Storing Apples

Tips for Growing Honeycrisp Apples Malus domestica ‘Honeycrisp’

How to Grow and Care for Braeburn Apple Trees Malus x domestica ‘Braeburn’

Fruit pruning isn’t the easiest thing to explain to anyone, chiefly because no two trees or bushes are ever the same. The line drawings in reference books are helpful, but when you look at your tree or bush, it rarely looks the same as the diagram. Hopefully these simple guidelines will help you make sense of the twigs and branches in front of you. Just take deep breaths and remember the old maxim: Think twice, cut once!

Crab apples can be used as food, for ornamental effect, to help pollination, or for the wood. The wild crab apple found individually in woods has green fruit turning golden in Autumn. Cultivated crab apples vary in habit and grow upto 10 feet. Fruiting this year looks like a bumper harvest after the wet weather earlier in the year.

Feeling grouchy and ill-tempered then perhaps you should plant a crab apple and that way you won’t feel crabby much longer.

We aren’t all blessed with acres and acres of land. Most of us have to make do with a smal

When most of us have a hankering for nuts, we tend to look no further than the pantry. It’s totally normal for nuts to be stored in the dark corners of our cupboards, with many taking residence there for what can turn into many months (especially if you shop in bulk). But did you know the pantry is actually not the best place to house nuts and seeds?

The Upstate is one of the few places in South Carolina with the right climate and soil conditions to grow productive apples trees. While the actual trees can be grown in most any part of the state, higher temperatures and humidity in the midlands and coastal plains make disease pressure hard to manage.

Up here in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires area, where the apples come in fast in fall, I make applesauce as fast as I can to freeze. A batch of mincemeat sounds about right, too, especially from a recipe minus the traditional beef suet. This one’s vegetarian.The recipe is from “Stocking Up II,” a Rodale cookbook of 1980s vintage that has since been reissued in athird version. The most-disfigured spread in my copy: the one with ‘Currant and Green Tomato Chutney,’ which uses loads of apples as well. If a waste-not, want-not mood seizes you in the not-too-distant future, here’s the recipe. (I fig

Curly-leaf parsley is great for edging borders, and for planting as a “ruff” around the feet of bigger plants in pots, where it will be beautiful all season, even after substantial frost. But if you want to cook, go ‘Gigante,’ or ‘Giant of Italy.’ Flat-leaf parsley has more parsley flavor, to my taste.All parsley is extremely high in nutrients, particularly Vitamin C, folates and Potassium, as well as beta carotene. In fact, a quarter-cup of raw chopped parsley has about as much C as a quarter-cup of orange juice and double the folates (more that one and a half times those, even, of raw spinach). I include raw leaflets in salads, greatly boosting the nutritional value of

I make about eight batches of red sauce late summer until frost, stashing it in the freezer for a year of enjoyment.  It isn’t much prep work, at least not the way I cook. Each “batch” constitutes a spaghetti potful of fresh, raw ingredients before it cooks down to less than half that, enough for 5 or 6 freezer containers of 12-16 ounces each. If you’ve got that last glut of tomatoes in need of processing, or see a bargain bushel of seconds at the farmstand, this lazy-person’s recipe for red sauce might be just the thing.Again, I don’t take the time to peel or seed the tomatoes (to you purists, mea culpa; I’m a whole-food type…and also a bit manic when I cook). The sauce is the tiniest bit more bitter, perhaps, but think of all that fiber (and time saved).Lazy Woman’s Tomato SauceIngredients Enough paste-type or other tomatoes to fill a spaghetti pot 1 head garlic Extra virgin olive oil Fresh basil Fresh parsley, preferably Italian flat-leaf Salt and pepper to taste; small amount of sugar optionalWash tomatoes and cut off stem ends and any blemishes

Yes, the potato has gone truly global; the intricate story of its journey through the centuries is probably best told by the International Potato Center.China, and now India, are the biggest producers of potatoes today–once the claim of Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union–though I am hard-pressed to think of a Chinese dish featuring them.storing potatoesI COULDN’T SAY IT BETTER THAN the Farm Security Administration did to farmers and would-be farmers in the 1942 slides I b