Winemaking 101

Wow -- today I finally did it. I started a batch of wine. I've been thinking about it for a couple of years: I even bought the stuff about this time last year, but I just kept putting it off and putting it off. Right now, I feel like I just sat through a 3-hour chemistry exam. But I learned so much! Like how to use a hygrometer and how to convert Imperial gallons to US gallons. And that a liter and a quart are quite close in volume. And that fermentation takes place best at 70-75 degree F.

I used frozen blueberries from last summer's crop. The recipe specified that frozen blueberries work really well, as the freezing and thawing process pierces the skin of the blueberry, which is necessary for making blueberry wine.

Now, I only have to wait somewhere around 15 months to see how it turns out! I figure this wine will be ready to drink somewhere around April 2010. That's quite a wait, but we should have wine before we have asparagus, and asparagus before we have apples from the newest apple trees. That's part of why I call it "Garden for Life"!

Hunting & Gathering

Since today was cold and windy, I went hunting and gathering with Skye rather than gardening. What did we find on our mission? Well, we found wine-making supplies at The Home Brewery for my first foray into wine-making, using frozen blueberries from last year's crop (more on that tomorrow).

Our next stop was Hobby Lobby, where we found two garden-related treasures on the 80% markdown Christmas shelves: tree lights and broken candy canes. Yes, both those items are gardening treasures! The strings of 7-watt tree lights (indoor-outdoor) will help keep my hoop-beds warms after first frost next year. If all goes well, we'll have tomatoes and peppers until the weather gets really cold. And the candy canes? This, I have to admit, was Skye's idea. We're going to make mint chocolate chip ice cream with the broken candy canes! And just how does that translate into a gardening treasure? Ever since I read Phelan's recipe for mint extract last summer over at A Homesteading Neophyte, I've wanted to make some. Combine next summer's mint crop with Skye's broken candy canes, and we'll have some fine ice cream! (Although we plan to use mini-chocolate chips this year, as we think that will improve the recipe.)

Third came Harp's, our local grocery store. There Skye and I had a long discussion about how we see the produce section so differently these days. We got Red Delicious apples for Love, and Skye asked if she could get some Granny Smiths. She admitted that she had sworn she would never eat another grocery store apple after tasting our Fujis last fall, but she misses apples. And the fujis we have left are past the eating stage. In fact, I've spent the afternoon processing the last of those into applesauce. No more homegrown fruit for us until the blueberries ripen in June. :(

Our last stop was Target, where I finally bought myself a salad spinner. It's plastic and cheap, but I thought I try out a cheap model before sinking money into a better one. With leaf lettuce and mustard the only things in our garden these days, I've been washing and drying a lot of green stuff. I'm hoping the new salad spinner will improve my processing of these precious fresh veggies!

A successful foraging trip, I must say!

Not Quite What I Was Planning

"Work for money; garden for life."

So goes my six-word memoir. Check out other six-word memoirs at Smith Magazine's Not Quite What I Was Planning.

Resolutions....

New Year's Day was Thursday, but here at The Realm, the "real" New Year begins tomorrow. Skye will be back at school -- she's ready -- and I will be back at work -- surprisingly, I am, too! Love started a new job last Monday, so he will be heading off the place tomorrow, too. Each day we will all make our ways in the world, and return home in the evening to our haven, the place where we trust everybody and know that everybody loves us. The animals will welcome us home: the dog will dance and the cats will raise their heads and glance our way (maybe).

I have menus planned through March 14 -- Spring Break. Yes, it's obsessive. No, I won't follow it every day. But the hardest part of cooking for me is to decide what to prepare with enough lead time to be able to get it ready. If I don't plan meals ahead of time, I'm planning them in the parking lot as I leave work. When I was a classroom teacher, I avoided parking-lot planning. Why should I inflict it on those I love most?

Skye reminded me that my New Year's Resolution last year was to feed my family better, and that it was really nice for a couple of months because we came home from school to supper in the crockpot lots of days, and I made salads and bread on the weekend to enjoy during the week. I really think that's a resolution worth repeating, but I'm tweaking it for this year. Here goes:

I resolve to feed my family better in 2009 by
1. Planning meals in advance and do some food prep on the weekends
2. Growing more of our own fruits & vegetables
3. Getting chickens so we can have fresh eggs (& because I promised Skye 2 years ago!)
4. Serving good meals so Love & I snack less (I'll bet you can guess why that's important!)

So resolved!

Winter Lettuce

This winter, for the first time, I built a temporary coldframe. Six bales of straw, a doubled sheet of 4-mil plastic sheeting, and four boards --- and, viola! I've been amazed at the difference it has made. The pictures above are lettuce planted about the same time. The picture on the left is in my cold frame, the one on the right is in an open bed. We had a salad with fresh lettuce on New Year's Eve. Yesterday, we had mustard from the cold frame. This is definitely a practice I will continue. I had no idea that this little bit of shelter would make such a difference. We have had temperatures in the single digits already this winter. The worst damage to the protected plants happened while we were gone to Texas last weekend. We got 1 2/10" rain, which crushed the plastic against the plants in spots. More than 24 hours of that was pretty rough on the plants. While I do have two crossbars (tomato stakes) to help keep the plastic off the plants, this is definitely a refinement I will need to work on for next year. But I've already declared this experiment a success!

2008 Wrap-up

As we head into the new year, I'm archiving my 2008 Pantry List. My goal for 2009 is to double the amount of food I preserve.

applesauce: 18 pts
bell peppers, frozen: 1 gallon plus 1 pt
blackberry jelly: 3 cups
blackberry syrup: 2 cups
blueberries, frozen: 2 gallons (some for winemaking)
blueberry jam: 14 cups (plus 6 cups w/ friends)
blueberry syrup: 4 cups
caramel apple jam: 5 1/2 cups
grape jelly: 6 half-pints (from Tx grapes)
jalapeno pepper rings, pickled - 2 pints
jalapeno peppers, frozen: 6 1/2 pts
pepper jelly (green): 3 cups plus 5 half-cups
pepper jelly (red): 3 cups plus 5 half-cups
pepper relish, 7 pts
praline syrup: 3 cups plus 3 pts
raspberry jam: 7 cups

Another Year Older...

Yesterday was my birthday. As Love headed off to work, he admonished me to not work all day, to take some time for myself. So I did. I dug a trench and set out the asparagus plants I hauled home from Bro's home near Ft. Worth this weekend. The soil is awesome! All that work Love put into the raised beds this fall really shows. I hope the plants do OK moving them in December. Bro didn't think it would be a problem, and he's usually right. Sister called while I was setting them out to wish me a happy b-day. She asked me if it was true that you can control grass and weeds in asparagus by using salt water. I told her that Bro says you can, and I've never asked him anything about growing anything that he didn't know. We both agreed that he is pretty amazing, but then, he DOES have a degree in agriculture!

If all goes well, we should harvest asparagus in the spring of 2011. The books I consulted yesterday say that I should be able to judiciously harvest a few stalks as early as this spring, but I think I'll practice patience and let the plants build vigor before I start harvesting. That's what Bro recommends.

I got some great presents for my birthday: books, jewelry, kitchen stuff. I have a feeling that the item I will get the most use out of will be a book from Love (which I put on my wish list after borrowing it from our public library): Seed-Starting Primer and Almanac, edited by Vicki Mattern. I plant to start vegetables indoor for the first time this year, and I think this will be a great guide. I can hardly wait to get started!

"Snow" Day

Skye and I are home today, as school is cancelled for our first "snow" day of the season. I got up this morning, made coffee, put veg soup in the crock pot, poured myself a cup and sat down to read my morning blogroll, poured Love a cup and took it to him, snuggled in beside him for a moment to watch the weather forecast. Imagine my surprise that school was cancelled! It is cold (17F this morning, and that is COLD for us!), and there are ice pellets on the ground, but I was still surprised that we had no school. But I must say, I am always thankful when the buses stay home and the teenagers aren't out driving on iffy roads. And I could certainly use a catch-up day this close to Christmas. But in the back of my mind, a little voice says, "Yes, you get to stay home today, but next June, you'll be one day later getting those longed-for gardening days. It's pay now, or pay later." But, today, it feels like a gift.

So, what have we been up to?
Me:
1. Made a batch of jelly from frozen grape juice my sister-in-love brought me all the way from Texas. Two summers ago, Bro, Skye, and I picked the wild grapes on a roadside near their home near Ft. Worth. We brought grapes home and made jelly, which Skye declared the best jelly for PB&J ever! I told Bro, who went back and picked every grape he could reach -- it was late in the season and they were just going to waste. G juiced them -- which is always the hardest part of jelly-making -- and froze them for us.
2. Tried homemade blueberry muffin recipe #2. This one featured brown sugar, sour cream, and oatmeal, but it's not that elusive perfect blueberry muffin recipe, either.
3. Cracked a bowl of pecans with the rocket cracker for picking out later. I did this on the back porch after Skye ran me out of the kitchen with a top secret project on her mind.
4. Made a batch of Buck's Pralined Pecans. They are wonderful and fill the "sweet" spot for the three toasted pecan recipes I set out to find this winter: salty, sweet, and spicy hot.
5. Made another batch of praline syrup: dark Karo, water, brown sugar, pecans, & vanilla. Verrry disappointing. Uses too much Karo for what it makes, so it's expensive. And it's a lot of work for what you get out of it. I made a single batch yesterday and got 3 half-pint jars. I was going to quadruple the recipe today, but a large bottle of Karo makes only 2 batches, so that is all I made. I got 3 pints, and I'm worried that the headspace is too deep. I will probably keep the pints, so I can monitor the quality, and give the half-pints as gifts.

Skye:
1. Wrestled with the printer to print her short story that is now due tomorrow morning. I keep thinking she will learn not to wait until the morning to print her assignments, but it hasn't sunk in yet. -- Skye tells me that she printed her story last night. She tried to print gift labels this morning.
2. Packaged jellies and jams from this summer's canning as teacher gifts. Dropped them into jar-sized tins we bought at the Lobby two years ago after Christmas for 90% off, then attached hand-made tags.
3. Made a top-secret gift for her mom.
4. Set up the snow village in our living room.

Still to come:
1. Me: Bookkeeping. (boo! hiss!)
2. Skye: Piano & clarinet practice.
3. Both: Top-secret gift-making.

Pecan Bonanza

Across the back of our property are two rows of pecan trees, 18 trees in all planted by Jasper & Pearl, our next-door-neighbors who once owned this property. Some years the harvest is better than others, but this year we are having a pecan bonanza. What a year for me to vow to let no pecans go to waste! I've been considering standing at the four-way-stop down the road and handing bags to motorists. This weekend alone, I picked up 45 pounds of pecans.

The blow we got off Hurricane Ike earlier this year left countless pecans on the ground. I can't imagine the crop if those pecans had matured as well. However, my brother suggested that perhaps the pecans are larger because they were thinned somewhat. Perhaps he's right. Pearl, my 87-year-old neighbor, says her daddy always said that if it rained on June 29th, there would be no pecans. When I asked her if that was true, she said yes, because rain at that time of year knocks off the blooms that develop into the pecans.

My mother always let the pecans "dry" in shallow pans before storing them. I set out to find out if that was indeed necessary. According to a website from the Agriculture Department at LSU, pecans should be air-dried in shallow containers for two weeks before storing them, unshelled, in bags. Love will be so glad that I actually explain why we have endless flats of pecans sitting around, instead of just saying, "Well, that's what Mother always did...."

And just what are we doing with all these pecans? I've invited friends to come pick up pecans. I've given pecans to friends and neighbors. We hauled pecans south at Thanksgiving. We've been toasting them and taking them in our school & work lunches as snacks. Today I made praline syrup. I was a bit disappointed that I got only 3 8-oz jars from the batch, but I plan to make more. I also made caramel popcorn with pecans. We plan to work on perfecting a "millionaire" candy, and, of course, we'll make pralines. My brother in Texas has requested I save some in the shells for him; he says the pecan crop there is short this year. I'm picking up pecans in my dreams these days....