Wild harvesting & preserving figs and berries

 

It all started with a Fig

 ....Or rather, a hundred figs in a tree, but not this tree!

 

This tree is in my back yard. My Grandfather very inconveniently planted it below the clothesline, where my father cuts it short every year. I hope to one day soon transplant this old, little tree.

Back to the figs....

 

We gathered these on a very large tree in some 200 year old California mine tailings between our house, and town. So, I guess there is some things to be grateful to the miners. They may have dissimated the native speices from producing natural seasonal harvest, but they did bring us the Fig tree, and the blackberry....

 

And with our modern technology called Excaliber and Cuisinart, we decided to dehydrate our Wildcrafted loot into fruit leather.

 

I used parchment paper on the trays. Then dried the fruit paste at 135 degrees for a few hours. Then turned the temperature down to 105 degrees for a few hours to insure maximum living enzyme preservation.

 

And to save energy I turned off the Xcaliber and let the fruit leather finish air drying overnight.

 

The parchment paper works very well. Instead of peeling the leather off right away, I decided to roll and cut like the fruit roll ups I had in my lunch as a kid!

Then I put them in an uncovered jar for storing until use.