What I Did This Summer

 In honor of the old-school first week back to school writing assignment, I present to you my (more outline style than final copy style) report on What I Did This Summer. (Caveat: I did a lot more, but this post is pretty much just those things I did that I didn't really post about here during the summer.)

>Rode horses (Poetess and the LBM) 5-6 times each week, with the exception of a week or two where I only rode 3 times.

>Kept the garden weeded and watered.  YAY!  After having the last two summers where my health was s**t in one way or another and subsequently the garden went to s**t, it was a major goal of mine to keep up with caring for the garden this year.  I did it!!  Not to say there wasn't ever a single weed in the garden, or that there aren't some out there now, but I kept them under control and they neither went nuts nor crowded out and smothered my veggie crops.  Good job, Me!

>Visited a couple of the newer 'farm markets' that have sprung up in my area in the last handful of years.  Their schtick, mostly, is 'local'/made in Michigan products and produce.  While I didn't really buy anything at either one (kinda disappointed in the 'farm' product aspect and didn't see any veggies or herbs I needed--desperately seeking fresh dill heads being the impetus for the visits), I got a new perspective on how bougie DH and I live.  I mean, looking at the prices on the 'artisan' handmade breads, the 'gourmet' packages of seasoning mixes, the artisan pickled veggies, I  a) was surprised at how much this stuff that I make as a matter of course goes for at retail and b) realized that a lot of what we are so used to that we take for granted is unique and custom made to a whole lot of people.  I may work my tushie off, but I'm blessed.

>Finally (after years of failed attempts) kept flowers in containers alive at my front porch!!  Yay Me!  I have tried, every year for at least 10, to have flowers on/at my front porch.  And every year, I start off good, but somewhere along late June, I just can't keep up with remembering to water them (or, DH and I go away with grandkids on vacation) and, well, that's the end of that.  Fried, crispy, dead dead dead flowers.  Not so this year!  This year I DID IT! What's kind of funny is that some of the pots I didn't get planted with the flowers I'd wanted.  Somehow, instead, I found morning glories sprouting in them.  Morning glories are fine with me. And ironically, when I purposely try to plant morning glories I don't get much germination, but these, 'wild' seeds that fell into the pots of soil I had sitting awaiting me to put in flower transplants, they sprouted dozens of little plants and soon were trying to vine their way up the balusters of the front steps.

>Went strawberry picking for the first time in several years and without other family members for the first time ever.  It was way faster and more convenient (schedule-wise) than going with others, but I have to say it lacked in the fun factor a little.

>Went to five (or was it six) free local concerts with DH.  While it took some effort to get our dinner made and eaten on time, and the horses' dinner prepped and them in their stalls early in order to get to the concerts by the time they started, it was a nice experience to 'take the evening off' so many times.

>Made a couple of recipes I'd been wanting to for a long time, but kept putting off because I felt like I should 'save' them for when we would be having company (but then those company plans would get changed).  Finally, I decided to do them for me.  The first was summer-themed sugar cookies that I decorated with colored sugar before baking rather than frosting after they were baked.  I made (and saved because so much!) the colored sugar for these.  The second was Scotcheroos (no pictures of those).

>Picked (and ate, no preserving!)  mulberries, black raspberries, raspberries and blackberries growing around the property at this little place here.  They made a yummy addition to my typical breakfast of yogurt and granola.  I also made a batch of mulberry muffins which was basically taking a blueberry muffin recipe and substituting mulberries for the blueberries.

>Took random pictures of wildlife I happened by in my day to day living.

And that, with the exception of maybe one or two more things that will get their own dedicated post, is what I did this summer.

How about you?  What things that maybe weren't momentous or impress-the-world worthy did you do this summer?

That's a Wrap

I am done with pickles for the year.

The cucumber vines started dying off week before last, and I finally picked everything over about 1.5" long and pulled the vines yesterday.  Today I canned the last batch of dill pickles.  There's some 'regular' sized pickles in each jar, and a ton of little dinky ones.

This brought the total pickles made to 15 quarts and 7 pints. Typically I don't put pickles in pints, but since I wasn't sure how the harvest would be this year, I did.  Each day I canned, if I was short on cukes to fill another quart, I used a pint jar rather than not pickle the 'extras' at all.  DH will probably eat a whole pint in one sitting.

Not a banner year, for sure, but considering that I had to buy cucumbers to pickle last year, and in 2023 I didn't get even half this number of jars, I'm pretty happy with it.

Any Given Saturday

 Last Saturday, I was (again) home alone for the majority of the weekend.  While there were some 'must dos' on my list for the day, I decided to, for the most part, tackle whatever I felt like doing around those have to do items.  For funsies, I kept a list of everything I did that day.  (Well, not everything, as I obviously didn't record bathroom breaks or brushing my teeth and hair, getting dressed, etc).

Anyway, if you're bored interested, here's what my Saturday looked like on that given day:

I fed horses their breakfast.

I fed myself my breakfast: a couple pieces of ham (I'd put small baggies of 2-4 slices of ham into a gallon sized freezer bag and put them in the freezer last year for such purposes as this) and two chocolate chip pancakes (also from the freezer, leftover from last time the grandkids spent the night).

Then I boiled six eggs and when they were done in the hot water and ready for their cold soak, I 

-went out and turned out horses

-cleaned stalls

-replaced the grossly-full-after-less-than-a-month fly ribbons hanging above the horse stalls

Also before noon, I was able to 

-clean past-their-edible-phase fruits and veggies and non-meat leftovers from the fridge and put them in the compost bucket, which I dumped in the compost bin out by the garden

-clean out the still sorta edible (like not moldy or slimy or gross) but I wasn't going to eat it things like shriveled blueberries, leftover peas (I'd already had some of the peas twice that week), and overripe watermelon from the fridge and give it to the chickens, which I let out of their coop at that time.

-wash and hang two loads of laundry on the clothesline 

-ran down the road to look at some hay I'd been offered to buy off the wagon after it was baled later that day (same family that does my hay was cutting and baling a neighbor's field about two miles away)

-rinsed my cucumbers that had been doing a limewater soak the three times rinsing and resoak in clean water 1 hour each time called for by my go-to customized dill pickle recipe

-set up the canner to heat the water to a boil and also set up another pot with the vinegar, water, canning salt and turmeric brine to simmer.

Then I fed myself lunch, which was two more pieces of ham from that breakfast baggie and some thin-sliced smoked gouda cheese made into a grilled ham and cheese sandwich on homemade bread with about a dozen sweet cherries on the side.

Wow!  I was kind of amazed when I looked at my documented activities from the morning.  Not bad.  I actually had done a lot and wasn't feeling tired/overworked yet.  So I continued after lunch.

I made deviled eggs with three of those hard boiled eggs I'd cooked that morning; the other three eggs I left for eating on salad in the coming days.

I peeled and sliced some short but fat cukes from the garden and made them into refrigerator pickles for DH to enjoy after he returned home on Sunday.

I canned dill pickles made from those cucumbers I'd limed the night before and rinsed that morning.  Three quarts and one pint worth.

While waiting on the canner, I emptied the dishwasher of clean dishes, swept the mudroom and kitchen, and vacuumed the living and dining rooms plus DH's home office.

After that I tallied up how much it had cost to raise the broiler chickens this year.  DS2 and DD1 each had wanted me to raise a few for them with promises that they'd reimburse me the costs of each bird they took.  I was unhappy to find that it cost me $18 per bird--although each bird weighed between 5 & 6 pounds after processing--because my original guesstimate based on last year's costs was only $13-14 per bird.  That extra $3 per bird processing fee having to not use my planned on processor really was a hit.  All the other price increases--like on feed and the purchase price of the chicks themselves--were tiny compared to that.

Plus, I also

-moved a dresser we don't need/use from the upstairs down to the garage so I can get rid of it (will list on local free pages)

-emptied the water in the dehumidifier

-weeded the four rows of peppers in the garden and 4 of the 6 rows of cucumbers

-walked to the mailbox and got the mail

-fed myself dinner of a salad and a protein bar (too hot to feel hungry)

By then it was time to bring in the horses and feed them their dinner.  Once that was done, I

-picked beans, cucumbers and zucchini

-made a chocolate zucchini cake

-loaded the dishwasher

-shut in chickens and gathered eggs

-sat on the porch swing and read Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts while listening to cicadas singing in the nearby trees

--ate a big hunk of zucchini cake still warm from the oven (YUM!)

 And that was what I did with my Saturday.

Hey, What, It's August?!?

 For the last several weeks, most days if you asked me what day it was I would tell you the wrong one.  Usually a day or two ahead of what it actually was.  This week, for example, Tuesday felt like Thursday all ready to me.  So on Thursday I was sure it was Saturday, and yesterday I almost put horses out an hour early so I could change my clothes and get ready for church.  Except it was Friday, not Sunday, and thank goodness I realized it in time before I got myself all gussied up. (Which, honestly isn't very gussied but does usually involve a dress or skirt, earrings, and not having my hair in a ponytail. LOL)

While yesterday may not have been Sunday, it was the first day of August.  All ready!  

Well, no wonder I'm starting to feel a) burnt out on gardening and b) like my house needs to be gutted and thoroughly cleaned and c) like I need to run away and go somewhere relaxing!  

As the sole caretaker of the animals and the garden as well as the person in charge of all things food at this little place here, summer is not a time when I laze around, take vacations, and generally wonder what to do with my time.  Summer is like full speed ahead, balls to the wall, hit the ground running every morning and don't sit down until dark every night.  Not that I don't hit the ground running every morning all year long (I suspect this is a habit I really should change to be a bit more relaxing and warm up to the new day kind of lifestyle), but in summer with it's long hours of daylight that's 14+ hours a day 7 days a week of not sitting down with the exception of eating meals (and church on Sunday).  And, like the hit the ground running morning ritual, meals typically are not a long time of sitting, more like the minimum seat time necessary for refueling and then I'm squealing tires out of pit row and back into the race.

You know, the fact that DH doesn't adhere to the same seasonal extra-work-can't-leave-home schedule and has been gone (*ahem* playing in the name of taking various family members on canoe and kayak float trips) most weekends since the middle of June probably doesn't help with my glut of work that keeps me from sitting and relaxing.  Or taking even a day off to recharge myself somewhere that I'm not responsible for making sure 36 mouths have enough to eat (20 young chickens, 9 adult chickens, 4 horses, 1 cat, DH and myself)  and that the garden isn't shriveling up from lack of rain/watering or getting overrun in weeds that smother my veggie crops and that the dishes get washed and laundry gets done and put away and bills are paid and the floors aren't too gritty or the furniture too dusty or the trash too stinky before it gets taken out to the bin. . .

I'm all for making hay while the sun shines, but you know, I need to include down time for enjoying while the sun shines, not months from now when it's chilly and damp and icky outside.  I like sunshine. I love sunshine.  That's part of why I practically live outside in the summer months; I can't pull myself indoors away from the sunshine so I go whole hog on outdoor work.  Do I need to raise our own meat birds?  Perhaps I could, in coming years, buy them from a local person raising them.  Do I need to grow as much as possible in a quarter-acre garden and tend it by myself?  And then be the only one harvesting and preserving the bounty?  While some of that is a yes because of my dietary needs (ie avoiding a lot of additives in food from the stores), maybe we should do some budget shuffling to procure the same good food from someone else.

And then there's the whole point b) gut the house thing. . . Housekeeping is not my favorite task.  And, when I'm outside all day, housekeeping is reduced to the bare minimums.  Which, by this time in the summer, means that the inside of my house is driving me nuts because no one else here takes care of it (lookin' at you, DH, who's idea of tidying is to every few weeks stack things in piles for me to take care of).  When the weather changes and I'm forced indoors in a few months, I really don't want to be in a cluttered mess of a place.  Housekeeping fairy, where are you? I could use a visit from your magic wand. . .

Which leads me to c) wanting to run away.  The urge to take a day trip is getting stronger.  I need to wait until after this week--broiler chickens are meeting their doom going to freezer camp--and find a farm care person who is willing to not just do feeding and turnouts but also clean stalls (DH adamantly refuses to help with stalls) and then I think I going to run a few hours away and do some beachside rockhounding.  Still outdoors, but no garden weeds or chores in sight, and while it's still August, i.e. summer, i.e. sun shining!

Meanwhile, let me offer you a sampling of photos of things going on at this little place here lately.  If it weren't for the fact that phones these days are practically never separate from our bodies, and that phones have cameras, I probably wouldn't have any pictures of my life to remember summers by.  Hence, this collection of things that caught my eye, or I thought about sharing as I've gone about my busy days.

the tomato patch, with grape arbor in the background

friendly neighborhood cat (not my cat, therefore not a mouth I feed)

visiting me while I was checking for pickle-sized cucumbers

the wild blackberries on the edge of the woods are getting ripe;

this was enough to enjoy with my yogurt and granola breakfast the next morning

Faline helping me hang laundry the day DD1 needed me to watch her for a while after VBS

blue swallowtail

reddish day lilies

little green frog

a brown garter? snake

(not sure, as I don't know if they come in brown; first brown one I've seen)

running some errands in Sweet Madame Blue and she rolled 3100 miles

(that lady lives a life of luxury and goes out in good weather only)

K3 having a riding lesson/helping me train the LBM

(owner wants 'anyone to be able to jump on and ride')

Garlic, MMMM

 Earlier this week, I harvested my garlic crop.  Last fall, I had planted it in a corner of the garden that I'd piled about four inches deep in (mostly) composted horse manure.  Since garlic is a heavy feeder of nitrogen, and horse manure is pretty high in nitrogen, I was hoping that this combination would yield me a crop of decent sized garlic bulbs.

And, for the most part, it did.  Almost every bulb of garlic I pulled, no matter which of the five varieties I'd planted, was as big as the individually sold heads of garlic in the grocery stores.  And, of a few varieties, there were many garlic bulbs that were close to baseball sized.  I am quite happy with the results of this informal experiment.

Guess how I'll be prepping my garlic beds from now on, LOL.

For the most part, every clove of garlic I had planted last fall grew and yielded a head of garlic this summer.  One variety had a smaller yield, I'd say about 70%, and those were also the smallest bulbs. But of the rest, two varieties gave me 100% of what I'd planted, and two others were more than 95%. 

We've had a couple of days of scattered showers since I harvest the garlic, but on the non-rainy days I've been spreading the garlic out on the front porch in the breeze and (indirect) sunshine in order to dry the necks down and cure the heads.  Once the 'stems' are all dried up, I will cut off the heads and bring them into the basement to separate out the ones I want to save for this year's seed garlic (the largest heads), and store the rest for eating.

The Frugal Things of May

Ugh!  How did I overlook posting this before now???  It has no pictures to accompany it, so can't use that excuse (having probs with pictures lately, that is why there is no Knitting Update today.  Hopefully tomorrow, fingers crossed!)

These are my notable frugal accomplishments for the month of May:

I cut DH's hair.

As always, we ate from our stash in the freezers, cellar, basement and pantry.

Speaking of freezers, I managed to neatly fit the remainder of the meat in the upright freezer into the chest freezer.  So the upright has been defrosted and unplugged just in time for the summer electric rate hike on the first of June.

Mother-In-Law came down for a few days and brought with her a bunch of stuff leftover from that week's pop-up food pantry that she helps with: bacon, pork chops, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and a half-sheet cake.  The package of pork chops was huge, and had previously been frozen, and arrived to us completely thawed, so we called the kids and those who were available came over for an impromptu potluck dinner featuring grilled pork chops and white cake with bright pink frosting.  The bacon, grape tomatoes and cucumbers were used multiple times in the next week.

I found the perfect chair for my tack room in the barn for just $5.29 at Goodwill.  I'd had my eye out for a non-upholstered chair I could use in my tack room for resting and also for sitting in while changing into riding boots from work or waterproof boots.  Pics of that perfect chair will be featured in June's Horse Update.

I decided to cull a rooster and seven hens from my flock.  The hens were laying more eggs than we could use, I was having no luck selling eggs due to a dearth of local people now keeping backyard flocks and so I took them to the local auction the third Saturday of the month.  You never know what prices you'll get there, but this was the best possible Saturday for me to have done that as after office fees and the sales commission, I received a check for $85!  That will pay for feed for the remainder of my flock for several months.

I planted seed potatoes from the cellar as well as the tomato and pepper plants I'd started from seed indoors.  So my potatoes were once again free (been saving my own seed potatoes for decades) and the 74 tomato plants and 46 pepper plants cost me maybe $20 in seed.  

I received a flat of marigolds and 9 pepper plants (3 jalapeno and 6 California Wonder green bell, which had been crop failures in my own seeding) as a Mother's Day gift from my daughters.  DD2 is one of the FFA Advisors at the school district they both teach in, and the FFA was having a plant sale where it was only $20 per flat, didn't matter what types of flowers or veggies you fit into the flat.  So they got them there based on a hint I had given in late April.  The hint being that they both love tomatoes I grow in my garden, tomatoes love marigolds planted with them to deter the tomato worms, so therefore my daughters giving me marigolds for Mother's Day would be a perfect symbiotic relationship.  Plus it supported FFA.

I also got 1/2 off a flat of petunias and pansies plus a begonia and three geraniums thrown in at the discounted plant sale the FFA put on to disperse their unsold stock from their original sale. 

DH and I ate asparagus from the garden several times.  Unfortunately the asparagus was ready early here and by not checking the garden three weeks earlier than normal I missed out on about two dozen stalks before they got too mature to eat.  But we enjoyed several dinners featuring steamed asparagus that was freshly harvested in the remaining couple of weeks of the short season.

Tractor Supply had a 10% off sale on stock tanks, so I bought a brand new Rubbermaid 100 gallon trough.  Tractor Supply is about $30-40 cheaper on them normally than any of the other farm stores within an hour of me, and with this sale I knew it was time to grab one.  I'd been trying to find a used and not leaking one for months, but even the abused/leaking ones people wanted only 20% less than a brand new one from TSC, so I went ahead and bought a nice shiny water-holding one.  Just in time to fill it up for the hotter weather of the coming summer.  Now I don't have to drag my original (leaky) one from pasture to pasture as I move horses to fresher grazing every couple of week.

I took advantage of a couple good sales and a 20% off coupon at Missouri Star Quilt Company to buy more batting, quilting thread, clips, and some more white on white fabric that perfectly matches what I'd used as the background in the blocks I started making for the Airplane Quilt.  Now instead of doing an assortment of whites in the blocks and hope they all read the same degree of whiteness in the finished top, I have enough of one fabric to make every block's background the same.

I took advantage of a promo from Rada to get a free pie server with a $29 order (plus free shipping!).  So I picked out a couple things I'd had my eye on for a while now, ordered them just barely hitting the $29 threshold, and got that pie server (and no shipping costs!).  I all ready have a pie server from Rada that I love, but it's nice to not have to use the same server on three different flavor pies during family holiday gatherings.  Now I have two Rada ones and the one my grandma gave me (so, sort of an heirloom as it had been hers, not brand new, when she gave it to me over 31 years ago) and we can serve three pies without flavor cross-contamination. 

Whew!  Listed out, that's a lot more frugal goodies than I'd thought we'd managed

Homegrown Food, 2023

 This summer, I started listing everything we ate that came from this little place here.  From earliest in the year, till now, this is the comprehensive list of all the edibles that have been produced (planted, raised, or grown wild) in 2023:

Maple syrup

Eggs

Asparagus (feral, as I had replanted my asparagus bed Fall 2022 and didn't harvest any this year so the crowns could be well fed).

Strawberries (although chickens and wild critters got most of them GRRR)

Lettuce

Chives

Peas

Mulberries (oh my, the crop just seemed to go for months!)

Cherries

Raspberries (a handful)

Black raspberries (the wild ones)

Garlic

Dill

Cilantro

Basil

Oregano

Lemon balm

Spearmint

Peppermint

Cucumbers (not many, abysmal year for squash types)

Chickens (raised two batches of broilers this summer)

Green beans (both bush and pole)

Sweet corn (good year, even managed to can and freeze some)

Potatoes

Blackberries (wild)

Green peppers (not great yield)

Jalapeno peppers (enormous ones; should have made poppers)

Paprika peppers (a mild kind and a spicy kind which I dried and ground into powder)

Tomatoes

Broccoli

Onions

Eggplant

Apples (a bumper crop)

Pears

Grapes (the grapes!  Grapes beyond my wildest dreams!)

Beets

Butternut squash

Venison (not grown by me, but produced by God)

Turnips (from the deer feed plot, LOL)

The Wine Has Been Bottled!

 This week, DH and I bottled his wine that he'd made from our bumper crop of concord grapes.  It could have been bottled sooner, but staying in the carboy after it was done fermenting wouldn't hurt it any, so we waited until we had a spare evening.

He decided instead of putting it into wine bottles, he was going to use some green Grolsch style beer bottles that we've had for a long time.  This decision was based on a) we typically don't go through an entire bottle of wine the day it's opened and b) he had loaned out his corker and given away our corks years ago when he and some coworkers made a batch of wine from a kit.  By using the Grolsch bottles we didn't need corks (or corker, which he did actually find the night we bottled) and the bottles were a much more manageable quantity of about 16 ounces.

It's been a long time since he's brewed anything (10 years?  Don't remember for sure), and the tube that attaches to his racking cane was in questionable condition when he took it from where it had been stored.  So I grabbed a length of tubing from my maple syrup supplies (complete with plastic spile attached) and he stuck that on his racking cane.  It worked really well and the spile was actually easier to hold in the corner of his mouth to get the siphon going than the original tubing.  Might just leave that spile in with the winemaking supplies for future vintages.

The carboy had quite a bit of sediment in it (brewer's note: next year buy and use cheesecloth for filtering the must in the first two phases!!) and some got into the pail we were racking into.  So, the carboy got rinsed clean, then the wine was poured back in there and we racked a second time; after rinsing the bucket out.  Then DH bottled from the valve on the bottom of the bucket.

Sometimes he got a bottle a little fuller than he wanted it, and so a juice glass was set beside the bottling bucket for him to pour the extra into (rather than mixing it back in).  If the glass got a little full looking, we sampled it in order to make room for more wine from overfilled bottles.

It was an interesting taste; very similar to what we remember his Dad's wine being (it's been a long, long time since the last of that got drank up--his father having died in 1994. . . ) yet different.  DH thinks ours is a tad sweeter, but for me, I get the same initial "wow, that's dry!" reflex when it hits my tongue as I remember his Dad's creating.  It definitely has a kick; it's not a sweet dessert type wine.

I forgot to count how many bottles we ended up with.  We did use up all the green Grolsch bottles we have, plus one larger clear one.  There was quite a bit of sediment that we did a not very in depth filtering of, so that decreased our wine yield from what we'd expected.  Next year I'll have to buy some cheese cloth to filter the must through in the transfer from initial fermentation to secondary; we didn't use any this year and that is probably why we ended up with somewhere in the vicinity of a gallon of sediment-filled wine.

this little place here heritage wine, 2023 vintage

Flowers For in the House

 I like flowers. But I've never really had them in my house on a regular basis. We're just not 'buy flowers' people.  I can count on one finger how many times DH has bought me (cut) flowers in our 30 years of marriage.  I can count on one hand how many times, in that 30 years, that I've bought myself (cut) flowers.

Last year I started thinking that I'd like to have a vase of flowers in my house on a fairly regular basis during the summer time.  Not year round, just the summer time, because that meant I could get my bouquets for next to nothing by growing them myself.

This year I consciously planted a few types of flowers that make good cut flowers.  I also tried to be more aware of what I all ready had growing around this little place here that could be cut and brought inside.

Like the peonies that have bloomed reliably for 20 years (funny thing; I brought the crowns with me from our previous house when we built this little place here.  Those peonies had rarely bloomed at the other house in the 7 years we owned it--they came with the house.  Didn't like the amount of sun--or lack of it--there I guess.)

There are also tulips and daffodils that, planted years ago, come up annually.  Well, the daffodils do.  The tulips have been decreasing in recent years; probably because the deer have gotten bolder and actually come up right by the house and eat the tulips down to the ground as soon as they send up buds.  Doesn't leave much greenery to feed the bulbs for the following year.

Then there's the miscellaneous perennials I've tried to get established out at the rock wall between the lawn and the garden.  This year I was able to make a couple bouquets out of bee balm, prairie coneflower, brown eyed Susan's (I know they're black-eyed, but my grandma was a Susan who had brown eyes, so my family has always called they brown eyed), daylily, plus some Queen Anne's lace, volunteer sunflowers and the earliest zinnias.

Last year I ordered some dahlia tubers from a fundraiser a friend of mine was participating in.  They're a little higher maintenance than my other flowers, having to be lifted in the Fall and replanted in the Spring, but not too terribly difficult to grow.  And I do like the big blooms they have!

I bought a packet of zinnia seeds and a packet of cosmos seeds and planted them in a couple of spots in the garden.  Not only do they attract lots of pollinators (good for the veggie yield), they also bloom for months until a hard frost kills them.

This summer I've been cutting bouquets of zinnia and cosmos weekly, as well as inviting family members to cut their own bouquet to take home when they are here visiting.  They've been a big hit.  DH has even mentioned planting a wide swath of them on the edge of the field, out near the road, in the future.  And he's not a flower kind of person!

We had a good, hard frost here on Sunday night, so now the flowers are done until next year (except the hardy mums, but I don't use those for cut flowers).  Looking forward to more 'free' bouquets to beautify my house next summer.

So Many Grapes

Currently, I'm drowning in grapes.  They smell soooo good, and my hands are soooo purple!

But to back up a bit, here's (mostly) weekly pictures to update since my post a couple months ago about the grapes.

week 11

 week 12

week 13

 

week 14

starting to turn purple!

week 15

week 16

are they ready yet?

(They were purplish, and tasted good if a little tart)

week 18

very purple

At week 18, there was no doubt they were ripe and ready to harvest. They could be smelled from ten feet away--smelled just like Welch's grape juice. And no matter where I looked in the grape arbor, there were tons of clusters of deep purple grapes.

Time to get picking!

Half of the grape arbor is all I picked last week; that yielded over two bushel (baskets in photo below are 1/2 bushel size).

From that approximate 2 1/2 bushel, I took about 1 3/4 bushel and used that to make a batch of jelly, and a batch of grape juice.  Which meant washing, stemming, and cooking the grapes, then straining them down into juice.  Lots and lots of juice.  I used the juicer attachment for my Kitchenaid for that.

2 of 3 bowls of juice

The juice had to sit overnight in the fridge before being strained a second time through cloth (my piece of cheese cloth wasn't big enough, so I grabbed a piece of unbleached muslin from my fabric stash).  It's now naturally dyed, LOL.

It took several hours to strain all that juice, and that's where/how I got my hands stained purple.

Really, it was an all day endeavor doing the second straining, then making and canning the jelly and the grape juice.  Tiring, but rewarding, and the kitchen smelled oh so good during the process.

7 half-pints and one 4-ounce jar of grape jelly

8 quarts of grape juice

If you've done the math throughout this post, you may be wondering what happened to that other 3/4 bushel of grapes.  Those went to DH's project: downsizing and recreating a heirloom family recipe for wine.  This something he's wanted to do for many years, but hasn't gotten around to.  But since we have a plethora of grapes out in the garden, there's no time like the present!

His Dad, Uncle, and Grandfather (all deceased) used to make homemade wine.  They used mainly concord grapes, as that was what grew on the homestead/farm.  The original recipe calls for over 7 bushel of grapes and makes 50 gallon batch.

We don't have a big enough fermenter to make 50 gallons, nor do we have 7 bushel of grapes (we do have probably 5+ as I still need to harvest the other half of the arbor).  So DH did the math to cut the recipe down to a manageable 5-gallon batch and will use our homebrew equipment for it.

Currently the grape mash is in it's first fermentation (10 days according to the old family recipe) on the kitchen counter.  All that's in the bucket is crushed grapes (unwashed, to use the natural yeast on the skins) and they are happily burbling away while the yeast eats the natural sugars in the grapes and creates alcohol.  After the first fermentation, the mash will be strained to remove the skins and seeds, then the juice will be put into a carboy for its second fermentation (with some water and a bunch of sugar added) then placed down in the basement where it's cooler and darker and the wine can age for a few months.

We'll know next year how it turns out.

Meanwhile, yesterday, DS2 and Surprise came and picked their own 3/4 bushel of grapes to take home and make wine with.  It should be interesting, as they are the same grapes DH used (same variety grown in the same place), to see if the wines come out identical or how much difference the water (tap water, different wells) and sugar (most likely a different brand) make in the final flavor.