Sunday Brewday

I haven't brewed anything in several months (probably closer to a year).  I used to brew every 2 weeks like clockwork and kept that up for a couple of years but I have just been too busy (and truth be told too tired) to brew lately.

Summer is here and I have no homebrew on tap and that's just not a good thing for a self-sufficient geek.  Why should I buy beer when I make beer so much better (and cheaper) than I can buy?

So, it was time to roll out the brewing gear and get a batch of cream ale in the fermenter on sunday.  I spent saturday cleaning and scrubbing my mash tun, hot liquor tank and brew kettle.  I took the time to make some test runs on my brew sculpture, fix leaky hoses and make sure everything was in tip-top shape.  One of the keys to brewing very good beer is to be extremely anal about cleanliness and sanitation so I spent a long time scrubbing out the fermenter (my temperature controlled stainless steel conical) and all the hot and cold side equipment.  Got up on sunday, made my yeast starter so it would be spinning on the stir plate all day and went to work.

I was worried that I'd be out of practice and clumsy but I nailed all my numbers dead on.  My strike temps were dead on, all my volumes and gravity were perfect as well.  My grain was still perfectly good (unmilled grain doesn't go bad unless you store it improperly) and the sweet wort tasted very good coming out of the mash tun, with the bitter wort (post boil) tasting equally good going into the fermenter.  Only hiccup during the day was that somehow my refractometer ended up broken and I added cascade hops for the finishing (flavor) addition instead of strisselspalt.  It will still be very good, just have more of a grapefruit citrus note than the apricot that the strisselspalt gives it.

All in all, it was a good brewday.  Hot sweaty work, but it is all worth it when you wake up on monday morning and walk out into the garage to see the airlock happily bubbling away and you know in just a few short weeks you'll have a keg of some of your finest summertime BBQ beer, all for pennies on the dollar.

Four Egg Day

Faith is finally laying again, so we had our first four egg day in a long while.  You can see the 4 differently colored eggs we get here.  We get turquoise blue, olive green, light brown and dark brown.  The dark brown ones belong to Faith.  They are a little bit bigger than the others and have a mottled white dusting on them as well.

Each chicken will lay the same colored egg for her entire life.  The green and blue ones come from the hens with Aracauna genes in them (the colored egg gene is dominant).  That would be Diva and Charity.  The light brown ones are from Granny, who as I posted earlier is our most prolific layer.  The dark brown one is from Faith who is a penedensca mutt and they can lay extremely dark brown (almost chocolate) colored eggs.

They'll get gradually larger as they get older.  Faith actually laid us a really strange egg before she molted, it was an egg inside an egg... that's right, an entire whole egg (shell and all) inside another shell.  It was the craziest thing.

Anyway, that's enough about the hens.  I have been checking on the tomato plants and it looks like all but two of them will survive being planted out.  Two of the pink beefsteaks are flat on the ground and I don't think they'll recover.  I have several replacement seedlings I can put in place of them, and I have a couple more black prince seedlings to plant out once they get a wee bit larger.  Hopefully we'll have a fantastic tomato crop this year because my peas are complete no-shows and the snails have devoured most of my brassicas!

Busy Weekend

I normally like to do non-techie things on the weekends to decompress my brain.  This weekend was no exception.

My wife volunteered me to grill all the meat for her church dinner.  They were having a "wild game" dinner complete with venison, trout, salmon, deer liver, pheasant, pork, etc.  Not all the meat was grilled but quite a bit was and I was manning two grills at once (one charcoal and one gasser).  I ended up grilling about 50 lbs or so of meat for 120 or so hungry Baptists.

It was kind of humorous because I am Catholic and of course I told them I sprinkled holy water in all the food and they were now all Catholics.  They were mildly amused and the head Pastor said "that's ok, we were planning on taking you upstairs and dunking you in the tank anyway"

They are a good group of people, in general.  Missed mass at my own church though, which is something that kind of bothered me a bit.  Ah well, I was still worshipping, just in a different place!

I visited my God son for the very first time as well.  His mom and dad (my nephew and niece) were exhausted so I didn't get to visit with them much but I got to hold little Jacob while he slept soundly on my chest with his little arms wrapped around my belly.

I also finally got the garden tilled up and all my tomato plants put out.  I've got really hard heavy clay in my garden that I've spent a couple of years trying to break up and am only slowly making progress.  It's pretty tiring bouncing a tiller off of the clay for so long (and believe me, it bounces a lot before the tines finally bite in) but I managed to get it all tilled up and got about 20 heirloom tomatoes planted that I started from seeds two months ago.  They are about 6 inches tall now and are very much ready to go out.

I planted about a dozen big beefsteak plants... half German Pink Beefsteak and half Mortgage Lifter plants.  The Mortage Lifters are a heirloom beefsteak variety as well and run a pound to a pound and a half per fruit so they are huge.  The Pink Beefsteaks are potato leaf so I hope they don't cross with my others.  I don't have any other PL varieties out so I'm hoping it will be ok.  I also planted a couple of cherry tomato plants (Grandpa's Golf Balls and Black Cherry) and then 3 or 4 Black Prince tomatoes for summer eating.  We'll can most of the big tomatoes and eat the others fresh throughout the summer.

The onions are finally coming up in the raised bed and the turnips, beets and radishes are starting to fill out.  I don't have a lot of them planted, I basically just wanted to use some of my new raised bed space in the time gap between now and when my squash and cucumbers will go out so they are more of a test run.

All in all, a busy weekend.  I'm tired today but I feel good knowing I got a lot done.

No Chicken and Dumplings For Now

Well, Granny's leg seems to be healing up and she's getting around just fine, so I guess I have to cancel the plans for a sunday chicken dinner. Good thing, because Faith isn't laying at all since she was molting and the other girls take turns. Granny lays consistently, even when she's got a gimpy leg. She's my girl... good thing too because I'm usually eating egg salad on fridays during Lent instead of fish this year.

I planted Amish snap peas this weekend. They are the first seeds I got through the seed saver's exchange so I hope they do well. I got enough to plant a big enough crop to build up the seed stock for next year (if they do ok that is). Won't have a lot of extra for eating this crop but I should be able to at least put a few aside for snackage. I also got Lynch butterbeans (a pole lima bean) for my wife and I requested some Yukon Gold seed potatoes. I haven't gotten the potatoes yet, I'm hoping I get them soon. The pole beans will have to wait until the ground is nice and warm. I think I'm going to stack my old tomato cages and use them for pole bean trellises this year since I'm planning on trying the Florida weave method to stake my tomatoes instead of cages.

I've been reading about a new technique for growing potatoes in a barrel (well, new to me anyway). You take a barrel (I happen to have a couple of food grade plastic drums) and punch holes in the bottom for drainage and add some bricks, rocks or whatever to the bottom. Then you add a little bit of dirt and your seed potatoes. As the potatoes sprout and grow, you continue to cover them up with dirt until the barrel is full, and then you let them go nuts. Potatoes are actually swollen portions of the stem, so when you do this you make the potato stem the whole depth of the barrel and it will grow potatoes all along the stem. You supposedly end up with a really big yield of potatoes from a small amount of space. When it all dies back in the fall, you just dig out the potatoes, dump the dirt in the compost pile and start fresh the next year. I'm going to try this if I get my seed potatoes soon.

My turnips and radishes are starting to come up and it's almost time to put the tomatoes in the ground. I also started a new flat of pepper seeds, split up equally between sweet cherry, jupiter bell and jalapeno. Should go without saying that everything I'm planting this year is either open-pollinated or heirloom. I'm still struggling with how to best use my space and how many plants I need based on our consumption patterns. We eat TONS of peppers so I'm quite sure I'm not planting enough, but last year my pepper plants didn't do well at all so I'm trying a different bed for them this year and we'll see how it works out.

My mom really surprised me, she asked me for some of my Black Prince tomato seeds. Made me smile, because it's my favorite tomato so far. I grew them last year and fell in love with the flavor. I gave some to mom and thought that she wasn't that impressed with them but I guess I was wrong. My mom constantly surprises me like that, you'd think I could read her better after 42 years of sharing our lives but I guess I've still got a lot to learn about her!

I tried to find some little paper coin envelopes so I could separate out all the seeds I want to send her but I didn't have much luck this weekend even after scouring several stores. I plan on sending her 5 or 6 seeds of several varieties... German Pink Beefsteak, Mortgage Lifter, Red Velvet, Sprite, Black Cherry, Black Prince and Grandpa's Golfballs. That's a good mix of huge tomatoes (the ML's run a pound to a pound and a half per fruit) to the little tiny sprite grape tomatoes and everything in between flavor-wise. That way she can pick and choose what she wants to sprout and grow. I'll go looking for envelopes again this weekend. I need to get them to her soon so she can get them started and outside before the summer is over.

I've had 100% germination rate (or close enough to it that I haven't noticed) on my tomato seeds this year so I'm confident that she really only needs a few of each. It's not like she will have room to start everything anyway and this will let her experiment and figure out if she wants to concentrate on a specific type. I'm hoping she'll plant a couple plants of several different varieties and then tell me what she likes and I'll send her a big bunch of seeds for next year.

Granny Has a Bum Leg

I seem to be having a problem with lame chickens.  One of my penedensca mutt hens (named Faith) got her leg all whopperjawed last fall and I had to use BluKote on it to keep the other hens from pecking at the blood.  Then we entered our rainy cold season, and she was miserable.  She'd wallow in the mud, lost a bunch of feathers and refused to walk on her bad leg.  I took her out and kept her separate during the day in a pet carrier full of timothy hay until she got her chest feathers back and got healthy again but she's still a little lazy although she's walking around fine now (she hasn't started laying again yet though).

Now that she's healthy and the weather is nice she's perked right up, but all of a sudden my best layer (Granny) now has a bum leg as well.  This one is different, there's no external injuries, but she refuses to walk on it and just drags it behind her.  She's still laying though, and she hobbles up and down the ramp into the coop.  The weather is nice now and warm and dry enough that I'm hoping she'll heal up but I hate to see her like this.  If she doesn't heal up in a week or two or at least show some signs of recovery I think the only kind thing to do will be to put her in the stewpot.  She's my most consistent layer though, so that's going to put a dent in our egg supply.

Welcome

I decided I'd start a new blog (yet another one) about my "backyard farming".  I'm not really an urban dweller since we live out in the county but we have a fairly small space and not much room.

I'm learning how to best use the space and my wife and I are trying to leave a "lighter footprint", so to speak.  We are trying to make use of the wonderful gifts of nature we have already and to supplement them.  In addition, in this scary economy, you never know when the presence of a healthy garden will make the difference between eating well and having to tighten the belt a few notches.

Currently we have an Asian pear tree, plums, figs, grapes, apricots and mandarin oranges.  My wife cans and preserves everything that I manage to get picked before the birds and raccoons get to them which is pretty much everything except the grapes.  My wife keeps bees and harvests the honey as well.  This year I planted blackberry canes and a nice large bed (40 plants) of strawberries and I built an asparagus bed (that won't be producing until next year).

I garden and have a few raised beds I've built as well as a larger (larger for us anyway) garden area that is not in good shape since it's all heavy clay.  I am learning what I can grow there and what doesn't do so well.  Last year I was pretty successful with my tomatoes and brassicas, this year I hope to do even better.  Our goal is to have enough tomatoes for my wife to can all the tomato products we use throughout the year.  I'd love to tear out the entire garden area and replace it with a deep bed system eventually.

We also have 4 chickens in a backyard run that is fenced in and covered to protect them from predators.  We get around 20 eggs a week on the average.

In addition to all that, I roast all of our coffee myself, I brew my own beer, bake all of our bread (I cheat and use a bread machine) and both my wife and I love to cook and experiment in the kitchen.

I hope to share some of our day to day experiences here and get back into the habit of blogging again.  I used to write 800-1000 words a day and miss it.