Blog catch-up!

Grape picking and wine making

Mom saved some grapes for me from her vines.  I stopped at her place and picked about 55-60lbs of concord grapes on the way up to my farm.  There were hornets ALL OVER those grapes!  It amazes me that I id not get stung.  They got in my hair, crawled over my arms an hands, but no stings!  Whew

They were in pretty rough shape, but that's fine for wine making!

All squished up and in the mesh bag for fermenting.

In the fermenter, ready to go!

Sealed up with the air-water lock

The recipe for the concord wine is included in the Elderberry Wine recipe link below (it's at the bottom of the sheet).

After a week of fermenting in the primary fermenter, I took out the grapes and let them drip/drain.  I moved the liquid from the primary fermenter into the secondary fermenter (racked the wine).  Always alot of dregs on the first fermentation!  In this picture the concord grapes are on the left, the elderberries are on the right.

The grape wine is in the narrow necked carboy.

Elderberry Wine

I looked in my wine recipe book and online and finally came up with my own variation of an elderberry wine recipe: Elderberry Wine recipes 

For the elderberry wine I boiled the berries with about half of the water that the recipe calls for.  Berries can have differing amounts of liquid so its good practice to only use part of the water until you know how much juice you really have!

My elderberries were frozen, so bringing them to a boil took quite a while!  After they reached boiling I let them simmer for about 15-20 mins.  Then I let them sit overnight to cool.  The wine making proceeded after they were cool enough.

Elderberry wine (I did two batches) in primary fermenters.

I had a "bubble over" event overnight - this is AFTER I cleaned the floor!  I decided that putting the fermenters into these grey tubs was a good idea...

Here you can see why I moved them into tubs!

As for the concord wine, I strained the berries out and move the wine into the secondary fermenters.

The wide mouth carboys have the elderberry wine

Finishing up the tomato harvest

We have been freeze-drying a lot of tomatoes this season, but we had too many come ready at once to save this batch - so I made 5 quarts of chili base!  Previously I had been making tomato gravy to use up the excess but this time was just too much!  I figure that we got between 80-100 lbs of tomatoes this harvest.  I only put in a dozen plants (I think), but many of the tomatoes I harvested came from the volunteer tomato plants in the other gardens!

Thats a LOT of chili!  There was actually more.  I ate a good portion too (BAD BAD heartburn that night!)

Technically, we are still getting some tomatoes, but I have just been leaving them on the vine.  We have FAR more than enough preserved!

Harvesting the Butternut Squash

I harvested most of the butternut squash.  I got a total of about 3.5 bushels.  We freeze-dried some (after baking).  I think that baking them first might make them too soft!  Next time I think we will just cube and par-boil before freeze-drying.

I have more pictures - but they pretty much all look the same!  Those are the last of the zucchini for the year too.

Wood Chipper repair

The feed brake weldment broke due to a crappy repair job last year.  The last repair was so bad it actually made things far more difficult to fix this time.   The arm broke off the pipe and left a big hole in the pipe.  I had use the GMAW (stick welder) last time and I guess I had the current too high or something because it ate up a good section of the pipe!   That is why there is such a big hole in the pipe.

There is about a 3/4" hole to fill once the arm is welded back on!

The hole is hidden in this picture.  Its under the red magnet on the right.

This time I decided to use the TIG welder to do the fix.  Well, the first weekend I tried it I ran out of argon about 5 mins into the weld!  I stopped in Frederick, MD and got the next bigger size argon tank. Then I tried again.

Ran out of argon!

NO argon makes the electrode unhappy!

I had to grind down the little weld I had done because of oxidation

Weld finished, ground and cleaned and then painted

I just happened to have the right shade of red paint handy!

You have to look closely to even see where the repair was made!  Excellent!

I re-attached the brake to the chipper and everything seems good.  I will have to try the chipper out soon.

Wine processing and bottling weekend

I am just going to post some pictures for now - I will fill this in more throughout the week!

Wine!

These pictures are  out of order, but I am feeling lazy tonight - maybe I will straighten these out later.  I used my new wine filter device, the Buon Vino mini-jet filter, to do a course and a polishing filter on the concord and the perry wines.  The perry had some freaky surface yeast growing on it and i had it in the cold room to keep it from fermenting and ruining the flavor of the wine.  What I did was to rack off the wine to a separate carboy and then filter it (course and polished, as i mentioned above), then I filled a narrow mouth carboy as full as I could to minimize the surface area exposed to the air.  That way if the bad yeast comes back, it has limited air available to react.  Also, some internet advice is to put a drop of olive oil on the surface to further restrict the yeasts access to oxygen.  If I see the surface yeast come back, I will try the oil trick!  Anyway, by filling the one carboy full to the top I couldn't possibly fill the other to the top - it was about 2 gallons short.  So i went ahead and added some sugar to the 3 remaining gallons and bottle it in what I thought were my champagne bottles.  The bottles turned out to be punted claret bottles!  So I wasted a bunch of time trying to cap and attach wire hoods to these bottles!  I ended up taking these plastic champagne stoppers out and throwing away the hoods (they were ruined) and re-corking these with plain corks.  Plain corks will likely blow out though.  I need to order some champagne bottles and re-bottle these ASAP!  If the fermentation proceeds too far before I re-bottle then I will have to add more sugar and it will be a lot more work!

This shows the first bottling of the Perry.  These are the wrong bottles and these caps had to be removed before I left this weekend.

See? there is no flange for the wire to hold down the cap!

You can see it, but these stoppers don't fit tightly either, so this simply wasn't going to work.

I used the screw top bottles for the remaining concord wine.  When I racked the concord wine I found what I guess to be about 1 pound of tartar crystals on the bottom of the carboy!  I was astounded! That was far more crystals that I expected.  Remember, the concord juice was diluted with an equal amount of water so I expected that to absorb a lot of the tartaric acid.   Anyway, the poly seal screw tops work great!  I didn't have enough to bottle all of the concord, so I used the clear claret bottles for the rest.  The clear bottles are nice to look through - they are so pretty!

Concord wine in screw top bottles.

I need to use a few clear claret bottles to accommodate the "extra" concord wine.

So pretty!

The green bottles don't let you appreciate how pretty the wine is.  Although, of course, the green bottles protect the wine from the light better!

The remaining perry, filled as close to top as I can to prevent wild surface yeast taking over!

I actually had to remove some of the wine as it warmed up it expanded and started to push wine into the airlock!

More Dried pumpkin

This is about 4 medium pumpkins dried and powdered

Another view.  It dried nicely and pulverized easy.

Tour around the farm - searching for new homes for more trees!

See the damage to this unprotected elderberry bush  by the deer?

They really tore into this one. This is why i put up the electric fences - even in the fall and winter!

Here is a potential area for the walnut trees - its flat-ish, but I think it may have a bit too much clay in the soil.  Also, this is where I have been thinking of putting a pond.

A little further up the hill from the previous picture - walnuts don't like slopes, but this isn't too bad.

Definitely too much slope here.  All of these areas are on the north-ish face of my property; walnuts don't need to be picky about early frosts it seems.

This is a strong candidate for the walnut trees.  A bit of a slope here, but not crazy.

A little closer to the neighbors property line.  Not sure how to use this space - it might become pasture in the distant future.

Here is a concern about planting the trees too close to the neighbors property line!  Lots of leaning and damaged trees like this .  While I am confident that these folks would let me take them out, i can't be sure future owners would be so friendly!

More leaning, big trees - this one might actually be on my property - i need to identify the property line here.

More leaning trees!

This view of the mountains in the distance was breath-taking to see. It doesn't show up well with the phone camera though

Another distant mountain shot - still not really coming through

LOL - but i kept trying.  I am thinking about putting some trees or berry bushes up here - but for now I will continue to lease this land to local farmer for forage/hay.

Lake walipini has re-appeared!

I wanted to dig this out this year, but I got my back-hoe back too late to get to it.

I am thinking of using gabion blocks to reinforce the back wall of the greenhouse - even though its really not that unstable (and the back "wall" will be sloped quite a bit anyway).

I am thinking that the hazelnut bushes will go in here somewhere.

I haven't quite decided where to place the new grapvines yet.  I was thinking right next to these - or below them.  

Katherine thinks that maybe I could put them next to the driveway after I take out the trees there.  Maybe.

A shot showing where the satellite cable i, and showing the sawdust i placed around the cherry trees.

By the way, I was also looking at where to place the new cherry trees coming next spring, and I think i will just fill in around these up toward the house and down toward the persimmons.  I have 12 more coming; that's more then I have planted now!  I only have these 8 sour cherry trees now, and I ordered more because these don't look too good.

I piled it up on the outside of the tree protectors.  You don't want to have the sawdust (or any mulch) right up against the bark of the tree.

Again, just showing the location of the satellite cable for future reference.

Attic vent progress

I filled the holes in the recycled boards with wood putty and left for the week last weekend.  This weekend I sanded the patches down, filled in some more holes and sanded those down too.  I finally got to applying a coat of primer to them.   I really would like to spray paint these buggers since there are so many hard to reach places - but I think it would take a lot of paint and I hate using sprays inside the house (which is the only place warm enough to paint now).

Shelving progress

While i was up there this past weekend, I went to get a jar of sauerkraut from the backroom where the canned goods are currently stored (all over the floor).  I had to perform acrobatics to get to the kraut, and when I did I noticed a jar that had gone bad.  I looked at all the other jars in the area and couldn't find any others that went bad. Hopefully this was just a bad lid or something random and not something that is systemic in my processing.  All the acrobatics reminded me that I really need to get these jars off the floor and downstairs on some shekving.  I considered (and am still considering) buying some good shop shelving for holding these jars, but I really want to gain more experience with my woodworking tools by making my own shelves.  With that in mind, I brought more oak wood in from the red barn and planed it.  I have a lot of trouble with getting the plane to not give me lines of uneven cuts - I think they are caused by the fact that I am using a portable plane and don't have a way of supporting the weight of the boards on the in-feed and out-feed of the planar.  I am looking at some roller tables to help this problem.  Working on the attic vents really got me to notice how much work I need to do in my shop to get my tools more accessible and in better configurations for use.  I need to make a couple grinder stands and a workstation for my chop-saw.  The firewood really needs to go!

UTV battery (or other electrical?) problems.

I wanted to do a quick tour around the farm when I got there last weekend, but the UTV battery was, once again, dead.  So I put the big battery charger on it and set it to 35 amp quick charge.  Well, I went inside and got distracted and by the time I finally got back out to the garage you culd smell the sulfur frmo the battery!  I went to try to start the UTV and it made bad sounds...  I hope that its just the battery and not some relay or something!  Although, i can't help think that the lights and things came on bright - so the battery has juice...  sigh - we will see.    I can't help but notice that this UTV has had a problem EVERY YEAR I have had it!  I bought it new and I don't think I treat it bad (not compared to the tractor or lawnmowers - they have good reasons to be broken!)  Well, i will diagnose it more when I get there next time.