Ratatouille and locust tree deer damage

I made Ratatouille!  (kind of)

Remember those eggplant that I had no plans for?  Well, here is what I did with them.  I made 

Ratatouille.  Used all of those eggplant that I picked last weekend, some of the tomatoes, and some canned tomato sauce from last year (well, from a previous year).  I also used a jar of my home-canned salsa because I didnt have the right spices.  It was risky and almost ruined things, but it ended up turning out quite good.  Although, I doubt if anyone who has eaten Ratatouille before would recognize this as ratatouille - LOL.

This ratatouille tastes awesome over white rice!

Most nutcrackers can't crack hickory nuts! 

I learned this the hard way!  Bought these off Amazon.  Fortunately, I was able to return even after they broke. 

I actually repaired this one and broke it a second time.  I guess I will keep it now since I did get some of the nuts cracked with it.

This one, however, broke on the very first attempt!  I am not sure it wasn't actually a defective casting rather than just being overwhelmed by the hickory nuts!

Deer-tree damage

I walk the property usually when I first get to the farm.  This time I noticed something when I toured the locust tree grove.  Freaking deer!  They really hit the locust trees hard this year - maybe 15-20 trees are severely damaged. :(   The good news is that NONE of the fruit trees got scrapped up this year (so far anyway).  The tree cages seem to work! Yay

More hickory nuts and a wrong date.

Shelling nuts.  I have a lot to go!

Shelling these goes real slow!  Kind of zen-like though.  Maybe good for practicing mindfulness?

Saving the shells for possible use in smoking meat!  We gave these to my neighbor in the city, he likes to smoke stuff!

Cabbage, eggplant and summer squash (!!!) harvest.

The cabbage are not very big, but I still got more than I could use.  The eggplants were just because we got the seeds mixed up in the cabbage seeds.  Of course, summer squash, I mean it's almost November!  Wow!

Wrong weekend for the yard sale

We got the weekends mixed up with regard to when the "big yard sale weekend" was supposed to be held.  Partly because when we were out at TSC last weekend at a sidewalk/harvest sale, one of the vendors had signs up saying the Grease, steam and rust show was this weekend - which normally corresponds to the big yard sale weekend.  Anyway, the big yard sale weekend (and the grease, steam, and rust show) are NEXT weekend.

Katherine made some nice signs!  I placed them out by the entrance to our road.  Didn't get much traffic though.

Wine is working! Various late harvest stuff

Wine

Not much going on this weekend.  The wine is fermenting well though!

More tomato gravy!

Didn't have enough to do anything else with, so I figured I would make some more gravy!  Yum!

Summer Squash, cabbage and eggplant harvesting

Just a quick shot of the harvest this weekend.

Cherry Trees Mulched

These trees are in rough shape.  The mulch seemed to help the blueberries a lot, so I will keep putting it down on the cherries too!  I am tempted to use some high Nitrogen fertilizer on these cherry trees next year.  They are old enough to tolerate it better and they sure could use something to get them to grow!

Pear picking, apple picking, corn, tomatoes and orchard care

Elderberry & peach leather

Elderberries are starting to slow down but there are still plenty to pick and process.  I decided to make some peach-elderberry leather!    I had to boil it down a bit more than for the strawberry leather and I had to add more honey - elderberries aren't very good without some sweet!

B-day outing with family

Tom and Julie were up to see mom and asked if I wanted to go out somewhere with them for lunch!  We went to the King Buffet in Bedford.  It has the best Chinese food around the area.

Asian Pears

Picked a bunch of the "top of the hill" variety of my asian pears.  They taste pretty good!  There is a big-ass yellow bee that seems to like them too.  Looks like a yellow jacket but 4-5 times the size.  They actually consume a good portion of the pears!  After I saw the condition of the remaining pears, I decided to pick all of this variety of pears.

Bee damage!  This is not all of the damaged pears - some were completely cleaned off!

This is the last of this variety of pears - I picked all of the rest to save them from the bees!

Apples

I picked more of the apples this weekend too.  Picked all of the crab apples.  I don't know what to do with the crab apples.  Katherine says she's going to make pie filling with them.  I guess we could try applesauce too.  We will see.  They are a bit unripe yet, so we have time to decide.  The pain in the butt thing about them is they are so small that prepping them for any use takes a bit of effort.

All of the crab apple crop this year.

First real picking of the Royal gala and some yellow delicious apples.

Mulching and caging the orchard trees

I put in a significant effort to get cages around all of the trees in the orchard.  I have seen a couple of deer now with antlers!  So its just a matter of time before they start scraping the velvet off.  I hope the decide to use some forest trees rather than my fruit trees this year.

I mulched a bunch of the orchard trees too.  They are easier to mulch before putting up the cages.

I just sat the cages on top of the mulch for now.  I will come back later and stake them in

I ran out of fencing so I couldn't do these last three trees.  I will probably scrounge some fencing from some of the dead cherry trees for them.

Some veg harvest

I checked the corn and found that it was getting about ripe.  We picked a dozen or so for eating.  We will probably pick most of it next weekend.  Also, the cold nights have made many of the tomatoes rot on the vine before ripening, but I did manage to get a few usable ones. 

As usual, I picked a couple quarts of strawberries

Also got some of the eggplant and cabbage in there!  

I managed to get enough tomatoes for a modest skillet of fried tomato gravy!

With corn on the cob.  Was excellent "first eating" ceremony

Eclipse

Well, it wasn't total eclipse here - only 80%.  20% of the sun is still pretty damn bright!