Here’s a little breakdown of what happened on the farm this past season through apple harvest and some fall tasks:
I stopped drinking coffee, and switched to herbal tea only to discover that it is not herbal and it is not tea; like many things today it is only what someone decided to call it, but while words are arbitrary to our bettors, facts are still hard and unyielding.
I pounded in posts for the pasture electrification (see image below). I counted 20 strikes of the pounder per post, 100 posts, so about 200,000 poundings, in the new math. The hope is to have a couple of lamb enjoy the pasture next year and save me from cutting it ever few weeks. That’s the hope.
I had a huge surplus of plums this year, and I ended up with a couple of new things. I fermented several buckets of a plum type we could not identify, and then I distilled the resulting ‘cider’ into hooch. First time, well improvements will be made in the future, but I definitely enjoyed the process, and the hooch.
I also canned the Damson plums, which was easier to do than I thought when I started. We simply washed the plums, split them in half and stuffed as many into quart canning jars as possible with a 1/2 Cup of sugar in each jar. Then I capped and treated them to a boiling cauldron of water for an hour. The resulting ‘compote’ is surly one of the most interesting and intense flavors I’ve ever experienced, while the color and light syrup are also amazing.
Read the collected short stories of William Faulkner. I didn’t know Faulkner was in the Canadian and then the British Royal Air Force during WWI. Several early stories were about his war experience.
I put a permanent door on the tractor barn this summer and I completed the project recently. Happy it’s done.
I picked apples for three days this year as the crop was a bit less than last year. Mary helped with the last day as we had to shake the Wickson crab trees, dropping the million golf ball size apples onto a tarp. We ended up with just 6 boxes of apples, each box weighing about 800 lbs.
I felled several small Ash trees, standing dead, to yield enough wood for next year’s maple roundup. We’ll see what kind of winter we have. When it’s a light easy winter like the last one, it’s really not worth the trouble. I heard they had to boil 80 gallons of sap to get 1 gallon of syrup. I’d have to cut down my forest to do that. Think I’ll pass. But if this winter is cold and snowy, we could have another excellent year like two years ago. Fingers crossed. It’s still my goal to rebuild the maple stove this fall but time is running out. Need to get on my horse!
Now that apples have been harvested from most of the local farms, the deer will start to come into the pile I’ve left in the back. Would like to put at least one in the freezer this year.
I will work today on the new lamb shed, a 4 by 8 structure I think will be fine for two lamb next spring. I’ll split the pasture down the middle, about 3/4 acre on each side and then have two doors on the shed so I can rotate where they graze each week, and try to keep the pasture, and the lambs, healthy.
Oh, I should also mention that Tandem Ciders processed the apples again this year, and I delivered 315 gallons to The Filling Station in Traverse City. I also sold a crate of the crab apples to Tandem. Here’s few photos from the processing:
After a water bath the apples go through a quick sorting and then up a conveyor to the hammer miller on the top left of the third photo. The resulting scat is then run through the belt press to extract the juice.
The garden turned out well this year. One thing we really enjoyed were Shishito peppers, the first time we tried them. Also had a great year for scallions. In the dish below we used both with lamb tips, soy, Chinese black vinegar, cilantro, garlic and ginger for a nice Asian style dish, served with sticky rice:
Well, that’s about it. I’m off to the surgeon’s table in November for a second time and a second metal and plastic knee. I’ll probably take some time off from writing while recuperating, but there will probably still be a short story or three in the mix. Thank you all for reading False Choices this past year. It’s been a great experience to write.
What an accomplishment! Whew…