Week of September 22

As the fall season officially arrives, HARVEST TIME gets going for many TAProots products, including peaches, apples, and pears.  But the main crop for sale are the grapes.  We are not picking Reisling grapes this year as our new plantings need several years of growth before a crop can be picked.  So the main grape harvest is the Concord grapes, a hardy American grape known for its juice and its jelly for PB&J sandwiches.  Bob Fingar has been waiting for the sugar in the grapes to rise, as a measure of ripeness, and September 21 is the bright sunny fall day following several warm and sunny days that have ripened the grapes rapidly.  TAProots has two Concord plots, one of 5 acres on the west, bordering Pepper Road, and a second 2-3 acre plot west of the cemetery.  The wine grapes (Vitis vinifera) are usually hand picked.  The Concord grapes (vitis lambrusco) are machine picked.  The grape picking machines are a marvel of engineering, with a tractor sitting atop what looks like a door frame with fingers of plastic protruding into the door space.  Bob Fingar drives this 2 story contraption over each row of grape trellises, the fingers beat the grapes off the clusters, with amazing thoroughness.  The grape berries fall onto a conveyor belt which carries the berries to huge 5’ by 5’ by 5’ boxes each weighing many hundreds of pounds.  These are lifted onto flatbed trucks and whisked a couple of hours away to Westfield, New York (Welch’s) or another grape juice maker.  The picked grapes need to get to the juice factory fast, as the sweet grapes start to ferment almost immediately.  It is an exciting day or two during this harvest, when 25-50 tons of TAProots grapes go to market.  The air is full of grape aroma, as the whole world smells like grape jam.  Thankfully, the picker misses a few clusters hanging around the trellis poles, allowing me to pick the 5-10 pounds needed for homemade TAProots grape jelly.  Nothing means it is harvest time better than a batch of deep purple grape jelly, put away in the wine cellar for the coming winter.