Pear-ing down

 We looked out the window to find that our pear tree in the backyard partially fell victim to a nasty storm we had yesterday.

 For a while now we've been keeping an eye on our overambitious pear tree.

 As you can see, it is so over burdened with fruit that the poor thing looks like it's doing it's best impression of a willow.

 I ended up pulling several broken branches out of the limbs of the tree. The goats were more than happy to assist with cleanup.

 I harvested as many of the immature pears as I could in the hopes that Big Onion will work his magic and somehow turn them into something drinkable and intoxicating.

 Josie and the other goats also enjoyed some of the pears I missed.

More please!

This picture cracks me up. Notice Gwen and her mother are both resting their chins on the fence in hopes of begging a few more branches out of me. It always surprises us how much Gwen's personality and actions are just like those of her mother, especially when you consider that Josie had absolutely nothing to do with raising the little goat. 

From Fruit, Wine: Muscadine follow-up, and some new projects!

Don't let the goofy label fool you; this is definitely not for sale!

All good things take time and one thing I've learned over the years is patience. Whether it's waiting for cured meat to dry, eggs to hatch, pregnant sheep to give birth ... the end product is always completely worth it.

Wine, however, really takes time. A lot of time. After about 6 months of fermenting, racking, and letting it settle, I finally bottled the muscadine wine. While totally drinkable at this point, many sources make it clear that muscadine wine is best after aging in the bottle for about a year.

With so much pulp from the fruit, it was hard to take SG measurements!

Not to let things go idle, I thought I'd make some small batches of some other fruit wines. Since we had a ridiculous amount of citrus and still had a bunch of ripe persimmons leftover, I put together a couple gallons of the persimmon wine and a gallon of orange wine. The left-most batch of persimmon wine was made mostly with peels and stems and was impossible to get a specific gravity measurement. As you can see, it was extremely active in fermenting and kept blowing through the top. I ended up combining both batches of persimmon wine and moved them to a bucket for primary fermentation.

I've since racked them over for secondary (longer-term) fermentation. You can see the sediment build-up at the bottom of each of the little carboys. Racking off the wine will remove some of the sediment and help to clarify the wine. After about six months, these should be ready for bottling.

Fruit wines are easy enough. Fruit, sugar, water, yeast, and some minor additives (to ensure a healthy ferment) are all you really need. I've been spending a lot of time reading through Jack Keller's recipes. Can you believe there's a turnip wine? I think I may have to try it just for the heck of it!

The bottles of muscadine are tucked away in the closet for long-term storage. I may crack one open in about 6 months to see how the flavor has changed, but the bulk of what remains after some Christmas gifts will be left undisturbed.

Do any of our wonderful readers make wine? I'd love to know what you might have going on right now!

Persimmons

It's persimmon season and our few little trees in the back yard are producing lots of fruit! I've read that it's best to harvest the fruit before it becomes totally ripe to keep the birds from eating their way through your harvest. 

 So I went out with our big bushel tub (thanks mom!) and pair of kitchen scissor to lay claim to our fruit. I tried to harvest anything that no longer had any green coloring, but most of the fruit was still very hard.

 This one actually ripened on the tree without the birds or bugs finding it!

 And my clumsy self dropped the dang thing while trying to harvest it. This variety of persimmon gets extremely soft when ripe, so my perfect fruit got a bit smooshed. Oops!

 My day's take. 

We are still not sure what we are going to do with the fruit when it ripens. I'm not a huge fan of the flavor, but I am tempted to try my hand at making preserves. I've just read that they can make a good salsa and even cookies. Mostly likely though, these  guys will end up becoming wine under the Big Onion's expert hand.

From Fruit, Wine

“Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares” 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

We've already posted about the number of fruit bearing trees and bushes on the property, and we may have talked a bit about how we used some of that fruit. One thing I've been meaning to do with our surplus is something that man has been doing for a long, long time: make some wine.

The first time I fermented anything was right after Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans and I had some time on my hands waiting to return to the city. I bought a beer kit from this fantastic shop in Philadelphia, Home Sweet Homebrew, and it was the best investment I've ever made. The owners there are great, and spent a lot of time answering my questions and helping me through the process. Even after returning to New Orleans I continued to order from them since there was no local brew shop open.

Fermenting alcohol is a very simple process. You take water and sugars, expose it to yeast, and allow the yeast to convert those sugars into alcohol. You can do this with almost any sugar: malted grains, honey, molasses, and especially fruit. This happens in nature quite frequently: fallen fruits become exposed to natural yeasts (or bacteria!) and begin to ferment. Every once in awhile you may seem some birds or other animals eating these fruits and behaving ... strangely. Alcohol's effects on a body are the same be it human, bird, or rodent.

We were thrilled to see these vines growing on the property once spring came around. Muscadine! We watched them grow and waited, and waited. The only muscadine I had ever seen or tasted was a dark, dark red, so I was waiting for the color to change. On a whim I gave one of the blush colored ones a bite and, sure enough, it was sweet and ripe! What we were growing was a variety of muscadine called scuppernong.

Hurricane Isaac was approaching quickly and we knew that heavy winds would probably shake free most of the fruit. Rather than hand pick all the fruit from this somewhat wildish vine that has no real structure to it, we decided to shake them free. We took a sheet and held it up under the vines, then shook them out. The fruit tumbled down the sheet to a tarp. (Sadly, no pictures, but let's just say it was fun.)

This is about 3 lbs. of grapes. Our bushel was half full when done!

Our final yield was 18 lbs. of ripe scuppernong grapes. I followed a recipe on Jack Keller's winemaking site which called for 6 lbs. of grapes per gallon of wine. Three gallons is a fine amount of wine in my book!

Crushed and mixed with water and sugar

The only yeast I had on hand was a champagne yeast, but I was glad that I did. I thought it would be important to use this kind of yeast because it's extremely aggressive (converts a lot of sugar very fast) and, in my unfounded theory, would work fast enough to prevent any bacteria from forming. Bacteria can ruin a wine quickly and turn it into vinegar (not a bad thing, but not the desired result). We probably weren't as "sterile" as you really should be in making wine. I come from a beer brewing background so I'm used to making sure everything is clean, but since wine ages for much longer there is little room for effort. My starting specific gravity (SG, a measurement for the amount of sugars/solids in the wine) was 1.100. That's pretty high!

After awhile I let it ferment down. I checked the SG again: 0.995. This calculates out to almost 14% ABV (alcohol by volume) -- even for a wine this is pretty high! It also means this will be a pretty dry wine, which was what I was hoping for in the end result. I racked it off of the lees (the grape skins, etc) and into a glass fermenter (referred to as a "secondary"). This will sit for another week or so for the sediment to clear before I transfer to another fermenter. I'm considering topping up with water to 4 or 5 gallons (which would dilute it down to around 9% ABV), but I'll wait and taste it then. More updates will certainly follow in the coming months!

As fall is in full swing, we harvested our pears and are looking forward to later in the year enjoying the fruits of the citrus trees in the yard. While I doubt we would make some citrus wine, we do love making limoncello (or orangecello, or grapefruitcello, or limecello!) since it allows a little bit of fruit to go a long way. Plus we can save the juice so that we always have citrus juice or homemade sour mix on hand!

The pears have been ripening in the fridge. Let's see what we can do with those next!

Gimme those pears, dammit!

More fruits

I've said it before and I'll say it again, we were SO lucky to get a place that had so many wonderful things already in place. This week we are particularly grateful for all the fruit trees, bushes, and vines there were already in place and thriving when we moved in.

 The corner of the backyard has this massive muscadine vine that we have been keeping an impatient eye on all these months. Well, this week we finally had just a few of ripe grapes that we were quick to harvest and pop into the freezer until we have enough ripe grapes to start out own batch of muscadine wine. Yum!

The other fruit we have been keeping a close eye on is the giant cooking pear tree on the other side of the yard. It's branches have been looking heavy with fruit and the occasional rock hard pear bomb would come falling down.

 We decided to give it a good shake and see what we could get. I stood back and watched while the Big Onion all but swung from the branches, and the pears came raining down! All counted we ended up with 21 pears. Apparently pears aren't like apples in that they do not ripen while on the tree, you have to harvest them and store them for a while for them to soften and sweeten. Since we are pretty sure these are cooking pears, I'm not sure how soft or sweet they will get, but we tucked them away into our smaller refrigerator to ripen before they get juiced and turned into cider.

The ever present Josie and the turkeys were both on hand to help dispose of any damaged fruits. This series of photos just cracks me up....

Spring

When I was a child I used to adore summer. It was the time of rest -- no school, lots of playing outside (although most kids today have no clue what that means), and a time to gear up for the new school year in the Fall. However, as I've gotten older the heat of summer isn't something that I exactly look forward to anymore. As my agricultural activities have grown, so has my fondness for spring.

Spring is a time of renewal. Althought winters in Louisiana aren't quite the same as some of our friends up north (snow? what is that?) things do die down a bit. Trees are bare, the grass is low, and there is very little activity. But spring hits, our clocks change and suddenly the grass is growing, trees and bushes are flowering, fruit is budding, vegetables are sprouting, bees are buzzing, and birds are hatching.

When we first moved to the property we had an idea of what some of the flora was, but couldn't know for sure until things started to grow. As K has said before about this property always giving us what we need, we're finding that there are many fruits growing all around the house. Here's some of our finds that made us extremely happy.