too!” Next to the mamey were sapodillas from Kopali Organics, also from Homestead. I looked around and didn’t see my friends. Gee, you just can’t take me anywhere… But Redland fruit travels everywhere!

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