too many tomatoes

I think Patsy and I have just this year felt like we have made up for all the years with out a garden. Our garden this past four years has been crazy big, with usually too  any tomatoes, but sometimes it's too many cabbages, or too many green beans.

So we are thinking that next year we might scale back a bit. Part of the plan is to plant winter wheat in one quarter of our garden this fall, thus making our own flour next year, but also reducing our veggie plantings by one fourth.

 Injury right at harvest time was a deciding factor. As was running out of freezer space.

Even with the Septoria leaf spot, our Romas are producing well, and we planted a crazy number of plants. I won't even discuss the grape tomatoes.

What part of your life have you gone too far with one realized you need to back off a bit?

favorite candy bar?

I'm eating a Dove promise ( dark, of course) and wondered what other folks favorite candy is. I eat two Promises every day with my coffee in the morning. The only other times I eat candy bars is as road food when traveling.

Favorites on the road: Mounds, KitKat dark, Ferrero Roche dark, and Little Debbie fudge rounds (I know those aren't candy bars, but they are an important source of road food enjoyment).

Hard to find, and a bit pricey, but I just recently ran in to Loacker dark chocolate hazelnut biscuits and like them a lot.

Do you see a pattern here?

the bounty of nature

Today I gathered eight five gallon buckets of apples from our trees. Tomorrow it is supposed to rain, so not a good day for outside work. We will grind and press the apples in the barn, and can some apple juice, and ferment some to make hard cider.

Yield from the apples is quite variable. Some varieties are just juicier than others, and some apples aren't fully ripe, but fall from the tree anyway. We'll be doing a blend from three trees, but I have no idea what the varieties are. A couple of our trees may well be feral, but the apples have been fine for making cider.

Hard cider is easy to make as long as you follow the guidelines, and the alcohol content comes in around 5% or so with the recipe I use. We will also charge the bottles with some dextrose to make sparkling cider. Regular hard cider like this is actually rather dry and crisp, not sweet like some commercial offerings.

I mow under the trees a couple times a year, prune them every other year or so ( still learning) but other than that, we just harvest each late summer/fall. What could be easier?

This photo is from last fall. I promise to take more pictures.

This is a batch fermenting in the utility room last fall. This step takes two or three weeks, then after bottling, wait two weeks to let the remnant yeast convert the dextrose to CO2.

Even if you don't want to mess with fermenting or canning, freezing cider for later use is super easy, and keeps a very fresh taste.

This is a test!

I'm here

Flagship blog post #1.

end of the dormancy?

So, just to see what might happen to this quiet little corner of cyberspace, thought I'd start posting here since I'm leaving facebook.  Others can add comments, new posts, have me add more authors to the group so they can post, or just let other relatives/friends know what's going on here.

In general, I'm hoping the direction this will take is one of newsy updates, general thoughts on what's happening in our lives, but trying to stay away from political and contentious stuff.

I guess some could even cross post here and facebook if they want to.

Here is an update of things on the farm in Wisconsin.

August 22, 2018- Very busy with harvest right now. Peas, sweet corn, green beans all already in the freezer. Today got the potatoes in the barn to cure a bit before going in the root cellar. Patsy has been processing tomatoes into pasta sauce, tomato sauce, ketchup, barbecue sauce, salsa, and whole tomatoes. We are going through the propane.

Carrots are all in the root cellar now, onions are all curing in the barn loft, will go into the root cellar after it cools down a bit more.

Apples are dropping on the early varieties, so we will do our first cider pressing soon, maybe Friday?

Got the champagne yeast and bottling sugar in the mail yesterday, so we are ready to roll.

Chickens are starting to slow down a bit on egg laying. Fall approaches, and I think I see signs of molting starting, plus two biddies decided to go broody this week, so no eggs from them. We are still getting enough for us, but our bartering might slow a bit.

The hazelnuts look like they will be ready to pick pretty soon. (On those precocious six year old bushes, not the lot of them)

Recent events: Took the train to Oakland to visit Joe, Kaitlyn, and our newest grandchild Agatha. Scenery and seeing fellow travelers was memorable.  Bri and the grandsons came down from the U.P. for a visit and they got to see and eat food coming straight from the garden to the kitchen. We did other stuff also, like a visit to the public pool, a park, legos, marble works, and lots of reading books.

I promise to try to take more pictures, and post them as well.