This Week in Harvesting & Homesteading

Billy grew a watermelon! Actually, he grew a few, which is no small feat in Western Washington. The one pictured here is a 4-pound Sugar Baby. We also planted some Yellow Dolls, but have yet to harvest one. Our thrown-together hoop house seems to be the thing that has made the difference. Summers normally just aren't long enough or hot enough around here for watermelon, and we'd all but given up on ever being able to grow them, when... booyah, the hoop house delivered.

NOM!

Or maybe this was just a good year for cucurbits in general? Our cukes have never really produced a meaningful harvest, but this year.... whoa nelly! I've gone off the deep end a little with my pickling this year, most but not all of which has been cucumber pickles. So far I have 2+ gallons done and cooling their heels in the fridge, and just started 1 1/2 more gallons of sour dills fermenting today. The house of Jackson shall have a tangy miasma about it this Winter! ;)

Garlicky sour pickles in progress Day 1

I also processed another 50ish pounds of apples into juice/cider/critter food this week. My cranky shoulder is in a bad way right now from all the chopping, grating and schlepping around of produce, but, you know, I wouldn't have it any other way. Farm Wife 4 Life, yo!

Harvest Time 2014, Part 1

We were very late to pick our apples this year, and so haven't got nearly as much to show for our efforts as we have in years past, but we can chalk up at least one small victory - homemade hard cider.

Nothing warms a homebrew nerd's heart quite like the steady bloop-blooping of the airlock on a carboy of fresh-juiced cider. Some of this is destined to become apple cider vinegar, but at least a few pints will be enjoyed in it's hard form.

I also just harvested some of my breadseed poppies for use in baked goods and as an added exfoliant to our homemade goats milk soaps. This year I grew Elka White Seeded Poppies from Adaptive Seeds in Sweet Home, Oregon. Provided that I'd managed my garden better and not left it to it's own devices this Spring & Summer, I have no doubt that I'd have had a much bigger harvest. Even still, homegrown poppy seeds in any amount is pretty rad in my book.

I still have a lot of a lot of other things to harvest and sock away by one means or another. I've been a lactofermenting fiend this Summer! I already have sour pickles, dilly beans, sauerkraut and fermented ginger carrots done and in the fridge, but the cukes keep rolling in and the 'maters and tomatillos... I've yet to deal with those at all so far.

Harvest Time parts 2, 3, 705, etc., will follow in due course. We're raising half a dozen Muscovy ducks for the freezer this year, with a tentative harvest date of October 1st. Apparently slaughtering ducks is a whole different ballgame from harvesting chickens and turkeys, so I have a lot of research and prep to do before ducky d-day. We also may be harvesting one of this past Spring's wethers for the freezer. It depends, in part on whether or not they sell when the doelings move on.

There is certainly no shortage of things to do in the coming weeks and months, and having been otherwise occupied during the Spring and Summer, I look forward to doing (most of) them.

It's good to be back! :)

Fall Done Fell

In the space of a week we've gone from humidity, thunderstorms and 80 degree temps to falling leaves and pea soup fog in the mornings. Fall has arrived in Boggy Hollow, and with it, as ever, a nearly-endless list of stuff that needs doing, yesterday.

As a bit of strategery, I am posting my to-do list here in the hope that the threat of an on-the-record public shaming will serve as motivation for me to get my crap together and not, say, take a nap with my puppy.

Hope springs eternal.

Chelle's end of Summer/Fall To-Do list:

*Finish harvesting the garden - tomatoes, tomatillos, basil, lemon balm, garlic chives, runner beans, pumpkins, cylindrical beets, sunflowers, chamomile, calendula, breadseed poppies, Fall raspberries

*Forage - apples, crab apples, pears, walnuts, hazelnuts, hawthorn berries, rose hips, dandelion roots, mushrooms?

*Can/Freeze/Dehydrate - Spaghetti sauce, tomato paste, tomatillo salsa, pumpkin puree, hard cider (apple, pear, hawthorn, etc.), wine (rose hip, hawthorn, raspberry), egg noodles (using beets, basil, etc.), pumpkin ravioli, chamomile, lemon balm and calendula for tea and soapmaking, dandelion roots (for bitters), pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, beet chips, beet greens, compound herb butters (basil, lemon balm, garlic chive), Scarlet Runner beans, 3 "surplus" roosters, 2 tom turkeys.

*Ferment - Cider (for ACV), wine, sauerkraut

*Make - At least 2 more batches of soap - one with goat milk and one vegan, re-batch soap trimmings, knit at least 2 dozen more dishcloths and 6 pair of bike helmet earmuffs

*Set up/Organize - The new pantry/storage room shelving - oy. This will probably involve a trip to IKEA, better known in our family as the Yuppie Modular Cattle Chute from Hell. Uff da.

As if that weren't enough, in addition to my regular Mom duties, a friend and I are in the process of starting a new business that entails real estate deals, meetings with bankers, tons of market research, paperwork and spreadsheets out the wazoo and a big, fat, healthy dose of sheer panic. Good times!

So, there you have it. My next 12 weeks, chock-full of farm housewifferey (did I just invent that word?), lava-hot mason jars and self-imposed stress and deadlines. Hold my feet to the fire to get this stuff done, guys and gals, because that nap is looking better with each passing minute.

How to: Homemade Vinegar

Making homemade apple cider vinegar is as easy as…well, pie. Sure, it takes a little longer, but it also lasts a lot longer than that pie would have anyhow, and it doesn’t go to your hips. ;)


A jug if apple wine vinegar in process. The only difference between this and apple cider vinegar is the yeast that I used to initially ferment the apple juice into alcohol.

Although this process is easy-peasy, there is a term that you’ll see here that you might not be familiar with - “the mother” (or scoby, mushroom). This refers to the jellyfish-looking blob that resides in a “live” vinegar. It is in fact a cluster of cellulose and acetobacter bacteria, which love to eat the alcohol in your hard cider, and in return, produce acetic acid which gives vinegar its signature tang. The mother is your friend, and if you give her what she needs, you can keep a mother culture going indefinitely.
The quick and easy method for making your own Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV)-

You will need-
1 clean quart jar
3 cups hard apple cider
1 bottle of store-bought organic ACV with the “mother” (Bragg is the brand I use)
1 rubber band
8x8 piece of cheesecloth or muslin (folded in half and half again to be 4x4)
Patience

Clean and rinse your quart jar very thoroughly. Remember we’re setting up an environment for bacterial organisms to thrive in, but only the ones we want, so be sure to wash any lurking bad guys out of there first.

Pour your hard cider into the jar. Next, add ½ cup of the store bought ACV, including as much of the mother as possible.

Place your cheesecloth across the top of the jar and rubber band it into place, then store it in a dark, warm place. (Mine is in the back of the cupboard above my stove.)
Forget about it for at least 6 weeks.

I fish mine out of the cupboard and start “sniff” testing it after 6-8 weeks. The longer you let it go, the better, so long as your vinegar-in-progress doesn’t show any signs of being invaded by contaminants. If, upon checking in, you see no signs of the mother, re-inoculate your cider with still more of the store bought ACV and give it some more time. Usually, once the mother is well established, it is pretty easy to keep “her” happy with fresh infusions of alcohol. (On this method of placating mom, the mother and I are in hearty agreement.)

A taste test will let you know without a doubt whether or not your vinegar is done. For the seriously scientific, you can also purchase an acid testing kit (sold at wine & homebrew stores) to verify acidity. Most commercial food vinegars are diluted to about 5% acidity. My vinegar was closer to 6% and while still being totally safe to use, oh, what an eye-watering difference that 1% makes!

When your vinegar is done to your liking, strain the finished product (no more that ¾ of the jar’s worth) into yet another clean jar or bottle with a firm sealing lid. This is your finished product. Now, go back to your mother jar, and fill ‘er up again with your alcoholic spirit of choice, put the cheesecloth covering on and send her back to her dark and cozy hiding place for another couple of months. The rate of conversion from alcohol to vinegar is directly proportionate to the surface area of the mother, so age your cider-come-vinegar in the largest diameter vessel you can reasonably manage for a faster turnaround time.



A view of the mother in my rhubarb wine vinegar.

The taste of your homemade vinegar depends a lot on the taste and quality of the cider/wine/beer that you start with, so if you want to guarantee a great vinegar, splurge a little on a bottle of your favorite cider or wine. Or, if waste not, want not is more your speed, use the collected dregs from various bottles of wine or cider and give them a go with the mother. Why not?

We make our own wine, cider & beer here on our little farm, so we always have a ready supply for my vinegar experiments. I have made ACV and rhubarb wine vinegar with our homemade wine & cider. I’m looking forward to “vinegarizing” some dandelion and rosehip wines soon, and want also give malt vinegar a try with my husband’s home brewed stout, if I can ever manage to sneak a little away.

Additional tips –

*Use a glass or lead-free ceramic vessel for aging and storing your vinegar. Plastics can etch and harbor bacteria or leach funky flavors into your vinegar.

*I use a plastic screw-top lid on my finished vinegar, so as not to have corroded metal-flavored vinegar.

*A clean, folded kitchen towel or paper towel can be used in place of the muslin/cheesecloth, as long as air is able to pass back and forth through the cloth while your vinegar is converting. Mother needs to breathe!

Booze News, Winter 2011

As with many things, the passing of time since my last wine/beer post had escaped my notice, until today. I'd like to catch everybody up on what's brewing in the Hollow, so here is the rundown of what we've got working right now -

*2 Gallons of Rhubarb Wine (everyone's favorite) started on 10/31/10 -


Egads! The flash really highlights the lees. Time to rack these puppies!

*1 Gallon of Rose Hip Wine, started 2/13/10 -


I think we'll do one more racking, then bottle this, as it it nearing it's first birthday. ;)

*3 Gallons of Fuji Apple cider, started on 11/21/10 -


We had to juice something like 70 pounds of apples to get 3 gallons of juice. I'm not even kidding. We're calling this batch "my" batch, because I asserted dominion over it when I decided to use organic maple syrup for the sugar instead of regular ol' sugar. We've had small samples now and again, and I feel like this is turning out to be our best batch of cider so far.

*1 Gallon of Spiced Gala Apple cider, started on 11/21/10 -



This too was part of apple-a-thon twenty-ten. 20-25lbs of apples were required to make this gallon of cider. The apples were grown by my husband's friend, and were so beautiful that it was almost a shame to juice them! Bill added a few tablespoons of Trader Joe's mulling spices to this batch, just to try it. We haven't tasted this one yet, but it smells good!

*5 Gallons of Pilsner, dubbed "The Billsner", started on 10/30/10
No pictures for you! Actually, this has already been bottled and is now carbonating, so there's really not much to see.

*5 Gallons of "Bill's Best Bitter" (beer), started on 11/27/10 -
Again, no pictures. You didn't really expect beer to just hang around here, waiting for it's picture to be taken, did you? Actually Bill has bottled this Bitter and very generously gifted much of it to his friends and set the rest of it aside to finish carbonating.

The dandelion wine has been "sampled" here and there, and is probably our best wine yet in terms of body, flavor, the whole nine yards. Our grape wine is getting better with age too. It's not yet anything to write home about, but it's definitely a drinkable rosé for the unfussy palate.

For those of you interested in the recipes used to make these wines and beers - I intend to post them. I only hesitate because it takes a good year (sometimes more) from the time I start one of these batches until I can taste them properly and report on their quality. I don't want to pass on a bum recipe, and I'm always tweaking, so when I finally write the recipe up here, I'll include all of my hacks and suggestions and an honest review of whether or not any given brew is worth the trouble.

In the mean time, we'll continue juicing, brewing and bottling like fiends. Tipsy, cheerful fiends. Sláinte!

You win some, You lose some

That statement is particularly true of home brewing and wine making. Our homegrown cider seems to be fermenting well.


Note it's promising "krausen" as Billy, the beer snob would doubtless have me point out. ;)

Let's just hope that it keeps on keeping on and doesn't go funky. We unfortunately lost an entire 5-gallon batch of cider last year to some sort of mystery contaminant and had to compost the whole thing. Talk about heartbreak! I feel pretty confident that we will not face that same problem with this batch though, since we not only washed and dried our apples well, but also used a steam juicer rather than a fruit press to juice them, effectively pasteurizing the juice and hopefully, hopefully killing all the bad guys before adding our little yeasty friends.

So, we have 2 1/2 gallons of apple cider, 3 gallons of dandelion wine, 24 bottles of grape wine, 1 gallon of rose hip wine and 1/2 gallon of apricot schnapps to the good. Alas, we lost the blackberry wine this week.

It, like the others, had been somewhat neglected during our move. Somewhere along the way, something funky snuck in and messed it up. My first clue was a bit of white mold in the airlock. Though most of the home brewing websites that I googled said that a little mold in the airlock was no big deal, I'm not really one to gamble with food poisoning and/or going blind. So of course, I had Billy smell it. Our eventual conclusion was that it had probably turned to vinegar, which would have been fine if I could have been sure that it was safe to use. I wasn't, so it too ended up on the compost pile.

Drink up, little wormies!

Wine Time is Nigh

In spite of utter neglect on our part, our wines seem to have been doing just fine during their extended aging. The dandelion is good, very good according to Bill, who has both a sensitive palate and an iron stomach, and is therefore usually the first one to try anything home brewed.

At almost 5 months old, the dandelion was only just sampled and racked to age for another few months before being bottled. Oh the anticipation!

The grape wine (variety unknown) finally reached it's first birthday, and was therefore bottled and laid aside to age further.



Annnd in goes the cork!



The grape is one of my favorites so far, but Bill finds it kind of hum-drum. It is a dark rosé color and reminds me of a lower-shelf white merlot. It's nothing to write home about, but most grape wines aren't until they're at least 2 years old, according to what I've read. I can wait... I think.



Or not. Cheers!

Appliciousness

My apples are ripe! My apples are ripe! At least as far as I can tell, they are.

Besides hardness, how does one determine the ripeness of an apple? I figure that since they are essentially leaping off of one of my trees, that at least that tree must be ready to go. And so I picked a few today, 5 pounds worth, which didn't even make a dent in that side of that tree. I'm excited for this harvest. This quantity of apples is a wonderful gift for many reasons. They will become applesauce, fruit leather, snacks for the bunnies, and more. But I have to admit that the one apple incarnation that stands head and shoulders above the rest is Bill's hard cider. Some have described Bill's cider as strong. Some have gone so far as to call it hallucinogenic. It packs a punch.

So as soon as we acquire either a steam juicer or a fruit press, we'll have ourselves a little harvest-fest and crank through some apples. And a few months after that - hopefully by Christmas - we'll be knocking back some Boggy Hollow cider. :)

Recipe: Rose Hip Wine

Has it really only been 6 weeks since I started this wine? It has gone through a lot in that time, and is nearing the drinkable, if still rough stage. As promised, the recipe follows-

Rose Hip Wine - Makes 1 Gallon

-1 1/2 lbs rose hips, well washed, cut in half & crushed*
-2 1/4 lbs sugar
-1/2 pkg Montrachet yeast
-1 tsp yeast nutrient
-2/3 cup fresh squeezed orange juice (minus the pulp, if possible)
-1 tsp citric acid
-1 tsp pectic enzyme

Put the crushed hips and sugar into your primary fermenter (I use a food-grade bucket) and cover with 2 quarts of water. Allow to sit for 24 hours.

Mix wine yeast, yeast nutrient and orange juice in a small container with a tight-fitting lid (a jar or plastic glad-ware type container work well.) Shake well to combine. Let stand at room temperature for a few hours until the mixture begins to look bubbly. Add this mixture (your "yeast starter") to the must (the mash that is currently in your primary fermenter.)



Add the remaining ingredients and give it a good stir. Allow it to ferment for a week. At the end of the week, strain out the solids and pour the liquid into your secondary fermenting vessel (I use a glass gallon jug.) Top up the jug with water if necessary to make one full gallon. Top your jug with an airlock to continue to let the wine ferment and bubble away without blowing the bottle to smithereens. Re-rack (siphon wine into a new, sterilized vessel) every 3 months or so until the wine is clear and the vast majority of the yeast sediment has settled out and been discarded.**


After a week in the secondary fermenter, quite a bit of the yeast has died off and the wine is ready to be racked.

Age the wine for as long as you can bear not to drink it. In our house, it doesn't usually have a chance to reach it's first birthday, though we're trying to exercise a little more self-control in that department. ;)

If you have any questions about the recipe or about wine making in general, drop me a line and I'll help if I can. Though I bought all of my equipment locally, for wine making supplies online, you can check out grapestompers. They seem to have a pretty good selection, and their prices are comparable to what I've paid.

*I actually used 1lb, 4oz of rose hips and 4oz of diced Golden Delicious apple to make up for the shortage of hips. ;)

**I totally encourage you to compost your dregs and must solids once you are done with them. The yeast will do wonders for your compost heap.

Roses and Wine

Actually, it was roses in wine on this particular Valentines Day. We strained and racked the rose hip wine today. Here it is going into the bottle, in which it will continue to ferment and clear over the next three months -



The color was pretty surprising since I was expecting a pinkish-orange brew, rather than the o.j. color that we ended up with. It just goes to show you never know with chemistry...



But the thing that you're probably most interested to hear about is the taste, and I'm pleased to say that both the wine's taste and smell (or should I say bouquet?) are quite good, even at this very early stage. It has a light, sweet apple/pear flavor that reminds me of a very light version of a hard cider, but with - at this stage- a very yeasty kick. I'm always impatient when it comes to drinking my finished wine, but this one has me counting the days 'til we can pour a glass. :)

Rose Hip Wine - Day 3

"Ferm, baby, ferm! Vino inferno! Ferm, baby, ferm - makin' al-kee-hall..."



I know it looks a little scary, but we're just 2 days away from straining out all of the chunkage and moving this yumminess into a jug to continue fermenting. This is my first non-fruit wine, so I am both excited and nervous to taste this. Provided that the first sip doesn't kill me, I'll keep you posted on it's progress.

Hippy Wine

After much dawdling, I finally got around to starting my first gallon of rose hip wine today. I've actually had these rose hips in the freezer for a while, being that I was 4 ounces shy of the amount required for the recipe that I wanted to use. Not able to ever lay my hands on more, I decided to make up the 4 ounce difference with the rose hip's botanical cousin, an apple.



I sliced, crushed, sugared and added water to these lovely hips (and half a yellow delicious apple) and set them to steep in the primary fermenter for 24 hours. Tomorrow I'll pitch the yeast and in a few days we'll see what we see. If this batch works out, I'll post the recipe here along with my fudges and observations.

On a related note, the hubby is starting another batch of beer today as well - a Czech/German Pilsner, he tells me, as if I'd have any idea at all what that meant. I figure that between our parallel booze brewing efforts, we will have a few lovely intoxicants to imbibe in the months and years to come.

Welcome Home (Yeastitarium)

Just back from our all too brief, and nearly fruitless expedition to the coast to dig clams, the hubby and I find ourselves scrambling to catch up on all of those little projects and chores which have fallen by the wayside during the holidays. Always first on Billy's list, his beer.

Here we have a montage of Bill's brewing efforts to date, minus the ill-fated brown ale.

L to R - 5 gallons "Amber Honey Lager", 1 gallon "Imperial Stout", 1 gallon "Blueberry Honey Ale"

Bill is bottling all 5 gallons of the Amber Honey Lager tonight. Good thing we've been saving our beer bottles and mooching would-be recycled glass vessels from our friends too, because this batch will yield approximately 4 cases of beer, aka 48 bottles of bubbly happiness.

Besides the beerfest, we've also got a few wines still going. The 5 gallons of grape wine (we're not sure of the variety, but are assuming it's something in the vein of "Concord") made from our own homegrown grapes, is about 3 months old now. Taste-wise, it is still in the "hooch" phase, as in, technically alcoholic, but not exactly pleasant to drink. From what I've read about concord grape wine, it takes at least a year to be decent, and is actually quite respectable by two years old. We'll see...

We've also got one gallon of blackberry wine working and whoa nelly is that stuff strong! Like strip the paint off your walls strong. I'm not sure if that one is going to ever be potable or if it's headed toward vinegar or maybe cooking wine.

We bottled the rhubarb and cherry wines a few months back and have been drinking them and sharing them with friends. They are pretty darn good, in my biased and inexpert opinion, especially the rhubarb, which is essentially a dessert wine. We'll be sure to make more of that next year, since we have a HUGE rhubarb plant that provides us with more fruit than we've ever known what to do with.

Besides all of the alcohol, we have the ever-present Amish bread starter on the counter, fermenting away. I popped the lid off this afternoon to give it a stir and accidentally inhaled a bit of the escaping gasses. My head swam! And I feed this stuff to my kids?

The end result of this ferment-a-thon (besides the smell of hops, malt & yeast snaking their way through the main floor of our house) is tasty organic wines & beers that cost just pennies per serving and come in wild and crazy flavors that you probably couldn't find anywhere else. We have really enjoyed this home brewing experiment and look forward to spring and summer, and turning all of the fruits & flowers that we can lay our hands on into still more tasty beverages. We're thinking of attempting to add mead or melomel to our repertoire next. YUM.

Sauerkraut Update

As a first time sauerkraut maker, and someone who does not personally appreciate the flavor of sauerkraut, it is up to my husband to sample ours to determine it's progress. In Bill's own words - "It smells like death, but it tastes awesome!" I'm going to go ahead an consider that a positive review.

Sauerkraut für doof Leute

I don’t speak German, which is probably very obvious to those of you who do, considering my hastily translated title; roughly, Sauerkraut for Dummies (That’s me!). Even so, I am proud to be of German heritage. My great-great grandparents emigrated from the town of Chemnitz, coming to this country in the 1880’s and settling amongst many of their countrymen and women in northern Minnesota. Over a century later and several states west of where they started, our family is trying to recover some of our German family history and traditions. Project number one – sauerkraut.

After doing a little research on making sauerkraut, I was pleased to find that the process was relatively simple. In fact, I found that I already had everything that I’d need, minus the cabbage, already in the kitchen, owing to my zeal for winemaking and canning. Here’s what it takes –

-Cabbage (or carrots, turnips, apples, etc. – kraut is a process, not a specific food)
-Canning salt
-A good sized crock with a lid (I used my 6-gallon food grade wine bucket instead. You can pick one up at any homebrew store.)
-Kitchen scale

That’s it. Seriously! The recipe/process that I used is an amalgam of the many recipes I found in books and online, with a generous sprinkling of advice from my far more experienced sauerkraut-making friends at KitchenGardeners.org. Essentially, you clean and core your cabbage, and slice or grate it as thinly as possible (we cut sliced ours with knives, but kraut cutters or mandolines are also good options), with one recipe calling for the cabbage shreds to be as thin as a quarter. Weigh your shredded cabbage as you go, adding roughly 1.5 tsp of canning salt per pound of cabbage. The salt will soften the cabbage and cause it to release much of its liquid, thus creating the brine in which the cabbage will ferment.

At this point, you’ll begin putting your cabbage and brine into your crock or bucket. It will likely take a little muscle to get the cabbage really jammed down into your container tightly, well below the level of the brine (4-5 inches is recommended), for which some folks employ a pounder our a stout mallet. My husband just punched and pressed ours down with his fists. After beating your cabbage into submission, a plate and weight must then be placed inside your fermentation container to hold the cabbage down, lest it float around and encourage funky molds to grow. We used a large salad plate that is just a little smaller around than the inside of our bucket, topped with a very heavy stoneware bowl for weight. Slap a lid on that puppy and you’re done. Mother Nature then steps in and if all goes well, fermentation begins. We are only on day 3 of our kraut, so I have no results to report at this point, but we are checking it daily for signs of progress or distress. No scary smells or mold, so I’m optimistic that we will have some edible sauerkraut in around 4-6 weeks. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

In the mean time, here are a few pics of our cabbages’ journey thus far, from field to bucket, with more to come as things move along.