Starting persimmon and pomegranate harvest

The last few weeks persimmons and pomegranates have started being harvested but we’ve been holding off for ours to be ripe which they are now.

The microclimate our persimmons and pomegranates are in means they ripen a little bit later than the farms around us.

We will have pomegranates and Fuyu persimmons at the Davis Farmers Market starting today. The pomegranate season is only a few weeks long while we will have persimmons through mid-December.

Fuyu persimmons are the best snacking persimmon with lots of flavor to go along with having a little crunch earlier in the season. They are a non-astringent variety which means they don’t have the bitterness and dry, numbing mouthfeel that astringent varieties like Hachiya have.

The longer we let them ripen on the trees the more the flavor will develop sweetness and the persimmons will become much softer.

Persimmons can be picked when they just start to show a little bit of orange. We wait until they are fully orange when they have more flavor than picked early and ripened in a cooler.

Pomegranates have juicy red seeds that are filled with antioxidants but they can be a little messy to remove from the fruit.

You can just eat the pomegranate seeds, called arils, by themselves as a snack or they can be added as topping to many dishes including salads and yogurt. The arils have a nice mixture of sweet and tart that brings a pop of flavor and color to many meals.

To get the seeds out of the pomegranate without the mess first cut the fruit in half. Then put it in a bowl of cold water and break it apart underwater while rubbing the seeds with your fingers.

The seeds should break free from the membrane without being crushed and releasing their juice.

This week will be the end of almost all of the summer crops. The cooler days along with the rain we had a couple of weeks ago really stressed out the plants and they are not producing very much.

Last week we wrapped up the harvest of the okra and this week it will be the final harvests of the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and summer squash.

We may be able to eke out another week of harvesting the basil but that is very dependent on the temperatures we get. Basil does not like temperatures below 50 degrees, which is why it does not like being in the fridge, and if we get a couple days in a row the leaves will turn black and melt.

There is forecasted to be a good rainstorm starting next Tuesday so we will be trying to get as much of the summer crops mowed and seeded with cover crop before then.

We’ve already started to pull out the drip tape which is all we need to do for most of them but for the tomatoes we also have to remove the trellis which involves cutting the string and taking it out of the field before pulling up the hundreds of stakes.

If we can get all of it done before the rain it will be great but we still have lots of harvesting to do and planting of lettuce.