Burn Day

Saturday morning I noticed that Terry’s pumpkin was looking more mournful than usual. I touched it, and it gave way. Somehow it had gotten infected with a fast-moving fungus. I lifted the lid and observed a huge, fuzzy mycelium. The flesh was nearly liquefied, held together only by the skin. I gently lifted the plate underneath it and took it outside. I set it next to the mulch bin and dumped the fluid on the plate on the ground. I put my pumpkin next to his so it wouldn’t be lonely. Also because it was full of the more normal small patches of black fungus, and I wanted the mold spores out of the house. Decompose in peace, little dudes. Thanks for the Halloween cheer.

Terry's pumpkin looking even more mournful, with fungus growing out of his eyes

Quick update on the chickens. Between my shift on chicken chores last Sunday and this Saturday, the pullets and the hens have learned to share the scratch grains. They were all together, hunting and pecking at the ground with only a few little tiffs. Bianca is sporting quite a beard, which is about the only white left on her these days.

Bianca is mostly brown with a white beard

Saturday was Burn Day. Terry had cut up a big willow that went down in one of the floods and piled the brush in one stack and the logs in another. He also assembled logs in the fire circle to get us started.

Before the burn--log pile in front; starter wood, right; brush pile in back

At 10:30, in typically man-style, Terry poured gas all over the burn pile and made a gas-trail from the logs to the edge of the fire ring and beyond. 

Terry douses the wood with gasoline

He lit the gas.

Lighting the gas trail

Half a second later—WHOOOOF! It all went up. I should have videotaped that!

WHOOOOF!

We started hauling the smaller pieces from the brush pile to be sure the fire was going to stay lit.

 Jane feeds the fire

Pat tosses in a branch

And then it was time for apple cider doughnuts!

Apple cider doughnuts, baby!

We alternated brush with the larger logs. When it got to be noon, we made ham and cheese sandwiches and ate chips with dip.

Chips and dip! (Note that our coats are all on the backs of the chair. Hot fire!)

We sat by the fire, talking and laughing.

Lunch break

 Hilda calmly left her chair and walked over by me and said, “My pants are burning. Can you put it out without pressing it against my skin?”

Burn hole in Hilda's pants--she wasn't lying about her pants being on fire.

I had my gloves on, so I pushed the two sides of the glowing hole against each other until I couldn’t see any more sparks. Jesus, if it had been me, I would have been dancing around, beating at my leg!

Here is a brief video of the fire:

We kept feeding the fire. Terry’s deadline for the last log was 2:00. Jane raked the last of the leaves and twigs from the brush pile while I carried them to the fire.

Jane and I clear out the last of the brush pile

And threw them on. The fire was so hot that they burst into flames immediately.

Tossing on leaves and twigs

Terry carried some of the larger logs himself, refusing all help.

Preparing to throw a log on

And there it goes!

At 1:41, he put on the last log.

The last log

To celebrate, Pat broke out the ghost peeps.

At that point, there was no more to burn. Nancy and Hilda started pulling branches out of the woods. Some people just can’t get enough.

Pat looked in vain for arrowheads by the creek.

Looking for arrowheads. None found.

We watched the fire burn down for a while. The fire didn’t burn so well when the breeze died down. Pat took it upon herself to fan it. “Is it doing any good?” she asked.

Pat fans the fire

“Of course not,” I replied. It was 2000°F inside that pile (according to Terry). Who needs to fan it?

Case in point, at 1:56 one of the last branches started smoking at the end.

A branch smoked at the end just before it started burning.

The logs were still a little green. The side by the heat burned while the rest of the log still looked wet.

The bottom of the log burning while the top was still wet

Terry went around with the shovel, tossing in pieces that had fallen out and flipping in the unburned ends.

Terry turns the fire with a shovel

At 2:23, the fired looked like this.

The fire at 2:23

A drizzle started then. Pat packed up the food and put it in Jane’s car. We sat a bit longer before deciding the rain was getting heavy enough that it was time to go it.

We played Mexican Train to pass the time until supper. We ordered pizza and wings and ate it all. I made a cherry pie for dessert.

It was a very special day.

Hilda's 88th

Terry grew some amazing pumpkins this year. The variety was Cougar, something he hadn’t grown previously. He liked that they were not only large, but all grew with flat bottoms. Given that they grow on their sides, that’s pretty remarkable that ever single on stood up straight after they were picked.

Jane came up Sunday afternoon for pumpkin carving. Here is the kitchen table, ready for action.

Carving at the kitchen table

The oil cloth on the table dates back to 1984. I bought it for my first apartment when I started teaching in Mukwonago. I needed something to cover the card table that served as a kitchen/dining table until I had enough money to buy real furniture (as I recall, at least a year). I think I may have borrowed the card table from my parents. As long as I’ve digressed down memory lane, I remember that my brother asked if I wanted the old barrel vacuum cleaner that my folks had from when they were first married. “It still sucks,” he said. Ha!

Jane and I carved happy pumpkins. Terry went for a mournful look, and I think he succeeded.

Left to right; Jane's happy pumpkin, Terry's mournful pumpkin, my happy pumpkin

We lit out pumpkins that night while we watched football. Halloween is just around the corner. It’ll be Christmas before you know it.

Our pumpkins lit up

Today was Hilda’s 88^th birthday. It worked out well for me because I had the whole day with neither classes nor appointments.

I was just getting dressed after my shower when the phone rang. It was Hilda, asking if I would like to collect the eggs this morning. I knew something was up. Sure enough, there in one of the nest boxes was a pullet egg! The first one! We were surprised it was brown because we haven’t observed any squatting from the Dominiques. It was also good news to have a blue egg, as the Americauna have been really slacking off since we combined the flocks. Carmella was in the nest box when I went out, but these were the only three eggs we got today. Carmella will lay blue eggs when her time comes. She's got to be getting close.

Carmella in the nest box with two hen eggs and one tiny brown pullet egg

The whole family went to Edward’s Orchard for lunch. Most of us had pulled pork sandwiches. Dad had a piece of apple pie. It was pleasant enough to eat outside. Really a nice day!

Lunch at Edward's Orchard

After we got home, I finished Hilda’s birthday cake. One of the things I fretted about in the middle of the night last night was how I was going to color chocolate frosting. When I was fully awake this morning, I thought, “Well, duh. Make white frosting.”

Hilda with birthday cake

Hilda made Boeuf Bourgogne and homemade noodles for supper. I made a loaf of sourdough bread for sopping up the delicious sauce. And I ate too much. Oh well. Mom will only have one 88^th birthday!

Step 1: Wear gloves

A nice feature of this time of year is that you can sleep in and still be up for sunrise. When I went out at 7:00 Saturday morning to let the girls out, here is the view that greeted me as the sun rose over the corn field across the road.

October sunrise

On the other side, the grass was white with frost. It was 28°F, well below normal for mid-October.

Frosty field

Here’s a close up of the frost crystals. Winter’s coming.

Ice crystals on the grass and oak leaves

I mentioned in my last post that our red maples are very pretty this year. I put on my Wellies and went out for a close up.

Red maples living up to their name

We also have a sassafras tree that has turned a lovely reddish brown.

Sassafras

With autumn comes apples. If memory serves, we didn’t have many apples last year because a late frost killed most of the flowers. No flowers, no fruit. Thus, it has been two years since I made apple juice, a project I only take on when we have WAY more apples than we know what to do with. Two years ago was the first time I made apple juice, and I did a great deal of experimentation to perfect the process. I had the presence of mind to 1) type detailed notes and 2) put them where I could find them again.

It had been so long that I was surprised to see that the instructions began with “1. Wear gloves.” I always wear gloves with working with hot peppers, but apple juice? After we’d been at it awhile, I remembered that working with apple pulp for hours left my fingers tanned--not as in Malibu Barbie, but as in animal hide, tough, brown, and leathery. That’s why they call it tannin.

I asked Terry to deliver a couple of boxes of MacIntoshes to the downstairs patio. Here’s what he brought. We used the first two boxes in the foreground.

Terry's apple delivery

Jane took some of Terry’s apples home a few weeks ago and made the mistake of telling me that she found washing apples highly satisfying. Because Terry never sprayed the apples this year (because the hens were in the orchard), they have spots of mildew on the outside that scrubs right off with a clean nail brush. Then they look beautiful!

“Perhaps you’d like to come up Saturday and wash apples,” I suggested. And so she did, arriving at my house at 10:30. She began at the sink, but later switched to sitting at the table. My notes said to use 12 to 15 apples for each batch of juice. Mostly we used 15 because the apples were small. You can see the “before” apples in the box.

Jane washing apples

One of the apples Jane washed had a leaf stuck to it. When she took it off, she found a perfect imprint including the petiole (leaf stem). We hadn’t known before that apples need light to turn red. I expect Terry knew that. Also note how pretty the apple is after washing.

A leaf print, complete with stem (left), on a shiny washed apple

Once clean, I sliced around the core in four cuts. I removed most of the bad spots, although as the morning wore on, I became less particular about the tiny little fruit fly larva trails.

Slicing apple off the core

And then to the juicer. One of the reasons I like the MacIntosh is that they don’t brown as readily as other varieties, as you can tell by the color of the juice in this photo.

The juicer and juice before the foam has completely settled

My notes said to clean the screen of the juicer and prepare the next batch of apples before pouring the juice from the collection pitcher through a sieve into my 2-liter pitcher. This allows the juice to settle from the foam. As soon as the foam starts coming out, stop and throw out the rest, even though every fiber of your being knows there is some juice left in there. I also wrote down the Apple Juice Motto: Embrace the Waste.

Every two to three batches, I skimmed the juice in the 2-liter pitcher with the tea strainer that no longer has a handle (yes, I wrote that down), and poured it into my largest stock pot. After 9 batches (roughly 135 apples), the stock pot was full.

I brought the apple juice to a boil, skimming off all the stuff that rose to the top along the way. (“Rinse skimmer in a bowl of water.”)

Boiling apple juice

Finally, I used a 2-cup measuring cup to pour the hot juice through a jelly bag into the (washed) 2-liter pitcher, and into the jars from there. And even with all this skimming and straining, they will eventually develop flocky stuff in the bottom. The weather station in this photo shows that it is now 2:20.

The final filtration through a jelly bag

I put lids on the jars and processed them for 10 minutes in a canner. And here they are! So lovely.

Six lovely quarts of apple juice

Here is about 4 gallons of apple waste in a 5-gallon bucket. Embrace the waste.

Four gallons of waste for 1.5 gallons of juice

It was 3:00 when I finished. If I sold apple juice at the farmers market and wanted to pay myself my normal wage, I would have to charge $47.50 per jar. It is a labor of love. And as long as we are doing math, it takes 22.5 apples per quart.

On Sunday, I was upstairs chatting with Hilda about the chickens—most notably that I saw Carmella do the Squat of Maturity, so it shouldn’t be long before she starts laying—when Hilda said, “I should learn to make apple juice.”

“Are you saying you’d like to help?” And so she washed apples for me, and we turned out six more jars of juice. I made 10 batches on Sunday, though, so I could have a little leftover for immediate consumption. It is excellent hot.

Flood #4

My post is late this week. I spent yesterday, when I would normally have written my post, on the phone with Geek Squad trying to figure out why none of my Windows devices could connect to the Internet. The Macs and my Android phone were fine. Thus, I did not suspect the router. The problem started late last week. I tried forgetting and adding back, uninstalling and reinstalling. Still the IP address was not valid. So frustrating! My leading hypothesis was that something had gotten screwed up in the last update, which was a real problem because I could not get any subsequent updates that might fix it because I couldn’t connect to the internet!

After four days of waiting for the problem to magically fix itself, I called Geek Squad after supper last night. It was about 6:45. The young man told me that the estimated time for a fix was 65 minutes, and he couldn’t promise success. I needed to be aware that a home visit might be necessary. He too was perplexed that uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t do it.

I got Hilda’s computer hooked up for remote access so a technician could check the settings on the router. The first guy said I could hang up and leave the computer; the technician would call when he/she needed me back on deck.

I went down and started crushing raspberries. Terry had picked that day, and with all the rain, I knew the berries were at risk for mold. Kim and Kate had so much fun making jam that they’d like to do it again. I made 5 cups of puree and put it in the freezer, ready to go as soon as we find a date when everyone can make it.
Just about the time I was covered in raspberry juice, Geek Squad called back. I raced back upstairs. The technician recommended unplugging the router and the other box where the phone and internet signal comes into the house. This was not as fast as it sounds. I had to crawl under the desk with a flashlight and read model number on the box receiving the signal, which was much too small for a person my age. The technician looked up the user manual so he could determine how many lights should be blinking or not blinking. Answer: one light, blinking. He told me to plug in the router. I turned on my desktop computer across the hall, and by golly, it had internet. The tech explained that the router had been sending out incorrect IP addresses, but only for the Windows computers. I don’t claim to understand that. It was fixed-that was all that mattered. By the time I finished with the raspberries and got the kitchen cleaned up, it was WAY past bedtime—almost 9:00!

All the rain. It POURED Friday night. On Saturday morning, this is what the rain gauge looked like:

Saturday morning: 3.5" of rain

We have had 5.8” of rain in October, and it’s only the 9^th. Here are some pictures of Flood #4:

The fifth oak

The solar panels and garden shed

Note that the water is once again above the bottom of the garden shed door. Luckily, Hilda didn’t have time to carry out her plans to tidy up the shed and put the roll of row cover on the floor.

The maple forest is looking pretty this year. I love red maple leaves in the fall, even when I secretly suspect that the leaves are changing color because the tree is severely stressed by, as they say, “having wet feet.”

The garden underwater again and the pretty red maples by the road.

The turkeys at least had the sense to get up out of the water this time. Terry saw them fly into the fifth oak, which is the only way I knew to look for them. We could see two, although he thought maybe there might be more.

One turkey upper left, the other lower right. Look for the shape of their bald little heads

Close up of the upper turkey

And the lower turkey

One turkey was on high ground over by the grapes. Perhaps the other two were also in the tree.

The loner who did not want to shelter in the tree

The water receded pretty quickly. By afternoon, I was able to go to the garden and retrieve 5 cabbages. I made borscht with half of one along with the few pathetic beets that the deer left behind and the very last tomato. It seemed a shame to put a fresh tomato in soup, but it was developing small craters of rottenness, and I had no other plans for it.

With the remainder of the cabbage, I made 7.5 more pounds of sauerkraut. I hope it turns out. God knows what wee beasties might be on flooded cabbage. I am hoping that the good guys will outcompete them. It looks like the fermentation is proceeding as usual.

The low pressure system gave me a rainy day headache most of the weekend. I was pretty grumpy Saturday. I’m ready for the frost. I would just like to cook what I want to eat. I am tired of the desperate rush to use up whatever is about to go bad. I had already thrown out the last of the cantaloupe. It just didn’t taste right, and I was sick of eating it besides. The last thing I did Saturday was go through the refrigerators and mulch everything that was wrinkly, moldy, or just unappealing. It was cathartic.

Next weekend—apples.

Digging potatoes

We started the summer with seven tom turkeys. Then there were five, which is not too surprising, given their propensity for playing in the road. Whenever I hear the milk trucks honking up north, I know where the turkeys are.

Five tom turkeys

This week, there were seven again. Terry’s hypothesis was that two of this year’s juveniles tried to join the gang. 

And then there were seven

I am not. familiar with how turkeys disperse. There is often some mechanism for preventing inbreeding. It is not unusual for young males to get run off. In any case, after hanging around for a few days, the group of toms was back to five. For now. But even the Fab Five seem to be a loose assemblage of three and two. I wonder if it’s the same turkeys in the group of two and the group of three. Terry thinks yes, but we really can’t be sure unless we somehow get close enough to hit them with different colors of spray paint. That might be a good project for retirement. Turkey chasing.

You'll never catch me!

We had our first frost Saturday morning. The basil always takes it in the shorts. Such a wussy plant.

Frosted basil. The reddish leaves will soon be black.

We had rain Saturday night. Hilda forgot to bring the food in from the chicken run. The girls were still eating from it when I let them out in the morning, so I left it. When we went out to dig the potatoes Sunday afternoon, Juanita had figured out a new way to get the goods. Silly chicken.

Juanita takes a short cut to the food

We weren’t sure what to expect from the potatoes. As I wrote recently, potatoes keep their secrets. There’s no telling how many potatoes are underground until you put the shovel in the ground. Having lost them all to a flood last year, Terry opened up the north garden again, since it is on higher ground. And it didn’t flood, but the south garden did again and again. As we dealt with the south garden, the north garden got overrun with grass. We pulled all the grass once, and I thought the potatoes would recover. Alas, we were too late. In addition, the sweet potatoes rapidly took over—vines everywhere!

Terry was anxious to dig the potatoes ahead of some serious rain that we are expecting tonight. Sunday began with drizzle, causing us to postpone the digging until after lunch. Terry started digging, and the potatoes were not too muddy. And so we pressed on. This is the first time in my memory that we have been swarmed by mosquitoes while digging potatoes. Why didn't the frost kill them? Why? Why?

Hilda and Terry dig potatoes. 

The potatoes growing around the edges, where the grass was thickest, didn’t have much going on. We got a good number of Kennebec, which are good keepers.

Kennebec

The Red Norland also did fairly well. We have to eat those first, as they don't keep.

Red Norland

We got one bin of Norkota, a type of russet. We only planted one row of those.

Norkota

We planted two rows of Superior, another good storage potato, next to the sweet potatoes. I suspected we wouldn’t get much due to the puniness of the above-ground biomass. True enough, plant after plant had not one tuber. Terry suggested that we just leave it. I said that would probably be okay. Nevertheless, he kept digging. And we got a few. 

Sad, sad yield of Superior potatoes

(And while we worked, I heard car horns and gobbling down by the road.)

As I mentioned before, the sweet potatoes were an experiment we expected to fail. They are quite different to dig from white potatoes as they grow vertically, and the stem is way more persistent. Sometimes we could lift a number of potatoes out still clinging to the vine. Sometimes we had to wiggle them loose, like pulling teeth. Plus you have to pull the vines away to keep from tripping on them and find the main stem to dig up. Crazy.

Sweet potatoes

Hilda got to work spreading the potatoes out to dry for a few days before we put them in the root cellar.

Hilda spreads the potatoes to dry

"We probably got about half of what we hoped for," Terry said of our harvest.

"True," I replied, "But it's still more than we can eat before they sprout and get wrinkly. If we got more, we would just be throwing them out in March."

One more task off the list as we prepare for winter. October already. I can hardly believe it.