Need to find a cool hot rod smiley as I've been zooming around on the interwebs for about an hour now on the new rebuild. Don't worry, I've got on my helmet and seat belt on and just hoping I don't get pulled over for speeding!
Quick update:
Still haven't figured out what has been spooking around after our birds. Lost 2 more hens this week and found a tear in the chicken wire. Feel really bad about it as replacing that wire was on the "to-do" list but it managed to get pushed aside with all the other to-do's . Well, got one half of that old chicken wire replaced with hardware cloth today. Got the other half battened down with a heavy wire cage and a heavy duty wire shelf and it'll do until I it get re-wired on Friday.
Mom gave us 2 watermelons the other week so we decided to attempt some watermelon wine. We bought a third melon and still hadn't gotten wine made before we were back at her place again when she gave us 4 more watermelons. Doc is finally working his regular four-man schedule and had this past week off so we did the melon wine on Sunday. Since we don't have a lot of room in the camper, it's been easier for us to do a 5 gallon batch at a time. Plans are in the works for expanding the hobby to doing 1 gallon batches in the near future, though. (Insert evil smiley)
I spent 2 weeks researching h2o melon wine recipes and was beginning to get discouraged as alot of people have had this one spoil brfore fermentation can begin. Learned that we could give fermentation a kick start with a yeast starter and that it was possible that the acid in lemons would help in preventing the juice from spoiling so we added both and am glad to say that we have watermelon wine fermenting happily as I type this.
Here's the
album I started for this batch and will add pix and descriptions as we go through the process.
No good news from the veggie garden, with temps well above 100 all summer the tomatoes did nothing until about 3 weeks ago and since I was growing mainly slicing tomatoes I figured I'd never get ripe fruit so I've cut them back to the ground. I'd have let them go for green tomatoes but we still have plenty of them canned at mom's from last year plus I've got 5 pounds of garlic to get planted in that bed. Didn't plant fall peas, like I'd hoped but still plan on doing fall greens, radishes and carrots so we can have fresh winter salads again this year.
We joined the
Ozark Chinquapin Foundation a few weeks ago as we are wanting to add more native edibles to the land. When my aunt found out about our interest, she told us that these trees were growing on their land 30+ years ago but were killed by the blight. We took Bubba out with us to her place yestrday to see if there were any chinquapins possibly sprouting from the old stumps. Didn't find any trees or sprouts but found tons of Persimmons that she'd forgotten about and Bub had a great time running the place (200+acres), playing with her Corgi and swimming in the several ponds on her land.
Stopped by mom's on our way home and Bub got to play with her two dogs. "It was a fantastic day to be a dog", says Bubba!
We hope to get back out to my aunt's with Bubba and some buckets to harvest persimmons. We'll store them in mom's freezer until we have enough to try a watermelon jelly/persimmon wine. We've got the winemaiking bug bad!!!
Woke up to a tarantula in the camper today! Freaked the fire outta doc and it was a fast bugger, too! We lost him several times before I was able to scoop him up and turn him loose back outside.
Still got some fine-tuning to do on the computer but I'll get back to journeling our journey with pictures as soon as I can!
It's great to be back without a computer that keeps freezing up!!!
