My grape vines usually produce a few bushels of grapes, but nothing spectacular. I wanted to ask my friend to come can with me (yes, the pear friend) so I figured I needed a few more grapes so we would have enough. So I asked if anyone in my neighborhood had grapes they didn't need. Stupid me, I asked and got them before picking mine!
When I picked mine, there were way more than I was expecting. It was so bad I asked for help from my friend and her kids. Then we had to use the kids to go pick the other friend's grapes the next day. It got to be ridiculous. We had grapes everywhere!
Fortunately we decided to do grapes over fall break so we had slave--I mean child labor--to help.
We had this crazy notion that we could just get them all done in one horrible long day and then be done for the weekend. Hahahah...Just ask my kids how well that went. At 9 PM they had lost it. By 10 PM my friend and I had lost it. By midnight we gave up and started cleaning up. By 1 AM we had a semblance of a kitchen, 102 quarts of grape juice on the counters, and buckets and pots full of plucked grapes for the next day.
The next day, Friday, my friend and I juiced on our own. We each got about 52 quarts each the next day.
Saturday I still had about 3 bushels to pluck. My new daughter Micheala got a chance to learn to pluck grapes. Again, I was stupid. I thought I could bake pumpkins, mash pumpkins, make a pumpkin pie, make pumpkin bread, make pumpkin cookies, get the grapes plucked and juiced, and get it all done in one day. Yea, that worked well. I got everything done but the pie, and it was a crazy day. Amazingly Micheala still wants to come live with us even after the torture we put her through.
When all was said and done, we had 220 quarts total. This picture just shows what we got the first day (102):
Here is the song my kids and their friends wrote about 10 PM Thursday night (the day to be hereafter remembered as the horrible day of grapes). It's funnier when you're drop dead exhausted and giggling hysterically:
To the tune of Do a Deer from the "Sound of Music"
"Do, I Do, I Do make juice,
Ray, a stem of trashy raisins;
Me, I'm real-ly, really tired;
Fa, a long, long way from bed;
So, I saw too many grapes,
La, I really really hate this!
Ti, I can't wait til this ends!
And that will bring us back to Do
Do, Do, Do
...
Repeat until you drive the moms nuts and they let you quit and go to bed.
Update: my neighbor came by tonight to ask us to come take his grapes. Apparently he has them coming out his ears also! He has these amazing red grapes. I love those juiced. I'm dumb enough that I'm actually thinking about it. Of course the kids are all vetoing me. Stay posted!
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