Sept. 10-16, 2023

Weather | 9/10, 53°, 83° | 9/11, 0.02" rain, 61°, 67° | 9/12, 54°, 75° | 9/13, 51°, 79° | 9/14, 52°, 79° | 9/15, 52°, 80° | 9/16, 0.14" rain, 60°, 79° | 

• Sunday, 9/10: Bill Leaves for St. Charles, MO
  
  • Katie ran one leg of a relay race between Skagway and Whitehorse. Her leg ended or started (I can't tell which) in Carcross, Yukon.
  • I added two tablespoons of pectic enzyme to the apple cider brew bucket and squeezed the mesh bags.
  • I also squeezed mesh bags in the blackberry wine brew bucket. The wine yeast is starting to win out over wild yeast and developing fizz and foam. The specific gravity before bed was 1.060, so the good yeast is moving along.
    
  • Bill left at 3 p.m. (see photo, below), after we enjoyed a smoked scrambled eggs meal garnished with fresh tomato slices.
    
  • I fixed a hose garden hose. It broke at a plastic fitting yesterday and soaked my shirt and pants.
    
  • Mary moved the Halloween tree, a dried up cedar tree that was stashed in the north woods, to the machine shed to keep it dry. She said it's in good shape.
  • Mary dug up potatoes from nine hills in the gardens. The results were paltry, but we don't care. We get a few free potatoes this way. They came from supermarket russet potatoes that were sprouting, anyway.
    
  • When we started watering gardens, we heard a raccoon growl from near the compost bins. We were probably 20 feet away. They sound like a small bear. A raccoon growl will make the hair raise on the back of your head.
    
  • I picked 56 Esopus apples, cleaning all of the good apples off that tree. Woodpeckers nailed a couple apples in upper branches of the tree. That's why I decided to strip the tree of good apples. It makes 90 apples picked from Esopus in the past couple days.
    
  • Mary used the blacklight flashlight after dusk and pulled 25 worms out of the garden...23 on tomatoes and three in the pepper plants.

  

  Bill waves goodbye from his car while leaving for his St. Charles apartment.

• Monday, 9/11: Triple Winemaking Day
  
  • After squeezing two nylon mesh bags full of applesauce in the apple cider brew bucket, the specific gravity reading was 1.040, a drop from 1.043 two days ago. I added a half pound of sugar to bring it up to 1.050. It makes for total sugar used in this cider of one pound, six ounces. I worked up a starter batch of Lalvin R2 yeast. Late at night, I pitched the yeast into the apple cider brew bucket. The specific gravity at that point was 1.048. I didn't add anymore sugar. The pH was 2.9...very acidic.
    
  • I racked the cherry wine for the third time. After adding one gram of Kmeta, a specific gravity check revealed 0.995, a minor change from a month ago of 0.994. The pH was 3.0. This wine has a nice, red/orange color. Mary and I tasted it. The cherry flavor is strong in it...quite good for a green wine. The must went into a 5-gallon carboy and a half-gallon jug.
  • The blackberry wine has the deepest purple/red color. The specific gravity is 1.053, so the yeast is slowly eating up the sugar content. Get near it and the brew bucket sounds like it's groaning, as CO2 gas is released through the purple cottage cheese that covers the top of the liquid.
    
  • Mary finished two Halloween cross stitch ornaments.
  • She also picked six worms and two worm eggs off the tomato plants.
  • Katie texted that her leg of the Klondike Road Relay was from the British Columbia/Yukon border to Carcross, Yukon. One of Katie's friends put an explanation with photos on Facebook. HERE is a link.
  • A motorized paraglider flew over our property right at dusk. His engine cut out and we think he landed in a pasture southwest of us. It was getting too dark.
    
  • We enjoyed a wonderful chicken dinner with our own garden potatoes and slices of garden tomatoes.
  • For dessert, we each ate two Esopus apples. They are extremely tasty. Too bad the tree is so susceptible to every disease known to apples, including fire blight, which is killing it.
    
    
• Tuesday, 9/12: Winter Greens Planted
  • Thick fog lifted in the morning for a full day of sunshine.
  • At sunrise, Mary watched four deer in the south lawn consisting of two does and two fawns. One doe was gray. They were eating and loving chicory stalks.
  • Mary made up a quart and a pint of refrigerator jalapeño pickles.
  • A midday check of the apple cider showed specific gravity of 1.043. It was 1.040 on a late night check. The must is fizzing a great deal.
    
  • The specific gravity of the blackberry wine was 1.039 at noon, and 1.034 at night.
    
  • I ordered a pound each of pectic enzyme and yeast nutrient from a home brew company that's going out of business, so prices were reduced by 35 percent. I also ordered vitamins.
  • I scrubbed sooty blotch and fly speck off about half of the Esopus apples I recently picked. These apple fungi are harmless. They just make the apple skin look ugly. Running warm water, a scrub brush, and vigorous scrubbing make the apples look great in a couple minutes.
    
  • I removed old lettuce stalks and grass from the six winter greens tubs. While loosening up the soil, I discovered that maple tree roots entered holes in the bottoms of five tubs and filled the potting soil within the tubs with feeder roots. After breaking off tree roots under the tubs, I cut up old chicken feed bags and laid them down under all of the tubs. Then I planted winter greens. They included:
  • Four radish types: Pink Lady Slipper, Gloriette, French Breakfast, and Zlata
  • Winter Bloomsdale spinach
  • Astro arugula
  • Red Tinged Winter lettuce
  • Winterbor kale
    
  • Mary watered the gardens, then while picking five worms off the tomato plants, she heard four separate deer snorts. We really have a lot of deer.
    
    
• Wednesday, 9/13: Blackberry Wine & Apple Cider First Racking
  • A noon check of wines in the brew buckets revealed that they were ready to move into carboys, with specific gravity of apple cider at 1.025 and the blackberry wine at 1.022. I tried to get a volume of five gallons of blackberry wine, but underestimated the amount of liquid in these berries. After squeezing the nylon mesh bags, I got 5.75 gallons, instead of five gallons.  I racked the wine for the first time into two five-gallon carboys (see photo, below), allowing for huge head spaces, since blackberry wine foams a lot when it first goes into a carboy. Blackberry wine develops what look like purple cottage cheese, while in the brew bucket. After racking, I had a lot of "curd turds" left behind.
    
  • After cleaning up, I racked the apple cider. Again, I underestimated the juice amount. Instead of three gallons I was aiming for, I got just under four gallons, with the cider going into a three-gallon carboy and a one-gallon jug (see photo, below). The specific gravity was 1.018 at racking time. Mary and I tasted the cider and it's a good drink. "I'd just like to sit here and drink the whole bucket right now," said Mary.
    
  • Mary picked a bunch of tomatoes, hot peppers (see photo, below), hazelnuts, and melons. She decided to end watering watermelon plants, because the tiny melons that are left are too small to develop to maturity.
    
  • We watered gardens, of course! NOAA's Climate Prediction Center told us last winter that spring and summer would be wet. They were very wrong. We've watered gardens almost every day of this summer.
  • While cleaning up chicken waterers on the porch, a fawn saw me from near the winter green tubs and then walked toward me. It ran north in a playful prance, then played with an older fawn. I stepped around the corner and saw a doe run off. Then, a gray doe walked in sight and ran off. Finally, the fawns ran away. This is the same foursome that Mary saw yesterday morning.

  

  Peppers: Hot Portugal (red) & Ho Chi Minh (yellow).
  

Blackberry wine after the first racking.

Apple cider after first racking.

• Thursday, 9/14: We Butcher Chickens Soon
  
  • Our young chickens are between 13-14 weeks old. We usually butcher at 14 weeks, so we decided to get ready to butcher in a couple days. It might start Saturday night, although rain is forecast for then. We'll still get ready.
  • Mary defrosted and took ice off the inside walls of both chest freezers, an annual chore in preparation of freezing chickens. She tossed two one-gallon bags of 2021 tomatoes, ten 2019 and 2020 old bags of sliced apples, and two bags of very, very old dried beans.
  • I drove to Quincy, IL, to get a medication and a couple other items.
  • Once returning home, I helped Mary water gardens.
  • The CO2 release from blackberry wine and apple cider is reducing as yeast burns up existing sugar.
    
    
• Friday, 9/15: Bartlett Pear Harvest & Chicken Butcher Prep
  • Three flights of Canada geese went over the house this morning.
    
  • Mary picked Bartlett pears. The job lasted most of the day. A total of 289 went inside to be wrapped in newspaper. An entire chest of drawers, with three drawers, is filled with newspaper-covered pears, as is an old cardboard apple box. She threw away a bucket full of fallen or misshapen fruits, which is roughly 30 pears. There are several pears still left on the tree, most of which are on high branches. We'll try to get them down to take weight of the branches that are bending down.
  • Mary also picked tomatoes and muskmelons. She froze two gallons of tomatoes and three quarts of melons. 
  • I scrubbed sooty blotch and flyspeck off the remaining 45 Esopus apples. I also picked the last three Grimes Golden apples.
    
  • We fixed up and ate white oyster and lion's mane mushrooms (see photos, below). Mary needs to get house plants inside and they go into the room these mushrooms kits are in, so we're calling it quits on trying to grow more "shromes". It's been a fun experiment. Thanks, Katie.
    
  • I hunted squirrels while sitting at the east end of the machine shed. I spotted something twitching in the brush to my left, brought up the rifle and spotted the ears of a fawn through the scope. For the next 10-15 minutes, I watched two fawns munch on anything and everything that was either green or a twig. They're amazing eating machines. These two little guys never saw me.
    
  • I whacked down grass and weeds with the Stihl trimmer fitted with the steel blade on the trail from the machine shed to the chicken killing cone. Then I knocked down tall foxtail grass around the compost bins. I also used loppers to cut tall, thick grass growing on top of old compost in two bins. Finally, I removed a couple of rusted out 5-foot wide steel panels on these bins. I'll replace these panels tomorrow and get the middle bin ready to receive chicken butchering residue.
    
  • I hunted squirrels, again, at 6 p.m., and shot a fox squirrel. At the same time, I scared two squirrels away from the pecan trees. They're high in these trees, chewing pecans like there's no tomorrow.
    
  • After evening chores, I helped Mary wrap pears with newspaper. If half of them go bad, we'll still have too many for pear wine.

White oyster mushrooms. These taste best of all varieties.

Lion's Mane mushrooms.

• Saturday, 9/16: Much Needed Rain
  
  • We had 0.03 inch of rain fall before we woke this morning. Any moisture is welcomed.
    
  • Mary made a batch of chocolate chip/oatmeal cookies to help sustain us during nighttime chicken butchering in the near future.
    
  • I moved old compost from the middle bin to the east bin after reinstalled some steel panels around the east bin. I have five half panels from when I made the walls of the bins extra high. Using old green treated boards from the south porch, I made two more panels by screwing two half panels to the 1x4-inch boards. I had to stop my work, due to an approaching thunderstorm.
    
  • The thunderstorm gave us an additional 0.11 inch of rain, which meant no watering of gardens required for tonight.
    
  • I hunted squirrels at the bewitching hour of 6 p.m. and shot one. They're tearing into all of our nut trees. We heard squirrels chomping away in the black walnut trees in our east yard, today. They really like pecans, though.
  • The blackberry wine and apple cider has stopped releasing CO2 gas.
  • Radishes and arugula is sprouting in my winter greens tubs.
  • We saw our normal squadrons of deer. One fawn was looking at me through the open north window. It was standing next to the weeping willow tree, which is right next to our house.