Harvests, Melon Seeds, Batch 47 Finished Finally, Grapes - Tuesday

Thanks to the day off for the summer squash they have rebounded and gave me a solid 20 pounds.

The 25 pounds of Minnesota midget melons we put into the freeze dryer had a plethora of seeds. After drying them on the cookie sheet for a while I was able to bag and weigh them. I got 225 grams of seeds with 50 seeds weighing 1.14 grams means I have about 9868 seeds. That is just from the first batch of melons. We have 39 pounds more in the cooler that need to be processed so I could end up with 30,000 seeds.

I grabbed R and we went up to the upper garden again to check on things. There were more melons ready and I got 19 pounds picked with a couple really nice sized ones. One is the size of a store bought cantaloupe.

I ended up picking 16 pounds of acorn which leaves only a few in the garden, and 55 pounds of butternut squash. The garden has a load of really nice large and heavy butternut that I will be picking over the next couple of weeks.

The sunflowers have gotten so big that some of them blew over in the most recent winds. 15 feet tall and the highest I can get a support wire is 6 ft. A bunch of them are filling out nicely but the heads are getting so heavy they are bending the stalks.

The melons finally finished in the freeze dryer. 67 hours 49 minutes to get the 23.5 pounds of water removed to leave us with 1.5 pounds of dried Minnesota Midget melon pieces. OMG are they delicious!!!! The melt in your mouth and explode with flavor kind of delicious.

This tray had little issue that looked a bit like scorching. There was a bit of darker browned pieces but they did not taste to off. The boys devoured them so all is good.

An experiment. We put some of the seeds from the melons in the freeze dryer and I am going to do a test to see id they are still viable and will sprout. If they are still viable then this may be a good way to preserve seeds for a longer time.

I got the text from Carl at the co-op about availability but had not checked the cooler for weights. I spent a good hour digging through all the squash and pulling the 16 pounds that were no good and getting counts. 320 lbs of squash is in the cooler and hopefully will be going this Friday. I had to go pick up J from school then managed to get the last counting done just in time for us to leave for the boy's dentist appointments.

My grapes have been ripening nicely and the Vanessa were ready to pick. These are my eating grapes that get larger and look nicer.

This is one of the larger and nicer looking bunches I picked. I got 12 lbs from the Vanessa and am going to use them for eating and for some juice for jam.

My other grapes are Somerset grapes which are a much smaller grape and are more suited to juicing. They are ripening a bit slower than the Vanessa but I still got 5 lbs picked. The deer had stolen some on their incursions but I still have a good amount left.

You can see the difference in size between the Vanessa on top and the Somerset below.

Once @stryeyz and the boys got home it was tub time again to soak away the day's work.

Today I've soaked, taken J to school, then later I get my order of seed bags so I can bag up the melon seeds for sale. I've got to build a label for them for a few weights like 1, 5, and 10 grams. The regular picking will ensue and then this evening is Cub Scouts meeting. I'd like to start cutting up the melons in the afternoon when it is warmer for another batch in the freeze dryer.

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