If anyone is interested, Ison’s has released the two supposedly colder hardy muscadines developed by U of Arkansas, “Mighty Fine” and “Altus”. They say there are only a couple hundred of each and they are limiting sales to one of each cultivar per household. I ordered mine yesterday. I hope to finally be able to overwinter muscadines. For the last three years the ones I have planted freeze to the ground in winter the grow like crazy during the summer.
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Some jelly from our Hall grapes. So flavorful it is like a grape jelly on steroids. Can’t wait to see what the jelly from our Paulk vine will be like.
We used the instructions from @Fusion_power to extract the juice to make the jelly and it worked great. Thanks!
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Looks awesome
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Ison (the variety) makes great jam. Skins are thick but soft, it has a good level of acidity
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Ison (the nursery man) says that they are making all their jam from this variety. Ison sells a little book on muscardines, that has a lot of recipes. The basic one calls for the skins to be slipped off, cut and simmered till softened. The pulps are simmered till you can press them through a sieve to remove the seeds. Combine skins and pulp, add sugar, etc.
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I freeze the juice of my Carlos grapes, till fermentation in late fall, by which time my garage has cooled down. I use food grade plastic bottles.
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Yes, I first started freezing juice in vacuum bags but did not like it. Then I switched to freezing in glass mason quart jars at about 3/4 full. Got it all frozen but didn’t like that either so looking for something else for the future.
Looked at Walmart stuff online but could not be sure just which food grade plastic bottles that you are referring to.
I see that you are in cider. I tried that several years ago but unfortunately it became a “hobby of the week”. Hopefully I have the equipment so may try the muscadine juice sometime. Probably just another “hobby of the week”. 
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I recycle 1 gal plastic water jugs and orange juice bottles. Can also use milk jugs, just wash out more thoroughly. Beats having to buy bottles online.
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My black Nobel grapes I freeze, for later fermentation into red wine. I crush them and ferment a few days on the skins, before pressing them off the skins and seeds in a cider press. You could also press them into juice, but I found that this causes problems if the grapes are still partially frozen: you’ll end up with an ice block in the press bag. Another problem I get with using a cider press is that grape pulps get stuck in the openings of the press bag. This makes pressing less efficient and cleaning the bags a pain. I will probably look into getting a bladder press at some point.
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Man…I wish I could grow those! Have tried for three years, grow to 20’ during the summer then freeze to the ground every winter.
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Mine are ripening also. Little bit of a Concord taste. I like them. Not the biggest, but out of my 8 varieties I’ve noticed the ones with smaller fruits seem to taste better.
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I ate a handful of Paulk muscadines today. It is good but I still give Ison a slight edge flavor wise. What I like is that Ison matures about 2 or 3 weeks before Paulk so with both growing I get about 6 or 7 weeks of muscadines to eat.
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I think that I’m being followed. When I Google something it starts popping up everywhere on my laptop. Most of the time I just move on but this morning they tempted me with the Oh Yes muscadine for 55.99 with free shipping. It is suppose to arrive by Oct 6th. This is a starter vine so I expect it to be small. They grow so fast the size doesn’t much matter to me. Thanks Walmart. I plan to go ahead and plant it when it arrives and let the root system start to get established. Wondering if anyone else is planting Oh Yes.
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Google is leveraging AI to track people and their browsing habits. I recently started looking at batteries for home solar on my computer. Imagine my surprise when an advertisement for a solar battery showed up on my cellphone! What does this mean? It means that my computer and my cell phone have been linked in their database so that they can send targeted ads to my phone based on my browsing habits on the computer.
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Hi,
I know the feeling, still holding hope my two remaining berries will ripen, all others have fallen off so my vines simply need more time to mature and next spring I will prune them back more aggressively. This vine is an Isons native. It had two nice clusters of about 8-10 berries each, one cluster fell off at the stem. This cluster held the stem but shed all but these two. I don’t even breath on these for fear of them falling before ripe. I think they need to be dark purple when they are ripe. So maybe these two will make it! My Cowart vine that fruited has shed all berries and it’s supposed to be an early variety.
Dennis
Kent, Wa
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So close!
I don’t know why my vine started putting on more fruit toward the end of summer. I can only guess because of the heat.
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Are your vines in full all day sun? Our growing season is so short that they must not be shaded at all during any hour of the day. When I first planted mine, I planted them in a location that was is shade for about half the day and I could not even get a blossom cluster to form. After year 3 I became frustrated and relocated them to the south side of my property where they are in full sun all day long last spring. So this is their second growing season exposed to full sun and it made a huge difference.
Otherwise I cannot explain why your vines set fruit so late. What variety are they?
Dennis
Kent, wa
I can’t remember if it is ‘Cowart’ or ‘Carlos’ that has survived, but it is obviously one that is self fertile.
I had the vines for two years in a place I thought got enough sun, but that was not the case. I moved them right before spring this year and moved them to a full sun location. I accidently chopped and killed one of the vines while transplanting.
Right away there were two small fruit clusters when it started flowering.
The vines grew and the grapes were on the vine for a while but then disappeared as more growth happened.
My most recent picture I posted shows the new clusters with some decent size, and that was maybe a month after I first noticed them and remembered to take a photo.