Next year, I will know that destemming all the grapes before drying them is absolutely essential. It avoids having to do what becomes a very picky job when the fruit has already dried. It also avoids eating most of the produce.
As it is, I remove a stalk, and pop the raisin in my mouth. I remove a handful of stalks from a handful of grapes and shove all of them in my mouth. Then, since I have had enough raisins for the time being, I stop destalking them, and go and wash my sticky hands.
The raisins would probably have been ready for storage containers a lot sooner if we had not had night-time rain about a week ago. I rescued them from the rain and brought them inside.
A full workload, however, prevented me from devoting too much time to them, and so they remained on my kitchen table for the entire week. Here, they are pictured outside again, and rinsed and sorted into “almost done” and “still got a way to go” sections.
Despite the thorough rinsing under water, they are still a little sticky to the touch. I take that as a good thing.
©2018 Allison Wright
Next year
That elusive pair of jeans 
Seems very exotic to make your own raisins.
Says she, who was born on an island where hawthorn berries were pretty much the only fruit you saw, while sitting in a room with a *vast* fig tree outside.
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I am surprised no one I know does it; I suppose because dried figs and carobs, also harvest around August, are more profitable, as is making wine from grapes. I am also surprised that it has taken me ten years in this place to figure out that with the minimum of fuss, I could do it myself. I have never thought of figs as exotic. Marvellous, nevertheless!
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