Biggest Juicebox Ever

....okay, okay, we were actually just stirring with PVC, but don't you just want to suck on it like a straw?!

We tested the cider and found that it had 0% potential alcohol by volume and a specific gravity of 1.000. Needless to say, it was very dry. Q and I played with adding 1/2t. sugar at a time to the sample until we liked it. There was a lot of sampling - and it was very, very yummy. Finally, we got to a sample we liked. (I like a fairly sweet hard cider.) We figured out how much sugar we had to add to the whole 5 gallons and put that into the second carboy. We then siphoned the cider from the first carboy to the second and stirred to dissolve the sugar. The airlock was replaced but there doesn't seem to be any more fermentation going on. Looks like the alcohol content is high enough to kill the yeast. The dregs from the first carboy still seemed like we would be wasting a lot, so we poured most of them into a pitcher and have been letting it sit to resettle before siphoning it into the new carboy as well. Figure we'll give it a few days to make sure fermentation has really stopped and then bottle her up and set it aside to age a few weeks.

Colorful Harvest and More Yard Work

Today's harvest - the first of the carrots, the first cuke, two of the first tomatoes, almost the last peas, and the very last radishes. The last radishes were found when Mom and I severely rooted out the radish/pea bed today. They'd been hiding and stayed very small.

The bolting seed radishes now have some space around them and we left just a few pea plants that still have quite a few unfinished pods and blossoms. Since the tomatoes (behind) are trying to take over that bed it's nice to not have the constant pea vine/tomato fights to break up.
The new strawberry bed has been planted. I don't think all of them will survive but I know some will and I've got plenty more I could transplant from the remaining "strawberry hill" (see below). My suspicion, however, is that it doesn't matter, as even only a few remaining plants will send out runners to populate the new bed in no time flat.

The moved beds are full of nice fresh dirt from the driveway pile, ready for planting.

After moving the beds we left "strawberry hill" to keep doing it's thing. The bolted lettuce at the left will have seed harvested and then that dirt pile will be moved. The rhubarb is getting moved this fall into one of the moved beds. At the back you can see the cinder blocks ready to be made into a compost bin. I don't have a before picture of this side of the house but it was heavily overgrown with weeds, strawberries and the bush by the chimney was about 12 feet high. Mom and Q and I worked a lot!
The lettuce forest is still producing even as many of the plants are bolting, ready to produce my seeds for next year. (Or even this fall, apparently; with a bit of protection I can get some year round lettuce growing.)

Still so proud of this basil that I thought was dead as little seedlings. Need to make pesto very soon.

Last night's dessert - Triple Berry Crumble - strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, all local.

Mama and I picked 14 pounds of blueberries yesterday. I've now got 2 gallons frozen, we've eaten a lot :D, and Mom's got some frozen ready for triple berry pies for this year's boutique.

We also went to the house of the lovely free apple man yesterday and picked up 96 pounds of apples. They're Gravensteins and it's the end of their season but after the required "surgery" on them they will provide the apples for her apple pies for the boutique. She's so industrious. I always feel like a fairly high energy person until Mom's around. :) May I grow up to be like my mother.

Scrabble Games

Mom and Dad are in town, which means that when Mom and I are finally exhausted from gardening, harvesting, preserving or other fun, we sit down to Scrabble. The other night, I perversely (didn't realize it at the time) built a diagonal wall straight down the center of the board, making half of it completely unusable. In the picture above, the white yarn line indicates what was on the board when we finally decided to cheat to our mutual benefit. We used Hasbro's online dictionary to find words containing "bee"- thankfully, "baubee" is a Scottish coin and "udo" is a Japanese herb, I had the right letters, and we were saved!

This is how Binky helps.

Cidermaking Day 2

Yesterday, I was keeping an eye on the bubbling cider and it was getting all nice and foamy and the airlock was bobbing away so I quit worrying about it. In the afternoon, however, I noticed it had jumped the bounds. The airlock was full of cider and the picture to the left is what it looked like after I took the airlock off. I put a towel over the top of the jug overnight and put the airlock on again this morning and it's behaving properly now. My pantry smells like a brewery though; good thing I don't consider that a bad thing. Yay yeast!

Our First Attempt at Making Hard Cider

Q got us free Gravenstein apples so we spent Sunday turning 40 lbs. of them into juice. We also juiced an additional 30 lbs. of Red Delicious that we bought. We only used about 20 lbs. of the Red in the cider recipe and have an additional 3 qts. of juice in the freezer.

So, to document our process, we ended up with 3 gallons of Gravenstein + 2 gallons of Red Delicious.
We sterilized our carboy and other equipment with sodium metabisulfite on Monday before we placed the juice, which had 5 Campden tablets dissolved in it, into the carboy. We added the airlock and waited for 36 hours for the yeast killing effects of the Campden tablets to run their course.

This morning (Wednesday), I added 5 t. of yeast nutrient, 2 1/2 t. of acid blend, and 1 pkg of Pasteur Champagne Yeast (softened according to package directions) to the must.


According to the hydrometer, the specific gravity before fermentation is 1.053, with a potential alcohol by volume of 7%. We'll see. I put the airlock on but some people suggest that at the beginning of fermentation it should just be loosely covered so it doesn't explode. I'll check on it later today and see if it seems bubbly.

Supposedly, fermentation will end in 2-3 weeks. It sounds like using 750 ml champagne bottles and adding 1 1/2 t. of sugar before stopping and covering with a wire cap will allow for carbonation. Yum. Here's hoping for the best

New Strawberry Bed

I've been putting quite a few hours in each day to create this, our new 12'x17' strawberry bed. We're hoping that when it gets into full production 204 square feet of strawberries will fill even my strawberry desires and we won't have to buy a couple flats each year to supplement our own. Q's just grateful that we've gotten rid of even more grass. He's getting quite a postage stamp sized space left for mowing.
I'm going to plant every other row with the mother transplants and then I'll at least have a start for trying to keep a rotation going. Tricky though because I'm starting to think that about a 3 year rotation is perfect, since daughters seem to produce a little thin the first year but I'm told productivity starts decreasing at about 4-5 years.

I managed to pull one of the old raised beds and put it in its new home. Q's going to do some repair work before we fill it with dirt. I'm going to transplant the rhubarb there this fall. It's perfect timing since they're supposed to be split about every 4 years and mine was 5 this spring.
That funny little outcropping of the grass portion, almost central in the yard, is where we're thinking we need to put in some "feature" - maybe some stone thing that has a bench section and an indentation as a sort of bird bath. In our Inspector Gadget moments, we think it would be really cool to incorporate the sprinkler in there too, since it's so centrally located.

I pulled 12 snails out of the front flower bed this morning. The lucky ones got put in the trash. The unlucky ones got thrown into the street - where snails who invade my garden usually end up. Heartless, I know. they seem to just adore the lupines and the irises though.
To the left is where the bed frame used to be. I saved the bolting lettuce and drying peas that I'm trying to collect seed from. Removing the grass roots that had grown up into that bed before putting down that bark was quite tedious. I still haven't removed the grass infestation from the corner where the two paths meet. I'll have to do it soon. It looks silly.
Between the deadheading, removing some bolted plants, and having all the leavings from apple cider making lately, I started an impromptu compost pile, visible just past the path. After the strawberries get transplanted, I'll be able to move it to where it will permanently be located.
The incredible shrinking dirt pile, refilling the two beds will make quite a dent in it and the rest will likely get moved over onto the area where the grapes will eventually be. We'll be able to move it to where we want it from there as needed and will get our driveway back.
A volunteer parsnip came up in the path and I didn't have the heart to pull it. We'll see how he does. :)

Awesome links: Growing New Farmers and New Farms and Lawnmower People

Turnips

If you ever wondered what 6 1/2 pounds of diced turnip looks like, you now have your answer. I realized that those luxuriant turnip leaves are shading out my beloved parsnips, so I did a massive thinning yesterday. Some were huge and quite ready and a frost is not suggested for turnips like some other root veggies, so I figure we're in good shape. On top of these, I gave a few babies to a neighbor for a salad and boiled and mashed some for Q and I for lunch. Mmmmmmm.
One hears about the "turnip taste" but we thought they were just slightly sweet tasting mashers and will gladly eat them as such all winter - I'm already having visions of Thanksgiving dinner. All those blossoms for our sugar pumpkins are helping feed that fantasy as well. I love food.

Back to the turnips- I'm planning on using these in pasties for the freezer when the carrots and onions are ready. Seems like a great lunch idea. Like all traditional dishes, there are about a million and one recipes out there for Cornish pasties. I'm planning on taking the bits I like from all of them and making something like this for the filling...
1 lb. diced lean beef
4 c. diced turnip (replaced the potato with them since we didn't grow potatoes this year)
2 shredded carrots
2 c. diced onion
1/2 lb. diced mushrooms (yes, I know we don't grow these yet but they are so very yummy)
Saute all of that in butter, season with salt and pepper, and bake in pastry shells. Apparently, once they're cooled you can freeze them just like that.

In other news, I realized that I've got TWO very healthy, blossom-laden eggplants, not one, which means that I've been looking up ways to preserve eggplant. According to online wisdom it's best to make up the dish in advance and freeze it already cooked. Breaded, pan-fried sliced can be frozen for quick eggplant parmesan later. Ratatouille can also be made and frozen for quick meals later.

Forty pounds of Gravenstein apples make 3 gallons of sweet cider. They were a bit wormy so the juicing took quite a while today. We're going to make hard cider. We needed a blend, so we bought some red delicious from Washington today at the bulk food store to provide our "aromatic, low acid" counterpoint to what we already had. It takes 5 gallons to make a batch of hard cider. It looks like we have basically everything we need on hand from the blackberry wine making that didn't happen last summer, so final juicing happens this evening, followed by chemistry tomorrow. By my reckoning, we should still be able to use our second carboy for the first racking of a batch of blackberry wine and by the time we need the other carboy for the second wine racking the cider will be bottled and tucked away. I really hope it turns out. Hard cider and fruity wines are one of the little delights that I have that are so expensive that I always feel a bit guilty when I get them from the store.

Since the Gravensteins are free from a guy Q knows, we're going to hopefully go back and do a careful (fewer worm) picking to get some pie apples. We discovered today that they're really a delicious, tangy apple variety and should make good pie.

I've been collecting and laying down cardboard like mad to create the new strawberry bed as well. It's going to take up a large chunk of what was left of the front yard grass, about 150 sq. feet. I'm placing stepping stones throughout. I'm hoping to get all the dirt in in the next couple days before my parents come so 1) they can actually park in the driveway and 2) mom can help me transplant crowns, since they're done producing for the year. After those are moved, we can move the two old raised beds to their new homes and actually get our cinder block compost bins built. Busy busy busy.