Sausage

For those readers out there that don't feel as though there is much actual homesteading going on at the Miller homestead, this post is for you!  For many months I've had a bunch of lower-quality meat sitting in my freezer that was all that was left of a deer harvested from Miller Homestead North.  I'd been half-heartedly looking for sausage casings at some local butchers to avail.  I finally decided to get serious and just order them from the internet.  Between the prep work, grinding, mixing, stuffing, and clean-up, it took me about 5 hours to make about 12lbs of sausage.  Yikes, they'd better be tasty!  I used all 9lbs of the remaining venison, and three pounds of ground pork in order to add some richness and juiciness. I turned that 12lbs of meat into 36 sausages.  I made bratwurst (a seasoning blend that came with the sausage casings), italian sausage (some of a seasoning blend that came with the casings plus some garlic, red wine, and cayenne pepper), and chorizo (a from-scratch internet recipe, minus the oregano).

Here they are drying on the counter.  Bratwurst back left, italian front left, and chorizo on the right.

I had reasonable confidence in the flavor of these sausages, but I was a bit concerned about the texture.  Most of the information I had seen on the Internet said to trim off all the silver-skin and connective tissue on the meat, though some people seemed to think that wasn't necessary.  I planned on removing it, but as I got into the trimming, there was so much of it and it was interwoven so much into the meat that I wouldn't have  had any meat left if I did try to cut it off.  I ended up just cutting off large, easy to remove pieces of connective tissue, left the rest, and hoped for the best.

Here is the finished product the next day.  Italian on the left, chorizo in the middle, and bratwurst on the right.

Good news!  No trace of any chewiness from any connective tissue.  Also, it is quite tasty!  The italian could use some more fennel (weird that I would actually want more fennel in something), but it tastes quite good.  The bratwurst might be a bit salty for me, but others (like my wife) like stuff saltier than I do.  The chorizo is probably the best, in my opinion.  Very good paprika flavor with a hint of smokiness and moderate spiciness level.  The downside to these sausages is that they are all rather dry.  There may have been a bit of over-cooking, but I think its mostly due to the leanness of the meat.  I'd seen some recipes that called for 50/50 mixes of venison and pork or 30% pork FAT with 70% venison.  I went with 75% venison and 25% ground pork, so I there is considerably less fat in these sausages than most sausages.  Sliced up and put in a sauce, I don't think you would notice the dryness.  Even alone, they are very much acceptable, which is good, because I have 33 more links in my freezer now!

The Orchard Is Alive

I'm happy to report that the orchard at Miller Homestead North is doing pretty well.  It appears that all the trees/bushes survived their transplant.  Most are doing well and growing, though the chestnuts took a pretty good beating when they started to open up before getting hit with a late spring hard frost.  Some of the apples are showing a strange wilting of the growing tips.  They had been getting quite a bit of rain, and I didn't see any sign of any bugs or disease beyond the wilting, so the cause is a mystery.  It  may just be the weird weather, but they were given a general-purpose spray just in case.  Everything else is green and growing.  The pictures below are the hazelnuts.  One close-up of a smaller one, and the other picture is down the row.  They are dramatically different sizes because the smaller ones were given to me by a friend at a young age, while the bigger ones are several year old nursery trees.  You can also see that the mixture of clover and grass surrounding the trees is growing well.  There are some holes due to spotty germination, but they should fill in.

Random Garden Update

Its been a very hot and wet start to the summer here at the Miller homestead.  Most of the garden has been doing pretty well.  We got a modest snow pea harvest.  Spring greens were again very poor this year.  The onion plants didn't seem to grow real big, but the bulbs are still in the ground, so we shall see what we end up with.  They are just about ready to harvest along with the shallots and garlic, both of which looked quite good above-ground.  Its currently broccoli harvest time.  The heads aren't all that big, but considering that they don't do real well in heat, I'll take what I can get.  On to the success stories....  We've been inundated with lettuce.  In the last few weeks, they've started to get tip burn from the heat and new seedings haven't been coming up well.  Thats OK, I'm about sick of lettuce.  Every year it seems as though I underestimate how big my potato plants are going to get.  They grow a couple feet high, then kind of fall over and grow sideways.  They have now grown about 4 feet away from their planting holes and are taking over nearby beds.  I'd better get a bumper crop of potatoes this year.  The pepper plants have put on a serious growth spurt and I'm letting them set fruit now instead of pinching off the flowers.  Should be another good year for bell and spicy peppers.  The pole beans are also doing their usual out-of control growth.  I really should only plant bush beans, but with my limited garden space and a big wall of my garage that they can grow up, it so tempting to plant the pole beans.  Of course, then they grow 8+ feet high and so dense that it is a serious struggle to find and harvest beans.  I lopped off the bean vines at about 7' high to try to get them to put more energy into beans and less into growth, but that only slowed them down for about a week.  Only bush beans next year!!

In the pic below, the beans are on the left side, peppers and broccoli front and center, lettuce front right.  Garlic and onions are on the right side, brussels sprouts in the center, and potatoes are all you can see in the back.

Planting Weekend

I had a pretty aggressive plan for the orchard planting weekend, but thanks to help from my parents and my wife, we got almost all of it done, if a bit behind schedule.

My parents arrived on wed night.  On thursday they fought with a 2wd truck that got stuck in the mud on the road down to the meadow and had mechanical issues, but managed to pick up several loads of pre-ordered fencing and mulch from agway and move the tractor down to the meadow before my wife and I arrived thursday night.

Friday was warm (60's) but windy and cloudy.  We tried out three different pH testing kits.  One was a digital probe that rarely gave any reading at all.  One was an old kit that my parents had that used indicator liquid put into a tube with soil and water.  That proved to be very difficult at best to read as the water remained cloudy and brown.  The third was a kit that I picked up from my local garden store at the last minute.  Similar to the liquid indicator, you put a small amount of dirt in a clear container and add water.  The indicator material is a capsule of powder.  When you open the capsule, pour the powder in, and shake it up, the solids settle out after a few seconds leaving a clear, colored liquid to compare to the pH scale.  There must be something in the powder that causes stuff to coagulate and precipitate out.  It worked quite well, and in the one location that we got a reading from the digital probe, it matched the capsule method.  The capsule kit is made by "Rapitest" and you can get it with different numbers of capsules.  I've seen it at a couple different stores and it will pop right up on a google search.  All the samples from the area that I had prepped for the orchard last year read between 6.0-6.5.  Another spot that was tested nearby in the field was 5.0.

We made great progress on Friday prepping the soil and digging holes.  Some of the holes were dug manually, which turned out to be easier than expected, though once you hit the compacted sand/clay layer about 8-14" down, you couldn't really get much deeper.  Simultaneously the tractor was digging holes(trenches) one bucket wide.

The idea being that it would be faster to dig the holes that way, and then we could just fill in the dirt on the sides of the trench that weren't needed for the tree.  By mid-afternoon we were well ahead of schedule and had completed all the soil prep work and dug all the holes.  We were about to start planting some trees when the leading edge of a cold front showed up.  Since we were ahead of schedule, we decided it would be a good time to stop for the day.

Saturday was in the upper 30's, cloudy, and quite windy.  Occasional sleet.  Unpleasant.  The plan was to plant almost everything that day.  Things moved along at a decent pace with the smaller hand-dug holes, but the tractor-dug holes ended up being rather time-consuming to fill back in.  We ended the day in the late afternoon with probably only about half of the ~55 trees planted.  Those that we did have planted were mulched and fenced.  

Sunday we got an early start.  When we got to the meadow the sun was just starting to come over the pines and melt the dusting of snow. Temps were in the mid 20's.  The water buckets had about an inch of ice on the top and sides.  As the day went on it warmed up into the 40's, clear, and light winds.  We decided to fill in all the remaining big tractor-dug holes with the tractor and re-dig by hand.  We made better progress after that, ending the day around 1:30 with almost all of the trees planted.  The only thing we didn't get planted at that time were blueberries that had been planted over by the northern pine plantation years ago and were to be transplanted to the orchard.  As of Sunday afternoon we had 50 trees planted, mulched, and fenced, plus a couple good sized beds of asparagus planted.  

My parents were staying an extra day, so they kindly volunteered to do the transplanting of the final blueberries as well as cover crop seeding on Monday.  Hopefully that went ok.

By the way, the watering was done using a couple of 55 gallon drums that my Dad was able to get from a friend.  We strapped them into the bucket on the tractor and drove them down to the brook where we used a generator to power a sump pump to get the water into the barrels.  We added a boiler drain spigot to each barrel that we connected to a garden hose.  Drove the tractor with the drums out into the field to do the watering.  It worked well enough, though not perfectly.

I'll be headed back up somewhere around Memorial Day to see what looks alive.  At that time I will also put either aluminum window screen or hardware cloth at the base of the trees for rodent protection.

Miller Homestead North

Its been quite some time since I have posted on here, but there has been a recent homesteading development that merits a few posts.  Miller homestead is expanding, and there is now a Miller homestead north!  Our family purchased a property in the Adirondacks in the 1940's, part of which was a very small scale dairy farm.  A homestead, if you will.  Since that time, much of the pasture land has been fallow.  Last spring several acres of the former pasture land was cleared of saplings and brush.  One area of it was set aside for a future orchard and soil preparations were begun.

The soil is very sandy and acidic (pH was approximately 4.5).  The area was fertilized, limed, tilled, and seeded with buckwheat as a cover crop.  The buckwheat grew quite well.  My mom was checking out the variety of insects attracted to the flowers.

In the fall, the area was again fertilized, tilled, and seeded, this time with oats.  The oats were seeded in mid-september, and that did not seem to give it enough time to really get going before winter hit, but at least the soil was in much better shape than it was in the spring.

Over the winter I spent quite a bit of time planning out what to plant in the new orchard area in the spring.  I ordered trees from several different different nurseries and planned to put them in the ground in late april.

Compostable bags?

We do quite a bit of composting here at the homestead.  Probably somewhere in the range of 100-200lbs of vegetables, lawn waste, and other stuff each year.  I thought it was interesting when Sun Chips came out with fully compostable bags a couple of years ago. (Strangely, they stopped selling them because people thought the bags were too noisy?!)  There were even pictures on the back showing different stages of a bag decomposing over 12 weeks.  After eating a bag of chips, I put a bag in a compost pile (this was 2 years ago).  This wasn't at home, it was at a cottage in the Adirondacks.  I was back there again last week and decided to check on the bag.  Here it is.  It doesn't look like there has been any decomposition at all in the last 2 years!  It was partially buried under a bunch of other stuff, so it had plenty of contact with the soil/compost.  False advertising!!

Garden Update

 Here is how the garden looked as of a couple days ago.

A few nice looking lettuce patches in serious need of thinning.

 The results of the thinning....1.5 lbs of good looking young lettuce plants.

 Unfortunately the next day after I did the thinning of the lettuce, some critter came in and ate a bunch of the remaining lettuce plants.  That seems to happen somewhat often for some reason.  No animal activity, but then I thin some plants and something comes along and eats some of the remaining plants.  Very frustrating.  Also frustrating is that the same animal mauled the two remaining broccoli plants that weren't previously attacked.  Clearly this is not a small animal, as it broke off 1/4" stems and ate 6-8" long leaves.  If we were out in the suburbs, I'd guess a woodchuck, but I have no idea what around here could/would do this.

 Up until the last couple days it has been hot and dry here.  I had to water the garden basically every day.  This was a bit of a problem last year as well.  I have noticed that the few areas of the garden that have a layer of last year's leaves as mulch stay moist much longer, have far more worm/insect activity going on under the soil, and have less weeds.  With that in mind, I figured that it would be a good idea to mulch the rest of the garden.  Newspapers and straw are two cheap mulches that I thought of.  I tried using newspapers last year, but they kept blowing away, even with small rocks as weights, so I'll try straw this year.

I calculated the volume of a standard sized bale of straw and assuming I wanted 1" thick, I calculated 4-5 bales of straw.  The lady at the garden/farm center said $5.50 for a bale of straw, but its a big bale of straw.  She showed me rough sizes with her arms, and it looked like standard size to me, so I got 4.  Turns out they really are pretty big, and quite compacted.  I would guess 40-50lbs per bale.

I started spreading it out about 2" deep.  Muffin was supervising.

Jaime also joined in on the supervision.

It turns out that there is a lot of straw in those bales!  One bale probably would have been perfectly fine.  I ended up using two bales and spreading it on the paths as well as putting thick layers on some weedy areas around the edges of the garden.

An Unispired Post

I don't have much to talk about, but I haven't posted in a while, so here are a couple pictures.  These Pak Choi plants were all planted at the same time and all sprouted at the same time.  Some haven't really grown at all since then.  I suspect there is a patch of clay under them or something like that, but I don't really know.

Some happy lettuce sproutlings.  This was actually a couple weeks ago.  They got thinned right after this picture and now need to be thinned again.  My garden seems to have way more slugs this year than in years past, but somehow the lettuce hasn't really been affected by them.

April Snow

I guess we're going to find out how cold hardy the stuff I planted actually is.  I'm more worried about the snow crushing the little sproutlings than I am about the cold.



Saving Seed

I didn't really plan on saving any seeds last year, but a couple of my plants bolted and went to seed, so I figured I might as well harvest them and see if I can get them to grow.  That happened with arugula and basil.  I also decided to keep some of the seeds from my dried cayenne peppers.  Similarly, I wasn't planning on saving any onions or potatoes, but with the bumper crop of potatoes, I still have a bunch that had started to sprout in my root cellar (basement).  There were also a few onions that I apparently had decided were too small to harvest last year, but had formed little onion sets in the ground, so I decided to replant those into my onion patch as well.

Surprisingly, all the seeds sprouted well and are growing quite well.  In fact, some are doing significantly better than their commercial counterparts.  The onion sets, which were no larger then the other onion sets I planted, have sprouted up significantly bigger and faster than the ones I bought.  I planted the harvested cayenne seeds next to some cayenne seeds that I purchased, and the harvested seedlings are bigger than the others (and the poblano and bell pepper seedlings, too).

I'm not sure how much genetic variation there is in seed packs, but it makes some sense to me that if I take seeds from the plants that grew best in my particular soil, light, and moisture conditions, the next generation could also be expected to do well in those same conditions the next year.

Of course another possibility is that I'd get some sort of whacky cross-pollination.  For instance, might my cayenne peppers be growing so well because they are in fact an F1 hybrid of cayenne and one of the other varieties that I grew last year?  I don't even know if pepper plants can cross pollinate across varieties or not.  I'd assume so, but I have no idea.  Just in case, I'll probably transplant one of the commercial cayenne seedlings and one of the harvested version.

My garden is so small that I don't really have the space to grow extra plants with the intention of saving seeds, but this year I might start to look for more opportunities to save what seeds I can, especially if something grew particularly well.  Some of my plants are F1 hybrids and therefore may not be good candidates for seed saving, but many of my plants are non-hybrid varieties.  Some, like the cayenne peppers, will be harvested when the fruit is ripe and the seeds are fully developed, so I could just keep some of the seeds.  Others, like the greens, would need to be allowed to bolt and go to seed.  I intend to plant other things in the areas where I am growing the spring greens now, but maybe there will be enough room to leave one or two plants to go to seed.

Seedling Progress

Here is my flat of seedlings that has been under a grow-light in the basement. I had it out in a semi-sunny area for an hour while I was working in the garden. The plants need to start building up a tolerance to actual sunlight. There are a lot of different things in there so I won't go through them all. Most are doing well and are on schedule. The broccoli and cauliflower (bottom right corner) will be the first things to be transplanted in a week or so. Many of the more tender things won't be transplanted for another month or so.

I finally put together the compost tumbler that Jaime got me for my birthday. My old system of throwing stuff in a garbage can with some holes in the bottom and periodically trying to turn it over with a shovel wasn't working very well. It was a pain to try to mix the stuff up, I never seemed to have the right moisture level in it (wet on the bottom, dry on top), and was just slow at turning the stuff to usable compost. Hopefully this sleek new composting machine will remedy all of those problems. It really is pretty amazing how much compostable material we generate.
Avid blog readers may remember that I planted the stem of one of last year's brussels sprouts plants with a few buds that not only survived the winter, but seemed to be growing. I wondered what would come from these buds. A regular brussels sprout plant that had a good head start? Alas, all three sprouts have flower buds, so it appears that they will just flower and go to seed. I guess brussels sprouts must be a bi-ennial plant. I guess that makes sense since they don't flower during the first year when you plant them.

Carrots

I decided it was time to harvest the carrots that I planted in late summer last year.

At first it seemed like a great harvest, but it turned out that probably almost half of them were unusable due to either splitting open or having slugs and other critters eating out the middle of them. Still, I got about 1.25 lbs of good carrots.

The rest of the garden is making progress. The garlic and shallots that were planted last year are doing well, though the multiplier onions didn't fare nearly as well over the winter. About half of those died, and the other half didn't send up much in the way of spring greenery. I planted replacement bulbs in the spots where none came up. The instructions I got with the onions say that you can plant them in the spring, but you will get dramatically lower production. Here is what the Allium patch looked like as of last week(I didn't get around to posting this till now). Thats garlic on the right, shallots on the left, and some multiplier onions in between them.

Most of the seeds that I planted in the garden have sprouted. The timing worked out well as we had exceedingly warm weather for a couple weeks, which allowed the seeds time to germinate and sprout. We hit all kinds of temperature records, and some went so far as to say that it was a 4 or 5-sigma weather event.

Recently, the temperatures have dropped back down and we have actually had a week of below average temperatures. All the stuff I planted was cold-hardy and survived temperatures in the mid to upper 20's. It even snowed last night.

There were two things that didn't sprout, though. The kale and scallions did not come up. They were both older seeds, but I'm surprised that they didn't come up. The beauty of being able to plant so early is that I can just plant replacement seeds, and I will be right back on my original schedule of planting cold-hardy seeds around April 1st.

Indoor seed starts are doing well, and I'll have a picture of that for the next post.

Its Spring?

I had planted some broccoli, cauliflower, and scallion seeds back in February, but I planned to start the majority of my indoor seeds right around the 1st of March. Due to a vacation and general business, I just got around to doing that planting this weekend. In addition to the aforementioned veggies, I planted tomatoes, peanuts, okra, cantaloupe, cucumber, and 3 kinds of peppers. That should be all of the indoor starts. The seed flat now looks like this.

After last year's disaster of a spring, I didn't have any plans to start working in the actual garden till around the first of April. However, with recent warm days and forecast LOWS in the upper 40's and 50's for at least another week or so, I have changed my mind. I spent a couple hours out in the garden laying out this year's paths and beds and turning over the soil in the beds that will be used first. Here is what it looked like as I was just getting started. Note the small mound against the cement wall on the left side. That is the remains of the compost pile that had all my fall garden waste and leaves and stuff like that.

I found some interesting stuff in the remains of the compost pile. Here are a pair of stems still brightly colored. The purple is a kale plant that had been on top of the pile. The chartreuse green is a broccoli plant (I think) that was buried down in the pile. The picture doesn't do it justice, it really is quite shockingly brightly colored.

I was surprised to also find some baby brussels sprouts poking out of the compost pile.

The brussels sprouts plants didn't have time to mature last year and the buds got no larger than the nail on my index finger(at best), so come December, I cut the plants off at ground level and tossed them in the compost pile. Apparently the buds grew from the energy still left in the stems. Here is what it looked like after I gently pulled out one stem.

Rather than kill off such determined little fellows, I buried the stem in part of what will be my brussels sprouts bed. I tried a few google searches to see if you could grow brussels sprouts plants from the buds, but I couldn't find anything. We shall see what happens.

The garlic plants seem to have a good start going. You can see them in the picture below. They were planted in late October along with "potato onions" and some shallots. Those have not poked up through the leaves yet, but I peeked under the insulating layer of leaves that I piled on them, and they look to be just starting to grow.

Here is what it looked like when I was done. Not too impressive, but at least half of the beds have been turned over. I'm hoping to plant a bunch of cold-hardy stuff like arugula, kale, and rapini this week sometime.

Garden Planning

Its that time of year again. The time of year when I get 1 or two seed catalogs in the mail every day, even though I never asked for them. I also have no need for them since I've already purchased my seeds for next year! I ordered some from www.groworganic.com, a company that I've been happy with over the last couple years. However, they don't sell hybrids there, and there are some vegetables that I really wanted to get hybrid varieties of, so I ordered some from www.burpee.com.

If you're wondering what I'm going to grow this year, take a look at my tentative garden map for next year. New additions this year are shallots and multiplier onions (both planted in the fall along with garlic) and Okra, per Jaime's request. I'm also trying peanuts again, but I ordered "peanut seeds" this time as opposed to trying to use unroasted peanuts from Wegmans.

Apple Wine Update

I was in a bit of a rush to try the apple wine around the time of the first apple wine post since I was having some friends over and I wanted to have it available for consumption at that time. Over the weeks since then, it continued to settle. It now is crystal clear and the yeasty flavor is entirely gone. It still lacks apple flavor and has too much acidity, but it is definately better than it was. I can now give it a 5 out of 10.

Hot Sauce!

If you recall a post from a few months ago, we had a bumper crop of peppers this year, including cayennes.

What better to do with excess cayennes than make hot sauce? I made two different batches. One was intended to mimic Frank's Redhot, while the second would be a bit more custom. Here is what the peppers looked like. Some of the peppers had fuzzy mold inside. I'm wondering if this was because I left the peppers that ripened early in the season on the plant rather than taking them off? Anyway, here is what it looked like when I was chopping them up.

I found a recipe online that said it was a copycat recipe for Redhot, so I decided to start with that. The recipe is quite simple. Pepper, vinegar, garlic, and salt. Boil everything together for a while, then put them in a blender and strain the resulting liquid. I got about 8 fluid ounces from the recipe. Using small pieces of bread to dip in the sauce, I decided that it had too much vinegar, not enough salt, and the vinegar flavor didn't seem quite right. It wasn't necessarily bad, but I also wouldn't say its all that great.

For the second batch I decided to use more salt, less vinegar, and use half apple cider vinegar. In addition, I used more salt, more garlic, and added a bunch of black pepper. Unfortunately it didn't work out too well. There wasn't enough liquid so I put in some water, but it ended up too liquidy. Somehow I managed to put in too much salt also. Its a shame, too, because if it wasn't for the excess salt/water, I like the underlying flavor of that batch quite a bit.

I didn't have any empty hotsauce bottles around, so I put the sauces in 4 oz. jelly jars. Makes it a bit inconvenient for using it. Here is what the final product looked like.

Here is a visual comparison of the two homemade sauces along with Redhot and a random hotsauce that I happened to have at the time. This is after letting the sauces rest for a few weeks.

Both homemade batches are slightly hotter than the commercial sauces, but not overwhelmingly so. The vinegar flavor in first homemade sauce seemed to mellow a bit in the jar. It tasted reasonably good, though it didn't have a lot of depth of flavor. The second batch continues to be too watery and salty, but the underlying flavor is quite good. With less salt and water, I think it would be right there with my favorite commerical sauces like Redhot and Cholula.

With very good (and reasonably cheap) commercial hotsauces widely available, I don't see a lot of reason to keep trying to make my own hotsauces. However, I do plan to grow at least one hot pepper plant next year since they are great for throwing in stir-fries and other dishes.

Year End Garden

Here is what the garden looks like as of 12/26.

The carrots are still fine, the scallions are sort of ok (partially frost damaged), while the lettuce and arugula finally got killed off in a hard frost in mid-December. The weather has been unseasonbly warm here this month. That is nice for the heating bills, but it confuses some of the plants. The garlic, onions, and shallots that I planted in October have started to sprout above the leaves that I put over them.

The garlic I planted last October did the same thing and it turned out OK, so hopefully they will all be fine this year too. I'm thinking next year I'll plant that stuff in November rather than mid-October.

Holy Cauliflower

I was recently in Wegmans and I saw some massive heads of cauliflower in their locally grown section. I was satisfied with my ~1.0 lb per plant yield, but these cauliflower put mine to shame. I measured one of them and it was around 4 lbs! I don't even know what somebody would do with 4lbs of cauliflower. Either have a cauliflower party or freeze it, I guess.

South Wedge Winery 2011 Apple Wine Review

It is cloudy, but quite a bit lighter in color than the cider that the initial cider.

The aroma isn't terribly enticing as it smells somewhat yeasty. There is only a mild apple smell. It has remarkably little flavor. Some fruit and apple flavor, but way less than I expected. Its actually kind of remarkable how little apple flavor there is. There isn't too much yeasty flavor, though its hard to get away from it since the smell is so strong. The wine benefits tremendously from an open-air rest as much of the yeasty aroma/flavor disappears. The sugar is almost entirely gone, and without the sweetness to mask it, there is a surprising amount of acidity.

I'd have to give this a 4 out of 10. Its certainly consumable, but not exactly good. I would probably only buy it if it was in the bargain bin.

There are a couple things wrong with the wine. The first is the yeastiness. I have no doubt that if allowed it to go through a secondary fermentation and fully settle and clarify, the yeastiness would be gone. In fact, it seemed to improve significantly between the day after fermentation stopped (my first taste) and 4 days later (when I'm writing this review). The yeastiness is probably going to be a fundamental problem with the quick and dirty ferment it in the jug method. The second thing that is wrong is the lack of apple flavor. Its kind of amazing how little it tastes like apple anymore. I think if I had used a yeast that got impaired at lower alcohol levels, it would have ended with some more apple flavor and a little bit of sweetness to balance the acidity. Just a hint of sugar, though. I still maintain that all commercial hard ciders I've drank have been too sweet.

The 2011 Harvest Summary

The 2011 growing season is clearly winding down at this point. There are only a few things left in the garden now including Kale, Pak Choi, Lettuce, and Carrots. Those veggies are still alive, but aren't really growing anymore. I've hacked up all the rest of the vegetation and put it in a new compost pile for the winter. The new pile consists of the recently cut up garden vegatation, the contents of the compost can from throughout the spring/summer/fall, the previous compost pile contents (stuff that was in the compost can but wasn't fully rotted in the spring), and leaves from my front yard on top. You can see that pile on the left side of the picture below.

With the majority of the harvest complete, I've "published" the 2011 harvest spreadsheet. It shows how much of each vegetable we produced here at the homestead and its approximate value. If you're too lazy to look, there was about 120 pounds of produce harvested, with an approximate market value of $300. That is a similar haul to 2010, which is surprising considering that the growing season (especially early) wasn't all that great. I'm consistently impressed with how much produce you can get from a pretty small area. The actual square footage of planted beds in the garden (not including paths) is probably around 160 square feet. Thats an average of 3/4 lb per square foot!

In terms of which crops did well, the best performers were:

• Peppers (all varieties)
• Kennebec Potatoes
• Pole beans, especially the Blue Lake variety
• Kale
• Garlic

On the other end of the spectrum, the disappointments were:

• Corn
• Melon
• Red Norland Potatoes
• Rapini
• Brussels Sprouts (again)