Earlier I wrote a post about chestnuts, and now I’ll write about the other nuts we have growing here in our premises, walnuts. According to the estimated harvest times they weren’t supposed to be ready before we’re well into September, but it turned out they are already virtually ready to be harvested and in a week or so we are going to take them and use them in our restaurants – or at least store them for later use. We have altogether three walnut trees, two of them are in Heart’s Repose, one of our rental homes, and one is in our Roadhouse restaurant, but that one doesn’t really produce much nuts yet. So our walnuts come from two trees, but these trees are big and provide us with an estimated 60kg of nuts a year. That is enough for us for the whole year – if properly managed, there is no need for us to buy walnuts ever again.

Walnuts are big dedicouos trees that can grow as high as 40 meters, making them the biggest trees we have, although some persimmon trees can compete quite well with them in size. Walnuts form their own plant family called Juglandaceae, also know as the Walnut Family. This is quite rare, because usually, as can be seen from the posts of this blog, edible plants belong to same family with many other edibles. There are more than 21 different species of walnuts, ours is so-called Persian Walnut, also called Common Walnut, which is native to large areas from Balkans in Europe to Central China. This tree is widely cultivated for its delicious nut. Actually, I am not 100% sure if ours is Persian or Black walnut, but came into the conclusion favouring Persian nut because that is native to China as well, while Black walnut is only native to North America. Why on earth we would have that growing here?  

The nut, or sometimes called fruit, of the walnut tree is inside a hard brown shell which is in its part inside a green, soft “peel” or “cover”. The brown shells are really hard and difficult to break. Inside each shell there are two nuts, separated by a thin, paper-like layer. Walnut meats have a lobed and wrinkled appearance, some say they look like brains or abstract butterflies. The lobes are off white in colour and covered by a thin, light brown skin. So there are in a way four layers in the fruit of a walnut tree - the nut, the skin, the shell and the cover.

While chestnuts are one of the oldest things eaten by men, walnuts were reportedly first used by Ancient Greeks some thousands of year ago. However, some say that Greeks were the first ones to cultivate it but it was used long time before in Persia. Ancient Greeks and Romans introduced the tree to Balkans and to the rest of Europe, especially the French started to cultivate it in vast quantities. Although walnut is often referred to English Walnut, it didn’t land to the rainy island before 16^th century, for some reason. Walnuts all in all never were any competition to chestnut in popularity until the last few hundred years. Today, chefs of the world use walnuts in many types of cuisines including meats, vegetables, desserts, and soup preparations. Walnut oil is used widely to improve salad dressings. It is widely used in chinese cuisine, but not as popular as chestnuts - maybe because walnuts are clearly more expensive. 

Walnuts are called “hu tao” in Chinese, which literally mean “Hu peach”. Again, one rather weird name in Chinese. How does walnuts resemble peaches? I can’t find any other similarities, except they might look a bit similar green balls when they are both in their early stages. Weird it is anyway. Why it is “Hu peach” is because the ancient Chinese associated the introduction of walnut into Eastern China (it is native to western part of the country) with the Hu barbarians living in Northwest China. The English name “walnut” comes from old English and means “foreign nut” (wealhhnutu), obviously because it was introduced from foreign countries rather late. This was an interesting information for me, because I always though that the name has something to do with walls, don’t know why.

Walnuts are good for health in many ways, as are almost all of the edibles we have here. Walnuts are an excellent source of important omega 3 fatty acids, which is a special protective substance that body just can’t manufacture. In addition, walnuts contain an antioxidant compound called ellagic acid that supports the immune system and appears to have several anticancer properties. Studies also suggest that walnuts have favourable effects on high cholesterol and other cardiovascular risk factors. They are also really good for heart and hypertension and helps preventing high blood pressure. In Chinese traditional medicine, walnuts are considered to be herbs. They are believed to be good for kidneys and lungs, strengthen knees and moisten intestines, as well as to cure the asthma. All in all, walnuts are considered to be amongst the healthiest foods there is, despite the fact they are high in calories. High in calories they are, but according to recent studies, people who eat nuts at least twice a week are much less likely to gain weight than those who almost never eat nuts. It was left unclear to me why, but that’s great news anyway. So walnuts are really healthy and are safe to eat weight-wise as well!

In the Schoolhouse, as said, we are going to have some 60kg of walnuts a year, thanks to our two large walnut trees right across the street from the main building. Currently, we use walnut as part of the Jiangbao Chicken in Roadhouse, as part of our salads and as ingredients of our brownies. We also make walnut ice-cream. Walnuts are easy to preserve by for example freezing, so we don’t have to use them all during the season, we can use them all year round. Still, we are thinking about other culinary uses for them and should decide those before the harvest starts in a week or so. Harvesting walnuts is a bit hard and tricky, due to the hardness of the shell and the dyeing effect of the peel. I wrote down some procedures for the harvesting, which are going to be part of the sustainable food program manual. Hopefully this are of some use to someone:

1. Wait until the nuts fall from the trees. Picking them from the tree can damage the tree.
2. Cut the green hull off the walnut, either by using a knife or stepping on the before they crack and then peeling them with hands. Use heavy rubber cloves when doing this.
3. Collect the green hulls to a garbage back, but DO NOT put them into the compost piles, as it is uncertain what they can do to the garden.
4. Put the brown hard shells to dry for a few days. They can be laid out on a newspaper, or in a shell somewhere dry. The dryer the shells are, the easier the nut meat will be to separate.
5. Don’t put them to dry somewhere squirrels can find them – they’ll eat them all.
6. When dried, crack the nuts with a hammer, vise or something similar. This will take time, be patient. Try not to damage the nut too much while cracking it.
7. Pull the nut meat out.
8. Collect the nut shells and dispose to compost piles as dry material.

In addition to its nuts, walnut trees are used for other purposes. They are attractive for their valuable timber – indeed, walnut wood is used in some of our houses here as well – and in some areas of the world walnut wood is the most valuable commercial timber there is. Walnut shells are used for varied purposes, including cleaning and polishing soft metals, fibreglass, plastics, wood and stone, due to its hardness and right kind of texture. Flour made of the shell is widely used in plastic industry, which makes a quite interesting contrast with chestnut flour which is used to make bread. Walnut shell flour is also used as paint thickener and even as filler in a dynamite. Walnut husks are often used for creating dye that is used for dyeing fabrics – they have a strong dyeing effect, which should be kept in mind when harvesting the nuts. Okay, these purposes are totally irrelevant when it comes to our sustainable food program, but I think it is an interesting add to this post.

That’s about the walnuts. Come to The Schoolhouse and try something with this delicious nut – I strongly recommend the walnut swirl ice-cream!

Pietari

Now it’s time again to write a post about how our sustainable food project is going in general. We started this program officially in late March and lots have happened after that. As I said a few posts earlier, I started to write a comprehensive document about this project, and later I decided to call it “the sustainable food program manual”. There will be all the information about what this project is about, what has been done so far, what are the objectives, what should be done in the future, procedures for all kinds of things from composting to harvesting chestnuts and other such kinds of practical things. It is currently a little more than 50 pages long, but it contains lots of lists and tables. From the document one can for example easily check the inventory of what edible trees we have, what plants we have been growing in our garden and how The Schoolhouse is doing when it comes to the principles of sustainable food. It will be posted on our websites for everyone to see, and it works as a framework and a sort of guidebook for the schoolhouse team when it comes to our sustainable food program. Hopefully it will be some help, and hopefully it won’t be too confusing or boring.

I have been here at The Schoolhouse since March and I have enjoyed it a lot. My main project has been this sustainable food program, and I hope there is some significance in the things and this project has made some difference. I’ll be leaving in a few weeks, and of course I also hope that we achieve more during the rest of my time here. Most of all I wish that people continue to take this sustainable food program seriously and follow the suggestions in the project manual I’m writing. In the future it is planned that the company will hire a full-time sustainable food project manager, and that would be great. The documents I have written will surely be of some help when the time comes, and hopefully I have managed to formalize this program in a way that it is easy to be followed and it provides long-term value to this company.
 
There is also another document I have made concerning this program. I have made a PowerPoint slideshow with basic information about each edible tree we have, then information about that plant in The Schoolhouse and finally a picture (or pictures) separately of each tree in different location. So, for example there is one slide telling in general about persimmons, then there is a slide telling how we use the persimmon in The Schoolhouse and how much we have it, and finally there are several slides with pictures, for example “Grandma’s Persimmon” and “The Persimmon of The Persimmon Court”. That is a cool way to present our tree inventory to customers and it is always good to have a picture database about our food resources. This document will be also linked to our webpage, it should be there in a few weeks, feel free to go and check it out. It has been quite fun doing that document as I have been finding out rather lot of new information about trees I formerly knew nothing about. Because of this separate document, there is not much detailed information in the project manual about the edible trees we have here. They will be both linked in the same section of our webpages, I will post a link here when they are available. There will be also other interesting documents linked to the website, including English language curricula for children relating sustainability, created by Audrey Gueho, an intern here like me, and information about the books we have published.

About our kitchen garden. It has been after all rather successful despite what it looked in the middle of the summer. I decided to formalize the gardening in a way the we have three different garden plans in one year – spring garden before June, summer garden from June to August, and autumn garden after August, or after the middle of August. Each year there will be three different plans and maps made. This is only natural, because different plants requires different conditions and not all can be grown at the same time. For example radish and spring onion are great for spring garden; eggplant, cucumber, tomatoes and herbs are summer plants; and spinach and cabbage are planted in autumn. During this summer, we had plenty of eggplant, cucucmber and basil and there was no need to buy those vegetables outside our garden. Lettuce and rucola are the kinds of plants that are a significant part of the spring, summer and autumn gardens, and those are arguably the most important things we want from our garden. At the beginning we had problems to get lettuce and rucola to grow well, but now they grow in our garden in abundance. Our chef said that we need to buy significantly less lettuce and rucola as we did before, thanks to the plantings we have at The Roadhouse. Next year we hope to get the lettuce and rucola grow in abundance from the early spring on, and I have no doubt we will. Last week we took away the shade on top of the lettuce, as it didn’t seem to do much good, and the air is already cooler than it was in the midsummer. The two new things that have been recently harvested from the garden are green beans and pumpkins. Newest addition is the cabbage - that should be ready in late autumn.

Composting is doing quite well, although we still don’t have any finished compost product and we started to built up the first compost pile again. There has been, however, some problems in separating the compostable waste. At first, months ago, we got too much of waste and it wasn’t all properly separated, and then I said to the staff that if you are not sure about the waste, don’t put it to compost bin. Well, then the amount of waste dropped as people started to be scared, apparently, to put hardly anything to the compost bins. After that, I reminded people to start composting again and then we started to have good amounts of compostable waste, almost all correctly separated. What was weird was that the big compost bin in behind the art room still seemed surprisingly empty. We had a wild guess with our chef that now when waste is being separated the way it should be, it’s not emptied in the right place. Now we have re-educated the staff and everything should be done right at the moment, luckily. It takes to make this kind of thing work, as it is virtually unheard here. I am happy we are still doing it rather successfully, and by next year I am sure that everything goes naturally and we get our compost cycle going on as planned. That is, of course, if the procedures are followed.

As I wrote a few posts earlier, the time for harvesting our fruits and nuts are coming closer. I have done quite a lot of research about these trees, and that has been rather fun. In a week or so we are going the harvest our peach and wild flower pepper, and those are going to be used in our restaurants. Others will follow soon. We are talking with our chef quite frequently how to use all the different fruits and I am sure that he will make something great out of them. For the mint, as I’ve told we have a lot of it, we came up with a new use – Randhir is going to make mint jelly candies out of it this week! Can’t wait to taste them. These will be given to customers when handing the bill.

So, everything is going quite good with this project and I am happy I was given this project when I came here. It has been highly rewarding, and still is. Thank you for your interest, and keep tuned for new post I will write this weekend. Pietari

This is a bit early for this post as chestnuts won’t be ready for harvesting before next month, but as they are probably the single most important edible we have around here, I decided to write now an entry about them. Growing chestnuts is one of the major sources of income in Mutianyu and villages around and one can see the hills packed with these trees, waiting for the precious nuts to be ready. Chestnut trees really are a major part of the nature here and they can be seen as a pride and joy of local farmers. We have approximately 60 chestnut trees in our premises, 20 of which are in the garden of Xiaolumian and the rest are in Jim’s Chestnut Orchard. We will be harvesting them late next month and use the product in our restaurants, as is the case with all the other edibles we have. Together with Persimmon, Chestnut is the fruit/nut we have the most.

So what exactly are chestnuts? They are edible nuts produced by a deciduous tree belonging to the same beech tree family with oak, the Fagaceae family. There are four main species of Chestnuts – Japanese, European, American and Chinese – and obviously the ones we have here are Chinese chestnuts. The Chinese Chestnuts divides into four subspecies and our chestnuts are the most common ones, Castanea Mollissima. The scientific name Castanea comes from either ancient Latin of Greek language, and is still used in many old European languages – Castan-wydden in Welsch, Kastanje in Dutch and Kastanja in Finnish. Chestnut dates back to prehistoric times, and it is actually believed to be one of the first things eaten by humans. It originated from central Asia, thus being also native to China, but rather quickly it spread around Northern hemisphere. It is sited twice in the old testament of the Bible which symbolizes the long history of its importance. It was introduced to Europe via ancient Greece. Today most of the world’s chestnuts are growing in China, Japan and Southern Europe. Different kinds of chestnut trees grows in different sizes, the Chinese Chestnut being an average-sized growing up to 15m high. The trees are often wide-spreading, and the wood of the tree is highly valued as is its cousin oak. Chestnut trees resembles oak in both colour and texture.

The fruit of the tree, commonly knows as nut, is contained in a spiny round cupule around 5-10cm in diameter. One should be careful with these as they are really sharp! These spiky balls are commonly known as “burrs” and they have the delicious nut inside. When the fruit is mature enough, around September here in China, the burr turns yellow-brown and opens in two or three sections. The chestnut fruit, inside the burr, is brown and smooth, and has a pointy end. It is often also flattened in one of two sides. After the spike burr, the fruit has actually two more skins – the first one is the hard brown peel, and under it is a soft thin skin called “pellicle”. Inside all these layer there is the nut, which isn’t actually a nut but the seed of the fruit, which is creamy white-fleshed and extremely tasty. The Chinese nut (or seed) is bigger than the American version, but smaller than the big Japanese one.

As is the case with all the nuts (although its not really a nut, but let's just call it one), chestnuts have rather many calories, about 200kcal per 100g. However, this is still a lot less than the calorie amounts of walnuts, almonds or other nuts, which can have up to 600kcal per 100g. Despite the calories, chestnuts contain very little fat and no cholesterol and they are rather healthy eaten in reasonable quantities. Actually, chestnuts are the only “nuts” that contain vitamin C, and it thus goes more than well with our sustainable food program that we have a lots of this fruit – it is arguably the most healthy “nut” there is. The vitamin C content is as high as it is in lemons, which is quite surprising. The potassium content is four time bigger than it is in apples, and it’s also rich in zinc and iron. Chestnuts have twice as much starch as potatoes and chestnut flour is actually used widely in culinary purposes – indeed, chestnut tree is often called “the bread tree”. Chestnut flour can be used to make breads and cakes, and is actually the original ingredient of “polenta” which is nowadays made mostly of corn. Before made to flour, chestnuts should be dried.

Chestnut can be eaten raw, but unlike most nuts, as raw chestnuts are not as their best – the taste can be rather astringent. The most popular way is to roast chestnuts, usually unpeeled. Roasted chestnuts are really popular as snack in China as well as in Central Europe, it is a good and healthy substitute to candy or chips. Chestnuts are also boiled, in this case peeled. Once cooked, the nut has a similar texture to baked potato but the taste is sweeter, more delicate and, naturally, nuttier. Boiling is a popular way especially in northern China, where boiled chestnuts are used as a part of different dishes. In The Schoolhouse, one of our trademark dishes is Pork with Chestnuts, in which the chestnuts are boiled. We also use these nuts for making ice-cream and as a part of daily special soups when in season. As a part of our sustainable food program, we try to find more uses for this delicacy, because we get a lot of it, an estimated 125kg a year. One idea is to start to do the polenta with chestnut instead of corn, as we have chestnut but we don’t have our own corn. There are plenty of ideas, hopefully we can get some of them work. It is really fun trying to figure out new ways to use our own food resources, and it is really rewarding too. It has been a great experience.

Chestnuts are probably one of the most difficult things to harvest we have around here. As said, the fruits are really sharp and it is important to use rubber cloves when handling them. A good idea is to take the fruits with tongs. The removing of the nut from the sell can be really time-consuming, and it is thus not a hobby for people with tight schedules. We have lots of chestnuts here to be harvested, and although our farmer surely knows better than me how to do it, I wrote down procedures for harvesting chestnuts – these procedures will be a part of the sustainable food program manual along with other procedures. The manual will be the major document of my work here during the past few months.  

1. Chestnuts should ripen in the tree until they fall. This should be at the end of September.


2. They should not be shaken or knocked from the tree, only as a last resort.


3. Harvest from the ground, not from the tree - the sooner the better (animals like them too).


4. Gather up all of the nuts with open burrs


5. Use rubber cloves and/or thongs, be careful of the spiky shells.


6. Don’t let chestnuts stay too long in the ground


7. Do two separate harvesting trips to each site: first collect all from the ground, the second time collect all the new ones from the ground and finally all the rest from the trees.


8. Remove the nuts from the burrs, and discard any with worm holes or other signs of damage.


9. Weight the yield achieved and write it down – it is important to keep track.


10. They are ready to use right away, unlike often thought

Chestnut trees produces more nuts when they grow older. The trees can live many hundreds of years, and usually start producing proper yields when they are around ten years old. We are planning to weight all the chestnuts we get every year and keep correct track of it, so that we can actually see if the yields will grow in time. This goes actually with every edible tree we have, the goal is to keep track of everything we get – this is exactly formalizing the fruit harvesting. For the storage (a questions probably popping to peoples mind, given that we have tens of nut trees but only few uses), chestnuts can be easily stored by drying or freezing. We freeze most of our chestnuts, and thus we use our own chestnut in our restaurants all year round.

So that was about today’s post about chestnuts. Here the chestnut trees in all abundance are all packed up with green spiky fruits and when hiking we must really watch out for them as they may hurt you. Now we are waiting for them to mature and drop down, and then we have all kinds of chestnuts foods served here at The Schoolhouse. Feel free to come and try!

Today’s post is about a little bit weirder thing than usually – it’s about using chicken poop as a fertiliser here at our garden. A few days ago in our weekly sustainable food program meeting Li Fangquen told us that he would need to get some fertilizer as soon as possible, because it is time to start planting the autumn garden. Obviously, we had all these big plans that our compost product would be ready by now in the first compost pile, but is has been taking longer than we thought – the kitchen waste is decomposed already but the leaves and small branches are not done yet. I think we made a mistake in the beginning when we started to build a new pile too soon because we wanted the old one the get ready as soon as possible. I think, given the fact that compost piles shrinks a lot, we left it too small and now the process is really slow because of that. We were too much in a rush. Well be it for whatever reason, we decided to continue building the old pile a bit so that the composting process would get fast again and the pile would get ready – and that we would get more of the product. The old compost pile will be also (and has been) watered in a regular basis in order to keep it moist enough.

This all lead to the fact that, obviously, we can’t yet use our compost product as a natural fertilizer in our garden plantings, we have to wait until late autumn probably. If not then, at least early next spring we will have finished compost product in abundance to use as fertilizer. We have the composting program, now we just have to wait. We still do need fertilizer now, and we decided to get chicken poop, or more appropriately said chicken manure product to be used as a natural fertilizer in our gardens for autumn plantings. Li Fangquen knows a company that sells completely organic chicken poop and he said he would need it and it would be a good fertilizer. We decided to buy ten bags of the manure, 50kg each. One bag is supposed to cost 30rmb so this will be an additional 300rmb cost to our program. Fertilizing about 100 square meters of garden takes a little bit more than 60kgs of chicken manure, so the 500kg is going to be just enough for our approximately 300 square meter garden and other places there are edible trees growing. The important thing for us is that it is organic, because we want our gardens to be 100% organic. Actually, using manure as a fertilizer is an integral part of sustainable agriculture and the next best thing after using own compost product. Anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of the plant nutrients fed to animals are excreted in their manure, so it should be no surprise that the stuff is an excellent fertilizer. They’ve recently done surveys which show that chicken manure actually cleans up contaminated fields quite efficiently, which tells something about the power it might have on gardens.    

Chicken manure products are earth-friendly, totally organic and excellent alternative to chemical fertilizers. Chicken poop is actually really good natural food for plants and makes the garden healthier, it’s nature’s own “multivitamin” for plants. It is completely natural and doesn’t harm the environment at all – if you don’t think about the need of transportation for it to get here. Manure in general is a great fertilizer, and they say that in China they even used human “waste” as a fertilizer for a long time. Well, that’s not really hygienic in today’s norms, not to speak about the odour problems that would cause. Not all manure is good and advisable for using in the gardens – meat-eaters poop might be harmful for garden and there is always a risk of parasites that might transfer to humans. Thus the manure used for fertilizing purposes is from vegetarian animals, namely horses, cattle, sheep or poultry, in this case chicken. This chicken manure that we are going to use in the garden is made in a factory specialized to chicken manure products – it is transformed a bit so that it is organic but doesn’t have so much the unpleasant qualities it normally would. Also, chicken manure must be composted before adding to gardens as it will otherwise “burn” all the plants it’s in contact with. That’s what the factory is doing for us. Of course, if we wouldn’t have our composting program and thus would need to regularly buy fertilizers, we could buy chicken manure from local farmers and compost it ourselves. But, now when we do have compost piles and need chicken manure only while waiting the compost to decompose, buying ready-to-use chicken poop from suppliers is organic enough.

Chicken manure is the richest animal manure when it comes to containing nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash, which are the key ingredients of fertilizers. It makes the garden soil balanced and increases the fertility by even tens of percents. According to websites devoted to using chicken manure as fertilizers, there are some certain rules or “tips” to be kept in mind when going on with this project. First, as said, fresh manure shouldn’t be used, it should be “old”. Otherwise especially young plants might die. Second, chicken manure should be always used as soil amendment, not as mulch. Third, interesting for us, chicken manure is a great addition to compost piles and makes them decompose faster than normal. This is something we should think about, adding this stuff to our piles would get us compost product faster – however, adding compost “helpers” isn’t probably something we want to do in regular basis. But something now at the beginning – maybe. Last but not least, it is a good idea to mix chicken manure to the soil at the end of autumn, because that way the soil will be excellent when the time comes for spring garden after winter. We’ll keep that in mind.

Animal manures have been used effectively as fertilizers for centuries. In the days when most families kept a flock of chickens among other animals, manure was a primary garden fertilizer. But with changes in food production practices and the advent of chemical fertilizers in the 1930's, many gardeners stopped using manure. Today, organic gardeners have rediscovered the benefits of manure as a fertilizer and soil conditioner, and it is a trendy thing to use now among environmentally aware people. As said, chicken manure is and has been seen for a long time the most efficient animal manure fertilizer. Now chicken manure is getting bigger and bigger in China, not only as fertilizer but also as new kind of energy source. All the huge chicken farms in this country has huge potential as a fertilizer and energy source, and it is a great thing that has been recognized lately. These things are in so large scale in China, as is everything, that it really can have a significant positive effect on the environment. And of course we are happy to try it out as well.

Everything I learn here - chicken manure as a part of sustainability. Interesting. Well, that's that, have a nice weekend everyone! 

It’s almost August now and the season when our different fruits and nuts are getting ready to harvest is coming closer. So far the only thing that has been ready for us to take from our trees was Xiang Chun (see one of the earliest posts), the time for that was in May to early June. Summer was also the season for Apricots, but our few apricot trees do not provide fruits yet, we have to wait until at least next year. We did use a lot local apricots however in our restaurants, in forms of local apricot ice-cream, sorbet and marmalade, and also as ingredient in various daily salads. Apricots are one of the major fruits around here, and we surely wanted to make use of that even though we don’t have our owns yet. We have apricot trees in Xiaolumian and Brickyard, so next year we should be able to use our own apricot. But local is nearly as good, right?

Let’s go through again what fruit and nut trees we have in our premises. We have:

- Sugar Pear: 11 trees, estimated 33kg a year

- Persimmon: 15 trees, estimated 279kg a year

- Chinese Dates: 5 trees, estimated 14kg a year

- Chestnuts: approximately 62 trees, estimated 125kg a year

- Walnuts: 3 trees, estimated 60kg a year

- Mulberries: 1 tree, estimated 10kg a year (someone took this years yield!)

- Hongguo: 6 trees, estimated 14kg a year

- Plums: 1 tree, estimated 3kg a year

- Xiang Chun: 7 trees, estimated 39kg a year

- Green Apple: 2 trees, estimated 7kg a year

- Wild Peach: 2 trees, estimated 3kg a year

- Wild Flower Pepper: 1 tree, estimated 5kg a year

- Apricots: 8 trees, not giving fruits this year

 

After xiang chun and apricots, the next one that was ready was mulberries, and we all were looking forward to having them. The mulberry tree we have is actually in Piveteau’s House’s garden, a house Jim built for individual use for a French couple. We already contacted them and made a deal that we can harvest the mulberries and use it in the restaurants, as long as we give them some delicious mulberry jam that our chef makes. Well, apparently all this was in vain, because when our chef went to see the tree, it was completely empty – somebody had harvested it already and we were left with nothing. This is really sad, because we had planned to make mulberry ice-cream and jam, which both would be no doubt delicious. As a part of this project, I must find a way, a procedure, how to make sure that this doesn’t happen again next year. All the harvesting needs to be organized and formalized. We want our mulberries!

 

Next ones to be ready for harvest are plums, wild peaches and wild pepper. The only plums we have is one plum tree in Randhir’s house, and the only wild pepper tree lies in Jim’s garden. We have two wild peach trees, one in Jim’s place and one in Piviteau’s garden. These are all available really soon, in August – we have to do some monitoring to see when exactly they can be harvested in August. As can be seen, we don’t have these things much, but still everything we can get from our own trees is a plus. I need to coordinate with our chef Randhir how to use these things as efficiently as possible. When we have only a little bit of something, it is especially important to be organized and plan possible uses beforehand, so that we can take the most out of them. Wild peach makes a delicious jam, and wild pepper gives a lovely kick to various dishes.

 

In September we have more abundant times when our nuts are getting ready to be harvested. We have tree big walnut trees with estimated yield of as high as 60kg a year and they should be ready to in September. Slightly later than walnut, in the end of September, are coming the chestnuts which are one of the edibles we have the most. We have about 60 chestnut trees (most of them in Jim's chestnut orchard) which will give as an estimated 125 kg of chestnuts this year! Of course, these are just estimations, and as a part of this program I would like to keep track of how many kg we get of each fruit and nut in reality, and write it down so during coming years it is easier to incorporate into menu planning when we know what we have. For chestnuts it is rather hard to estimate correctly the yields, because trees will give a different quantity of fruits on different years, usually giving more each year when they develop. It would be really interesting to keep track for many years and see what are the actual differences – this I hope can be done by following the program I am making. Chestnuts and walnuts are actually the most difficult things to harvest out of the things we have here. I will write the procedures how to harvest them as well as all the culinary purposes we are using them in a separate blog entry a little bit later. But I can say now that when it comes to the chestnut harvest time, we are going to have a lot of different kinds of chestnut foods served here at The Schoolhouse!

 

I have been working on a formalized harvesting schedule for all the different fruits and nuts we have. There will be 19 separate stages of harvesting which are all indicated in weeks. To keep it organized, it is important that nothing is being harvested without it being on the schedule, unless decided otherwise in the weekly sustainable food project meeting. The first stage will be the first week of May each year, when The Pavilion’s xiang chun is supposed to be harvested. Until the third week of September the harvesting stages will be every first and third week of the month, so two times a month. Then it comes a little more frequent, when we start to have larger quantities of fruits and nuts to harvest. There will be harvesting in the fourth week of September as well, and in October there is harvesting scheduled for each week. This is because in September-October we have the walnuts and chestnuts as well as sugar pears, Chinese dates, apples and hongguo. In November, as weird as it sounds, we have four harvesting stages too, because that is when we are expecting to have the persimmon, which is the fruit we absolutely have the most. We have 15 trees of persimmon which should provide us over 250 kg of persimmon each year! Persimmons are also good to be harvested in stages, because it’s good to have persimmons that are a little bit hard and persimmons that are completely ready, for different kinds of uses. The harvesting season ends at fourth week of November, when we should take the last persimmons out. So lots of persimmons here in November, welcome to try it out!

 

It needs to be remembered though that these harvest times are only estimates, and it is always hard to make exact timetables when it comes to harvesting fruits and nuts. For example with walnuts and chestnuts, we have to wait them to drop from the tree before harvesting them, at when that is it’s really hard to give exact estimates. Also, the harvesting could start before May if xiang chun happens to be ready. I am hoping, however, that these weeks in my plan would be as appropriate as possible, and we can always change the plan if we see that the plant is not ready when it’s scheduled harvest time would be. This is not an exact science, but an attempt to organise things and make everything more efficient. In addition to when each species should be harvested, the timetable I am making is more detailed than that. It separates the trees in different locations and gives them a different time for harvesting, for example sugar pears in Mumanyu and Xiaolumian should be harvested in the first week of October, whereas Jim’s Road Front sugar pear is scheduled for the second week of October and Jim’s Courtyard sugar pears for the third week. It remains to be seen whether this kind of scheduling actually works in practice, or is everything just harvested when they simply are ready, but it is nice to give it a try – after all, my job is to formalize this.

 

That’s it for today, keep tuned for separate detailed entries for different kinds of trees. They are coming! I will also make a picasa gallery with pictures of our fruit and nut trees. The gallery should be up in a few days.

 

Pietari