harvesting time for apples and potatoes

[WestTN_reb]

Re: harvesting time for apples and potatoes

All the advice I can give on this subject is that the little green crabapple tree in the front yard should be starting to ripen right about now.

[J.H.Berger]

Re: harvesting time for apples and potatoes

Thank you all, especially you Charles! Apples all year must definitely be the stored apples as well. The old sorts of apples you siometimes still find were meant to bring fruits that could be stored for many months.

[Becky Morgan]

Re: harvesting time for apples and potatoes

Our Molly Delicious is a modern variety, and it's just starting to ripen (close to 40 north in Ohio.)
Crabapples are indeed getting ripe. I've already made three batches of jelly from the windfalls and expect a fourth and fifth if nothing bad happens.
Our wild prune plums ripened in early July, which seems a tad early.
Our neighbor has just dug his first batch of red potatoes. The Irish white potatoes are likely to come in during the last half of this month or early September. Great-grandpa (b. 1864) recalled his family making sure to plant their potatoes on St. Patrick's Day for late August-early September digging. If I planted that early, odds are we';d have a killing frost, so either they protected the young vines or the climate has shifted. In defense of the latter idea, I have seen several period accounts of cold Halloweens and snowy Thanksgivings here, which is not at all the modern pattern.
Pumpkins around here are full-sized, and the vines dying naturally, about October 1. The Barnesville pumpkin festival is a week or so too early for the biggest ones to have gained their full weight. I'm reasonably sure that period varieties ripened about the same time, because the "pumpkin floods" in 1816 and several subsequent years were in mid-October and were called that because they washed numerous ripe pumpkins into the river.

[Charles Heath]

Re: harvesting time for apples and potatoes

Apples all year must definitely be the stored apples as well. The old sorts of apples you sometimes still find were meant to bring fruits that could be stored for many months.

Jan,

Part of the problem with the blanket plant when/harvest when questions is the breadth of the answers. Narrowing the time and geography down to a specific time and location really helps, and, even then, a little change in elevation, seasonal temperature and rainfall variations, can be an issue. Usually these questions are associated with an event scenario where foraging is anticipated, such as "what the heck is growing and reaching harvest stage in Culpeper Co. and Orange Co. in early August 1862?" The answer goes into live play in a few weeks, and, as will all events, giving the participants an opportunity to develop a set of 19th century tastebuds, if only for the weekend, can be amusing.

Nick Medwid, 23rd Virginia, asked a similar question about mid-19th century Richmond area apple varieties during a prep day for Glendale-Malvern Hill, and, although the specific orchard info has been posted here several times (the forum crashes ate it), I need to dig it out and send it to him. I'll repost it here again, and probably link it to the apple variety information Virginia Mescher posted in the "Great Big Food Thread," which is a handy read. Some of the Winesap apples (old cultivar) in my own micro-orchard are ripening, and the crab apples have been ripe for a while. Many of the older varieties are not worth planting anymore, due to their susceptibility to the sames diseases and other problems that made them fall out of the marketplace a century or more ago. Others were raised for specific purposes, and knowing the latter is the key. The late Paul Smith of Hanover Co. (VA) was one of the most knowledgeable pomological hobbyists I ever met in terms of regional apple varieties and their uses, and few could hold a candle to the Burford Brothers of Amherst, VA, when it came to collecting, propagating, and selling old varieties of apples. The Gloucester White was one they searched the world over, and finally found in New Zealand thanks to the remnants of Japanese research stations active in the 1930s. A good number of our modern apples in supermarkets are products of this research.

As to potatoes, the Mercer potato trail grows cold in 2003, but that gives at least some hope we can find a specific US Army variety. The funny thing about potatoes is the harvest in this part of the world (think Antietam) begins in mid-June after a late March planting, and contiues to frost, depending on the variety, season, and they can be left in the ground after the first frost, but tend to rot quickly once the cold weather hits. Untreated potatoes, kept in a warm and dark place can sprout quickly, or last well into May depending on a variety of factors. Lots of what ifs, and the potatoes just 10-12 miles north of here in the Smithsburg MD and Wolfsville MD area are superior, since they grow in a slightly cooler microclimate.

In this quiet little valley, you can bet the Schmidts, Poffenbergers, Hershpergers, Remsburgs, et al, know what to do with cabbage, too. :D