Sept. 3-9, 2023

Weather | 9/3, 61°, 89° | 9/4, 69°, 93° | 9/5, 0.08" rain, 67°, 88° | 9/6, 59°, 71° | 9/7, 50°, 73° | 9/8, 52°, 77° | 9/9, 51°, 77° | 

• Sunday, 9/3: Racking Apple Wine
  
  • We saw a black-crowned night-heron fly over our property while walking the dogs this morning.
  • I lined up purchasing 3-gallon carboys tomorrow.
    
  • Mary froze more tomatoes and hot peppers. 
  • She checked the hazelnuts. They aren't ready. Those she thought were ready burned up in the recent heat and were brown...they're normally a lemon-yellow green right now. Mary also propped up melons.
  • Mary cut down some hay from tall grass surrounding the compost bins.
  • I racked the apple wine for the second time, due to excessive fines at the bottom of the carboy and other containers. Fines were three inches deep in the beer bottle. The specific gravity was 0.999 and the pH was 3.0. A sulfite (SO2) test kit indicated 11 parts per million (ppm) in this wine. It needs to be about 60 ppm, so I added 0.5 grams of Kmeta, instead of the normal 0.63 grams for the 3.5 gallons of liquid I got after pulling the wine off the fines. Sulfur gas emitted from Kmeta (potassium metabisulfite) preserves wine. We tasted a bit of this wine. Unlike last year's apple wine, this batch has no metallic taste. It will be good.
  • Using a flashlight and getting down on the floor, I noticed that the cherry and spiced apple wines do not have deep fines in the bottoms of the containers like I thought they did. There's only a thin line of fines, but a slight residue settling up the sides to give an illusion of thick fines. That's good news, because I don't need to rack them until later.
    
  • We watched the 2004 movie, The Librarian: Quest for the Spear. Bob Newhart is in it and he's hilarious, especially when he's kicking butt in a fight scene. It's silly fun.
    
    
• Monday, 9/4: Picking Up Carboys & Racking Jalapeño Wine
  • I drove west about 38 miles and bought two 3-gallon glass carboys from a woman whose husband bought them years ago. He used some of them only a couple times, then died in 2016 and the carboys are taking up room in her basement. They are made in Mexico and in good shape.
    
  • A check of the pears and apples on fruit trees indicated that they aren't ready to be picked.
    
  • I redid the winemaking schedule, since I didn't rack two wines yesterday. The new one is in pencil, making changes possible.
    
  • Mary canned 14 quarts of salsa. She's raving about a tomato variety grown this year. It's called Jet Star. This tomato grows large and it's meaty, greatly adding to the salsa quantity. Mary had leftover tomatoes that she couldn't put in the pot, because it was so full. All of the jars of salsa sealed.
    
  • Mary turned hay that she dropped yesterday.
  • A check of the jalapeño wine at 3 p.m. registered a specific gravity of 1.023. Yeast in this batch is extremely active (see video, below), producing heat to give it a temperature of 81°. Mary was filling canning jars, so I waited to rack it until after our evening meal. Specific gravity was 1.001 at 9 p.m. The pH was 3.1. It went into one of my new 3-gallon carboys and a 750-ml wine bottle.
  • We ate our first muskmelon from the garden. It was divine!
  Robust CO2 release from jalapeño wine after racking it.
  

• Tuesday, 9/5: Some Rain!
  
  • We received a little rain in morning from a thunderstorm, which was nice.
    
  • Mary strung hot peppers on thread loops, then hung them upstairs in the south bedroom to dry.
    
  • Mary thought her hay was ruined by this morning's rain, but it wasn't. With a strong wind blowing, Mary turned the hay, then picked it up before evening dew set in. It's a start of hay storage for winter usage in the chicken coop.
    
  • Mary and I watered the gardens, a chore that takes less time as we finish various crops.
  • Our water supplier installed a new remote-read water meter. A blue plastic lid contains an antenna that relays readings to their office in Knox City, about 15 miles west of us. Hopefully, it works better than the last meter, which was to relay readings to a vehicle on the gravel road. They still had to drive our quarter-mile lane to get in front of our house to read it. The past year, they just estimated amounts, which were excessively high, so I called in our meter's amounts each month.
    
    
• Wednesday, 9/6: Dusty Mowing
  • Our day started with a clear morning, but clouds filled in soon after sunrise, and it was cloudy all day. Clouds cleared at sunset.
  • I mowed the lane. It was really dusty. I looked like Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoon after finishing mowing, so I took a quick bath.
    
  • I drove to Quincy. I seem to run out of some medication every single week! Looking north and south while driving across the Mississippi River, I could really detect our mucky air. Occasionally, you could catch whiffs of smoke, probably from Canada.
    
  • Mary froze 17 packages of green beans, which means we're done with our garden beans.
  • While returning home, I saw a deer bedded down along the edge of our neighbor's pond. We watched two deer grazing in the west field when we put the chickens to bed.
  • We enjoyed a bottle of cherry wine from fruit picked in 2021. It's really good. Mary says it resembles the taste of the cherry in chocolate-covered cherry candy.
    
    
• Thursday, 9/7: Start of Blackberry Wine
  
  • I started a 5-gallon batch of blackberry wine. Past blackberry wine creations started with 5 gallons and ended up with 6.5 gallons, so this time I made less to ultimately get 5 gallons. I thawed 16 quart bags on the sunny porch, crushed the fruit in each bag, then dumped the berries into two nylon mesh bags. Added to the 20 pounds, 5.5 ounces of blackberries was 3.5 gallons of water, 4.5 teaspoons of yeast nutrient, 0.8 grams of Kmeta, and seven pounds of sugar. The liquid level was 4.35 gallons, or 16.5 liters. Specific gravity was 1.078 and the pH was 3.3. It now sits overnight in the pantry.
    
  • Mary says she bowed to the inevitable and rearranged the pantry floor to accommodate my growing batches of wine. I now have five different wines in the making and taking up space on the pantry floor (see photo, below).
    
  • We watered the gardens and while doing so, Mary picked two muskmelons.
    
  • While checking fruit trees, we picked four Esopus apples, one Grimes Golden apple, and two Bartlett pears. Granny Smith apples aren't ready and several Esopus apples are green. Bartlett pears are due for picking anytime, now.
    
  • We discovered that the Grimes apples are not as good as described. They're too sweet for our liking. We prefer a tart taste. Esopus has that taste, but that tree is susceptible to every apple disease imaginable.
  • Katie texted me a photo of Haines Junction, Yukon Territory, Canada. She's on her way to Skagway where she will run in the Klondike Road Relay, between Skagway and Whitehorse, Yukon.

  

  Five wines on the pantry floor. In November,
  there will be eight!
  

• Friday, 9/8: Bill Arrives
  
  • Bill showed up around 11:30 a.m. for a three-day visit.
    
  • Mary made three pizzas, using garden produce. Bill, Mary and I ate all of them...take no prisoners!
    
  • I picked 34 apples off the Esopus tree. There are several more to collect.
    
  • Bill picked several worms off the tomato plants while Mary and I watered the gardens.
    
  • We watched the first two Fantastic Beasts movies, which involve the 2016 movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and the 2018 film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. We each ate huge, 6-quart containers of popcorn that I popped up.
    
    
• Saturday, 9/9: Starting a Batch of Apple Cider
  • Something is suspect with the blackberry wine must. It's already showing signs of fermentation. I think some wild yeast that was on the blackberries survived the Kmeta I added and started developing. I worked up a starter batch of Lalvin RC 212 yeast and pitched it into the the brew bucket late at night. The specific gravity dropped from 1.078 to 1.070, so wild yeast indeed was eating up the sugar in the must. The pH dropped from 3.3 to 3.0.
    
  • Bill and I started a 3-gallon batch of apple cider. After thawing out four one-gallon bags of Empire applesauce, we put 25 pounds, 4.6 ounces into two nylon mesh bags. Added to the brew bucket was a gallon of water, 0.4 grams of Kmeta, two teaspoons of yeast nutrient, and 14 ounces of sugar to get a specific gravity of 1.043. I want to start with specific gravity of 1.050, which will put the alcohol level between 6-7 percent. More sugar should release from the apples over the next couple days. The pH was 3.2. No acid blend is necessary.
    
  • Mary picked a half a bucket of hot peppers, 8 watermelons, 2 muskmelon, an ice cream pail of cherry tomatoes, a bucket of big tomatoes, and a third of a bucket of hazelnuts.
  • Mary and I watered gardens while Bill picked worms off the tomato plants.
    
  • We watched the third Fantastic Beasts movie, which is the 2022 film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.
    
  • When Mary and I walked the dogs, a nighthawk that was in the lane flew away as Plato approached it. The bird was parked right on the gravel.