Rainy start - hurricane Joaquin

Wet start and a sick dog

Well, it looks like the hurricane is going to miss us.  I won't miss it though!

I took off for farm alone, Katherine is staying with Smokey because he got tapeworms!  Found sign in his stool in the morning.  Ugh.

Anyway, I took of in the rain and stopped by Hagerstown Home Depot to get more caulking and a decent caulking gun. I also picked up a replacement gas cap and nozzle for the deisel gas can top I broke last weekend.  I grabbed a set of utility scissors and a couple of quick disconnectors for use with my tree-pulling-ropes.

I got to the farm and ATE!  OMG, it must be the fall allergies or something. I was famished and I couldn't stop eating!  I am going to be so sick from that, I am sure.  I tried to eat healthy - at first.  Ate 2 pieces of chicken (leg-quarters - so like total of a half chicken there!, about 2 cups of cole-slaw and about the same of broccoli with ranch dip!  Then I ate almost a whole bag of potato chips and some nut crunch snack that Katherine sent along with me.  Ugh.

Elderberry processing

I finally got to working on something though.  As soon as I got to the farm (and finished eating), I grabbed a couple bags of frozen elderberries from the freezer so that I could make some elderberry juice for making jelly!

Once they had defrosted (mostly) I put one bag in at a time to boil.  Once the berries had defrosted a bit I mashed them as best I could with a potato masher, then put them back on the stove to simmer for 15 mins.  Then I put them in a jelly-strainer bag and began boiling the next bag of elderberries.  Each gallon bag seem to hold about 4 lbs of berries.  Each pound of berries seems to produce about 1 Cup of juice.  As we discovered last year, the berry pulp - left over from the jelly-bag, can be put bag in the pot with a like amount of water (that is, for each pound of berries you start with, add a cup of water) and boiled again and re-strained.  The liquor from this second straining isn't as strong, obviously, but it has as much flavor as many commercially available elderberry jellies!  Last year me made jelly with this 2nd extract liquor, but this year I thought that I would instead mix the second extract liquor with the juice - that way the juice is extended and the liquor will taste stronger.  So basically, 4 lbs of berries produce 8 cups of fairly potent elderberry juice this way!!  I am trying for a second extraction this time to see what that turns out like.  I wont mix it with the juice mix, but I am thinking it might be ok for drink or something.

Here are the pictures for the elderberries:

Frozen berries from this years crop!

Boiling the berries to make juice.  Actually, this picture is from an extract run.  I think the 2nd extract run, so the berries are pretty tapped out of goodness here.  Se how they are not dark anymore?

Straining the juice from the berries using a jelly bag.

Elderberry pulp.  This can be reprocessed at least once.  Maybe twice depending on how this experiment goes!

 Drying pumpkins

As I was waiting for the elderberries to thaw I started to process the "sugar baby" pumpkin harvest.  I will just dehydrate these as I did last year since we do seem to be using the pumpkin powder.   I cleaned up the dehydrator with the vacuum cleaner and grabbed some of the drying trays.   Then I went out and gathered a bunch of the little pumpkins from the porch where they have been curing for a couple of weeks.  I choose the pumpkins that looked like they may have trouble keeping.

The process starts with simple scrubbing the pumpkins well, then cutting them open and removing their seeds.  After seed removal its just a matter of slicing up the pumpkins into pieces no more than a quarter inch thick and placing those slices on the dehydrator trays (oh, I wiped the trays clean too - just in case).  Then the trays go into the dehydrator at 120F for as long as it takes for the pumpkin to get "brittle dry".   After they get dry enough I will powder them in the vitamix!

These little guys can spoil fast!  They get dehydrated first.

After drying for about 10 hours.

First use of the dehydrator this season.