More fall stuff - rain, allergies, wood chipping, elderberry jelly making

It Rained Friday, so... ELDERBERRY

The relationship between jelly making and rain is that it was too wet outside for me to get into wood-chipping (it makes mud and I am in no real hurry with the need for wood-chips, whereas I would like to process the elderberries out of the freezer!)

Made a total equivalent of 40 half-pints this weekend!  

I made 9 half-pints of sugar free!  I used 3 C of splenda instead of 6 C of sugar.  Taste is - well sugarfree taste.

I put some in pint jars.  I did 2 pints so that I could fit this last batch in one canner load.  Two pints = 4 half-pints

Pumpkin pie

Along the lines of cleaning out the freezer of old food, I grabbed a couple pints of 2013 pumpkin puree and made a couple of pumpkin pies!  Only had 8 inch pie pans but crust was for 9 inch (and I was not about to trim the crust so I just mangled it - LOL).  They tasted fine! :)

I actually made two pies and a little thing of just filling.  Should have been enough for 2 9 inch  pies.

Castor Bean seed saving

I had picked a bunch of the ripe castor bean pods last weekend and put them in the drier at 90F to dry out.  Most of the black ones had "popped" open on their own, but the little beige stripped ones need to be shelled out.

Sorting and shelling out the castor beans from their husks

The black beans are from the bigger-red hulled plants.

The smaller plants had these beige-stripped ones.

I am continuing to pick and dry more.  I want to plant a bunch next year!

Wood-chipping and some cleanup

I need more wood chips for the orchard and I want to clean up that old "timber-wood" from almost 5 years ago, so I took some of those old logs and put them through the sawmill then the remains through the chipper.  While looking over the logs I saw a fairly large oak "crap" log and it struck me that I should use that one for testing out my quarter-sawing technique!  I didn't get any pics of the results, but I will describe the approach.  On a band-sawmill their are a number of ways of getting quarter-sawn lumber.  One, of course, is to quarter the log and do the standard herringbone cut from the center out.  This requires that I flip the cant every cut!  It took awhile, but I must admit the lumber looks nice and seems to be stable!  I will try the other method of quarter-sawing next time I have a big piece of oak.  Anyway, I gathered up all of the slab cuts and debris and chipped it up!  I even pulled the tomato trellis off the garden and chipped that too.

I took down the tomato trellis and chipped it!

Didn't make much woodchips - not sure if that is even a cubic yard there.

Last of the tomatoes

I picked the tomatoes just before I removed the trellis.  I think I have enough to do one more 5 pint batch of some kind of sauce.