Backyard Beverages

Call it a hippie cliché, old fashioned, backwater brew or what have you, but we decided to try a batch of dandelion wine.  Of the many stories I've heard about it, I've never known anyone who has actually confessed to making or drinking dandelion wine.

We did our best to follow a "Pennsylvania German" pre-prohibition recipe we found randomly on the web. Warning: this recipe calls for a lot of sugar.

We had a really hard time getting the yeast to start and were about to start over when it quickly fermented the dandelion syrup into something passable as an adult beverage/cleaning product.

Almost ready to bottle. We'll give it another week or so in the secondary fermenter.

This hasn't been the only experimental drink we've been working on. Inspired by a post over on Hunter Angler Gardener Cook we tried a bit of homemade root beer last night.

We took the easy track for the first attempt by making it in the common form as a non-alcoholic soda.

Luckily we have a sassafras tree in our back yard so collecting a bit of root was as simple as pulling up a few of the saplings surrounding the main tree and cutting off the roots.

We made sure to hang on to the leaves in hopes of making filé powder for gumbo. We'll let you know how that goes.

Cutting up the roots before boiling them was a good bit of fun.  It was the first time we've had a need to use our loppers in the kitchen. The pint jar there is full of root beer syrup.

We've also been in the habit lately of using our mixer (with attachment) to make ice cream.  I couldn't resist having a root beer float using a bit of our last batch of vanilla ice cream.

Words can't describe how good it was. I'm tempted to head to the kitchen for another one right now.

Room for Improvement, Soil Improvement

This being our first growing season in the new house, we're starting to find out what does well in our soil and what really doesn't.  We've yet to do a soil test, and we haven't added any amendments, but we're working on that.

Last weekend we had the wonderful opportunity to attend a potluck dinner with the Community Gardens of Chester County.  Dinner was amazing and made even better by a talk on the manufacture and use of biochar by our gracious host.  The wheels are already turning as to how we'll be adding this medium to our soil.  Our big hope is that we can lighten the heavy clay in our soil with material sourced from our own yard.

Our garlic, it appears, doesn't like our heavy soil much at all.  The Gardeness dug up the German Extra Hardy today, and even though the leaves looked fine, almost all of the bulbs are rotten.  The Romanian Reds seem to have fared better, but they're small, with only a couple of cloves each.  I hope this doesn't mean bad news for our potatoes as well.  As you might recall from last year, the Romanian Red was the variety that survived when the other rotted out then too.  It's really important to me that we keep this stock going, even if that means replanting all of it this fall and having nothing to cook with.

On a brighter note, our heirloom family corn seems to feel right at home, and all three varieties of beans have sprouted and are growing nicely.  Our goal is to find plants that do well here naturally, and save those seeds year after year.

When Life Gives You Thistles, Make Some Cheese!

What's missing when you have a fresh peasant loaf and a bottle of homemade ale? Some good cheese, of course! We decided it was high time to fill that void, so we set out to make some farmhouse cheddar. We ordered starter, rennet, and a mold from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and bought two gallons of good quality raw grassfed Jersey milk from a local Amish family. We visited their farm and got to see their happy cows and clean facilities, and we were really impressed! They also sell sheep's milk, which we may have to try another time!

So to make a farmhouse cheddar, you heat the milk gently to 90 degrees, add some mesophilic starter, and let it ripen for 45 minutes. Then you add the rennet and let it set at that temperature for another 45 minutes until it breaks, at which point you cut it into curds.

You slowly bring up the temperature of the curds to 100 degrees, and then drain them by pouring them into a cheesecloth and hanging it for an hour.

Once drained, you break the curds up into small pieces, and mix in some salt.

Then you pack them into a cheesecloth lined mold and press, applying 10 pounds of pressure for 10 minutes, then 20 pounds for 10 minutes, and lastly 50 pounds for 12 hours. Afterwards, the cheese is removed from the mold, the cloth is carefully peeled away, and it's left to air dry for 2 - 4 days, allowing a rind to develop.

At that point you can wax or bandage it, and let it age for a couple of months. Just as with all food preservation methods, so long as you pay attention to cleanliness, there's not much else to stress about.

We plan on making a mother culture from our store bought starter, and we've read that we can make rennet from our thistles! Now if only we had a cow...

So Many Things to Learn

Today I've been repeatedly faced with my gardening shortcomings. First, I found out that my Canada Thistle eradication efforts were only making things worse. Our front flower bed, which runs the entire length of the house, is completely infested with these evil weeds. I thought that by pulling them out before they flowered I would be making good headway. Turns out that each time you break the root, it produces several more plants. So... I guess I'm going to try cutting them off at gound level as often as possible in hopes that I'll eventually weaken the root systems enough that they'll stop growing back.


Then, I moved my seedlings outside this morning to continue hardening them off in preparation for planting them this weekend, and I took a good look at them. Even though we had fluorescent lights on them for 16 hours a day, and also had them in a south facing window, they don't look a heck of a lot better than the ones we started last year. At least my tomato plants aren't pale or leggy this year, but instead are dark purple and still very small, with only a couple of true leaves at this point. When I looked at a gardening forum this morning, where purple tomato seedlings were the topic of discussion, I was really disheartened to see what other people's tomato plants looked like by the time they're getting them in the garden. They've got to be 20 times bigger! My seedlings always look like this, though, and usually survive just fine (except when a late frost comes in, like last year). But I can't help but think how much earlier I'd get fruit and how much better the crop would be if they had a better start.


And finally, when I checked the garden for progress, the potatoes are coming up (yay!) but the peas haven't grown much in the last couple of weeks, and the spinach is pretty much non-existant. It came up about a week after I planted it, but since then it's barely grown at all. I know the last week in April is a bit late for spinach, but we planted it the same time last year, and had no problem. Perhaps it was the freak weekend of almost 90 degree weather we had shortly after I put the seeds in the ground. Maybe the soil isn't to their liking. I just don't know...


But it's a beautiful day outside, so I'll try not to dwell on it. Learning from mistakes is all part of the process.

Week 1: Buy Better Milk

After watching Food, Inc. and No Impact Man recently, we realized that we've been getting kind of lax with some of our lifestyle choices. Having a baby definitely makes it tempting to do things based on convenience rather than conscience. So to get ourselves back on track we've decided to make one new resolution each week that we'll try to make a part of our everyday lives.

This week, we're going to stop buying supermarket milk. We like Stoneyfield, but we're lucky enough to have a great local company that sells grass-fed, certified organic, gently pasteurized milk that comes in returnable glass bottles.


I'll have to go a little bit out of my way to get it, and remember to wash and take back the bottles, but it'll be worth it. Not only does their milk taste like real milk, but we'll also be getting extra CLA and Omega-3 fatty acids. All of their farms are located in Lancaster County, so it should all come from about 50 miles away or less. And we won't have to worry about what the packaging is made of or where it goes after we're done using it. And even though it costs a little bit more, the money we spend stays local and supports our farming neighbors. If you're interested in finding local grass-fed milk, check out Eat Wild.

Baby Fruits

Our yard is ripe with new growth and the start of this year's backyard fruit crop. Take a look at some of the little ones...

Apples

Mulberries

Wild Raspberries

Wineberries

Kousa Dogwood fruits

I'm optimistic that we'll have a good harvest for cider, pies and wines later this summer.  We'll let you know how we do!

Overwintered Kale and Spring Peas

The kale we planted last fall never grew very big, so we didn't end up harvesting any of it. We just left the scrawny little plants in the garden over winter, and we were surprised when they were still alive come spring. Now they've got beautiful yellow flowers and plenty of seed pods on them!


Since kale will cross with other Brassicas, including broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage, saving seed can be tricky. But considering that we don't have any of those growing nearby at the moment, we should be able to get a pretty nice seed harvest for planting next year!

Peas are also great to save for seed, and we plan to do just that with some of our fall crop. But our spring crop will be all for eating, and I was pleased to find these pea shoots coming up in the garden this morning.


Peas are one of my favorite garden vegetables. They're easy to grow. You just pop them in the soil, no indoor starting to fuss with, and they pretty much take care of themselves, making up for the extra effort involved in shelling! They're worth growing in the home garden for fresh eating because they're so much sweeter than anything you'll get from the market, but they also freeze beautifully for something green to eat all winter long. Also, we can't forget to mention how useful the pods can be. We planted about 100 pea seeds, and plan to plant the same number again in July as a fall crop. I'm hoping for a freezer full!