August-September 2025 Farm Update

Wow, the weeks sure have flown by! We are just getting back from a short vacation, and it was some much needed rest. We’ve been working hard, and it’s been nice to take a pause, take stock of things, and give ourselves a gentle reentry back into the farm routine. It also makes it a good time to write the post – if I get back into things, I’m not likely to think about it again until October.

The main theme of the past ~month is that kids are back in school and harvest is in full swing. Losing our help just in time for the bulk of the work has been tough, but we’ve also become adept with our task sequencing. Our kitchen has been into full-on production mode for several weeks. We’ve kept two dehydrators fully busy (in addition to racks in the sun), pressed gallon after gallon of juice, and kept the stove running with 2-3 daily canning batches. Looking back at the pictures from the past six weeks, it’s amazing to see how much we’ve done. Thankfully, the bulk of the work is behind us, but there are still enough apples and pears to keep us steadily busy for a couple of weeks yet.

Of course, there’s still the large backlog of extracts, liqueurs, and shrubs that we need to strain and bottle. There are plenty of herbs to harvest and dry. And now, with a moment to look around, we notice that we’re already late getting fall garden tasks done! Not that there’s been a spare moment to tackle any of this amid the harvest…

While it’s been a physically and mentally exhausting period, it’s important to note that it’s not all drudgery and labor – it’s also rewarding and abundant. There have been so many beautiful days, our corner of the world is filled with life, and our bellies are full of so much fresh, delicious food. Soon enough the days will be too short, the leaves will turn, our bird/insect/reptile/amphibian friends will be gone, snow will blanket the ground, and we’ll be longing to start it all again in the spring.

Plums

Plums were a big part of August. We finished the harvest of our Santa Rosa plums, started harvesting our Satsuma plums, and harvested golden plums from our neighbor’s trees. The Santa Rosa plums were wonderful this year, and the Satsumas have really just started hitting their prime mid-September. The golden plums, for whatever reason, ended up being particularly tart. Nonetheless they were enjoyed and used.

A big milestone for the farm was selling a 4 quart batch of Santa Rosa plum ice cream to Baldovinos, our favorite restaurant in town. They ran it as a dessert special and sold out in one weekend.

Otherwise, plums were variously turned into:

• Dried plums
• Fruit roll-ups
• Shrubs
• Liqueurs
• Extracts (and, eventually, cocktail bitters)
• Plum wine
• Santa Rosa Plum Butter
• Plum jam & jelly
• Smoked Plum BBQ Sauce
• Chinese plum sauce
• Whole plums in spiced brandy syrup
• Plum halves in syrup
• Ice cream
• Sorbet

Apples

We have two apple trees and we manage another 8 trees for two of our neighbors. Overall, the apples seemed to be ready quite early this year. We spent the bulk of the time picking and processing apples. We’ve gone through ~100 gallons so far, making:

• Apple sauce
• Apple butter
• Dried apples
• Apple shrub
• Apple-infused brandy
• ~2 gallons of Apple cider to drink
• ~4 gallons of Apple cider to ferment
• 15+ gallons of “Ciderkin,” where we take the pressed solids from making cider and cover them with water. Harvested the next day, this produces a light and refreshing “juice” that our kids like. We let it ferment another 5-7 days and then it becomes a lightly alcoholic (1-3%) cider.

Of course, we also ate plenty of the best apples along the way :).

Cherries

Our cherry harvest had already finished, but we still had a bit of processing to do. The rest of our cherries were pressed into wine, and we harvested cherry extract and mixed a batch of cherry cocktail bitters.

We also started taking care of our neighbor’s orchard and picked the rest of the sour cherries from her tree. They were so ripe that they ended up being quite sweet! We turned these into a small batch of sour cherry ice cream.

Pears

Our neighbor’s orchard has a pear tree, and a friend of ours shared some fruit from her tree as well. We processed this into:

• Dried pears
• Pear sauce (like apple sauce, just made with pears)
• Pear halves in syrup
• Pear shrub

Grapes

One of our friends let us come and pick grapes from her vine. These were some of the tastiest I’ve ever eaten. We ate a ton, made a double batch of grape jelly (which turned out perfect!), and turned the rest into raisins.

I’ve got a couple of small wild california grapes, but I think I’ll try to add a few more vines around the property this fall.

Peaches

We also received a large batch of delicious peaches from a friend’s tree. Aside from being gorged upon, they were turned into peach ice cream and peach shrub. Interestingly, we learned that white peaches can be low acid, which means they are not recommended to be used for canning.

Mushrooms

August was a mix of mushroom successes and failures, yet even with our failures we harvested 16 pounds of mushrooms – a new high for us. We ate some, sold some, fermented some, and dried the rest.

We had some struggles with our indoor grow tent – partially due to humidifier problems and partially due to our attention being focused on fruit harvests. Most of our lion’s mane in the tent was stunted, and we picked that and dried it for tea. Our fruiting blocks were moved to the greenhouse (and now we’re tight on space!), where they have since performed admirably.

The fall plan is to inoculate logs to be kept under the shade of our cherry tree. We’ve selected the oaks on our land that need to be thinned and selected the varieties we want to grow. Now we need to wait until the trees go dormant before we can cut an inoculate.

Flowers

The bouquets have been dominated by an array of dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, and blanket flower. Roses have made an occasional appearances with small second and third flower flushes on the bushes. Oregano has surprised us as a wonderful filler, and we’ll be planting more for adding to bouquets. We’ve also enjoyed garlic chive flowers, a nice treat after most of the other alliums in our yard were done.

Our favorite part was seeing a photo of our flowers gracing the stage for a concert in McCloud!

Ferments

We do a lot of fermentation in our household. And it really seems to have picked up this last month!

We actively maintain cultures for buttermilk, three varieties of yogurt, sourdough starter, vinegar, and kombucha. The kombucha and sourdough starter are new additions to the family this year, and the others we’ve been maintaining for 7-10 years.

Kombucha has proved quite popular with the family, and we’ve steadily scaled up production to two gallons a week. Our favorite part is the variety of seasonal flavors – we’ve enjoyed cherry, sour cherry, Santa Rosa plum, cherry shrub, plum shrub, apple, and manzanita.

We also made some other fun drinks. We found discounted organic ginger and made a two gallon batch of ginger beer. We also fermented turmeric for a few days, straining the solids and added the liquid to the ginger beer (along with leftover sasparilla root tea). The fermented turmeric solids were dehydrated, and they’ll be used in a tea mix once harvest ends.

The fruit harvests always come with batches of wine and cider – at some point, you’re just done with a batch of fruit, and the rest can be turned into wine (and then vinegar). We have ~32 gallons of fruit juice fermenting at the moment, with a couple more gallons of of apple likely to be added in coming weeks.

Harvest also provides an opportunity to turn bounty into fermented goodies. We were flush with mushrooms all at once, and turned a large chunk of our supply into lactofermented mushrooms. We also harvested all of our mung beans early August. We cooked them, shelled them, and then inoculated them with koji spores. After the koji had covered the beans, we moved them to a fermentation crock and covered with a brine. We also fermented a matching volume of chili pepprs and garlic in another crock. In November, the two crocks will be combined and allowed to sit for another year. This will make “doubanjiang,” a Sichuan ingredient that is used to add a funky-spicy flavor base to stir fries and sauces.

Wild Foods

We naturally focus most of our time and energy on the “large” producers in our small operation – the fruit, mushrooms, and flowers. But I’m a big fan of wild foods and strive to make them a regular part of our diet and our offerings.

The big focus in August has been on harvesting from our manzanita plants.

• My daughter and I like to drink “cider” made from the fruit. We pick berries (she prefers green with a blush of pink, I prefer closer to fully ripe), and then smash them up and pour water over them. I let this extract for a couple of days, and then drink.
• We pick the ripe berries and dry them out. These can then be ground into a power, which is reasonably sweet and flavorful. This powder makes great addition to oatmeal, pancakes, acorn pancakes, and flatbreads. I store the berries whole and grind into powder in small batches.
• I made a sweetened batch of manzanita cider that I used to make manzanita kombucha. This was quite tasty, though more delicately flavored than batches made with plum and cherry juice.

Rozi and Lilac picked a quart of wild blackberries, which I promptly rewarded by turning into a blackberry torte and blackberry syrup to drizzle over it. We also enjoyed the blackberry syrup drizzled over acorn-manzanita pancakes.

The acorns will be dropping soon, and then it will be a race against the squirrels to collect as many of the good ones as we can!