First frost?

Cold weather weekend

First things first, we harvested a bunch of the veggies since they were calling for frost Sat and Sun nights.  

We got a good harvest of brussel sprouts:

Which we ate over the course of the weekend!  Roasted with some olive oil, salt an pepper!  Delicious!  There are more to come on the plants, we just took what was ready.

We got a surprisingly good bunch of broccoli - which I froze.

Last of the eggplants/  Some are small, but what can you do.  I harvested a cabbage for some slaw.

Last of the bell peppers.  We took them all since frost will certainly kill them.

Continuing my efforts to clear out the freezer I grabbed another pack of frozen blackberries and made another pie:

Blackberry pie.  I used tapioca  as a thickener this time.  Turned out quite nice!

More pumpkin processing!

Sliced up another eight dryer trays worth of the sugar babies an dried them this weekend.

After drying I put them in the vitamix an turn them into powder!  

A few random pictures of the place in the fall

A documentary on quarter-sawing an oak log - gone awry

Well, I wanted to do a bit of a show piece to illustrate how I do quarter sawing on an oak log, but I messed up and got into a maple log instead!

Anyway, here are some pictures of the whole process.

Trusty tractor with chipper and front forks

The logs (well some of them)

The remains of the chipping operation (I did another 2 + cubic yards and got all of the apple orchard trees mulched!)

The log

This crotch - side limb is a bit of a problem.

Great, it has a piece of wire embedded in it!

So I had to saw off the limb to try to get into the wire

And I had to dig in a bit with the chainsaw to get to it - but I got it out!  I didn't want to hit that with the sawmill

I lifted it up an marked it - in pencil.  So you can't see it.  In fact, I had a hard time seeing the marks!  I need to get some bright crayons for woodmarking. 

The other end.  It was going to be tricky making sure this thing was "even" on the mill bed!

Up on the mill bed.

Fiddled around trying to figure out the best cut - even after the markings earlier, it wasn't clear

OK, I think I got a good alignment.  Now to check to be sure the blade and carriage wont get hung up during the cut 

First cut is done - you can kind of see the cut line here.

Flipped over onto the flat side

Positioned for the next flat cut.

Second flat cut and slab removed.

Rotated 90 degrees.  

Top removed.

Rotated 180 degrees to get last side

Last side removed!  Nice rectangular cant now. 

 Its about 9+" by 14.5" 

See that grain?  It's amazing that it took me so long to realize this wasn't OAK!  Sheesh!

I decided to mill the side slabs first.  I ha some idea that this was smarter and would save the blade somehow.  I don't remember my logic at the time.  I can't for the life of me think now what advantage it would give me.

Slabs all cut up into boards.  But they need to be edged

After edging.  They still need some ends trimmed off.  Nice little boards for misc purposes.  I had realized that this was maple at this point so I saved these. Otherwise I would have probably chipped these smaller ones.

The remnants after edging.  These are going on the chipping pile.

The big cant back on the mill bed.  At this point, if I were still  quarter-sawing, I would cut this down the center to give me 2 nearly square cants, then rotation them each 90 degrees, positions them next to each other and start cutting boards.

Boards cut!  I chose to cut at 6/4 (one and a half inches thick)

These are in pretty good shape!

Nice stack of wood there!

Stickering the boards

I put the short and small ones on top.  I need to figure out how to better organize my wood stash.

Rough ends.  I think I will clean these up some day - maybe.

Side view.  I will have to restack I am sure.  I think the hardest part of operating sawmill is finished wood management!

Finally got our frost!

Got up on Sunday morning to see this:

Kind of pretty, really.

Site seeing

Finally got to go for a drive down "Summit Road" - the dirt/gravel road that runs along the summit of the mountain above our place.  Here are some pictures from the trip.

Panoramic view - looks a little weird at first.

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.

First of the year elderberry jelly has been made!

Elderberry Jelly

I got about 22 cups of elderberry juice from the berries shown in the last post.  I did not include the 2nd extraction juice because I didn't think it tasted enough like elderberry.  I did sweeten and can that "liquor" though.  I think it should still have some anti-viral properties and it tastes OK when sweetened.  I got 5 and a half-pints of the 2nd extract liquor canned.  I made a total of 38 half-pints of jelly from the 22 cups of juice.

This is showing only 17 jars.  There are 21 already cased and put away!  It does taste a bit different than last years.  I swear its more bitter.  Still very good though!

Dried Pumpkins - powdered!

I let the pumpkins sit in the dehydrator overnight again.  They were dry last evening, but I was too busy making jelly to get to them, so I turned the dehydrator back on and let them dry more.  This morning I removed them from the trays and put them in the vitamix to powder.  I got about a pint of powdered pumpkin!  I need to keep moving with them, but its too late to get to the powdering point so I will just wait until later to get more done.  Just a note for the future for storage:  7 dehydrator trays will powder down to about 1 pint.

Straight from the dehydrator

Powdered and packed in a pint jar.

Septic tank 

I checked the tank this morning (I was concerned since I have been doing food processing and that means lot of water down the drain).  It is at the top in the normal "overflow to the 2ndary tank" level.  So I added about 10 (?) lbs of copper sulfate to the tank (dissolved in water).   I hope that helps clear those roots out!  I will have to keep an eye on it.  I want that copper sulfate to be in there as long as I can.  Makes me nervous when its close to the top like this;  I will have to check it more often.  I recall that when we had problems, the fluid level was well above the lid inside the cover.

Spiral Tree protectors all on now

Well, not all on.  The persimmons don't have any.  I am still debating whether they will get them or not.  I did the remaining cherry trees today.  Some of the spiral tubes needed to be cut since those trees are so small (dwarf).  I checked and two f the trees looked absolutely dead.  I will have to order a couple more sour cherries from the conservation district next year.

Apple trees and white aphids

I got some Neem oil spray for the white aphid problems on the apple trees.  I used it all.  I only did the trees that had signs and trees that looked weak.  I will keep an eye out for those buggers.  Maybe a dose of dormant oil earlier in the winter this time to help wipe out their eggs?

Last front-lawn stump is GONE

I finally got to cutting of the last of the front lawn stumps!  I only dulled one chain (well two, counting the one I put on to finish the job)!    I am glad to get it out of there, but I still am considering stump grinding. 

I did some cross-hatching in the remaining wood to encourage decomposition.  I might add some stump remover.

Found a neat Fungus in the front lawn 

Just found this thing - thought it was a pile of leaves at first.  Neat looking.

Caulking the basement continues

I got more caulking and a new caulking gun on the way up.  I went downstairs to start caulking  and noticed a bad smell.  After looking around a bit I found a dead mouse!  I swept up a bit and moved the old dresser to clean up under it (where the dead mouse was).  I caulked all around the sill except where I couldn't reach (behind the drain line from the bathroom and behind the canning shelves).  It should be mouse proof there now!

While I was cleaning up I saw a mouse running around the edge of the wall!  He ran behind the canning shelves.  I figure he couldn't get out since the sill is caulked now.  In response I placed some poison downstairs and put a couple traps under the bathroom sink.  I have noticed that there seems to be significant gaps around the basement windows - I may caulk there too.

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.