We are coming rapidly toward the end of harvest time. This week we canned our last batch of spaghetti sauce and our tomatoes are pretty much done. We dug the remaining potatoes and started digging up some sweet potatoes.
Working on the second cutting of herbs and we’ve been drying a lot of mint, some rosemary and more oregano as well.
We still have a few onions, melons, green peppers, carrots and parsnips, as well as some pumpkins.
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| White Sweet Potatoes |
Still one of our favorite breads – so much so, that we always make a lot of extra mashed potatoes:
For breadmachine: place ingredients into machine in the above order, turn on dough cycle and let it run its course. Remove dough and shape into loaf. If using just one pan, it will be a very tall loaf of bread… sometimes I make one slightly smaller loaf and several rolls. Preheat oven to 375 degree F, and let bread rise. Bake for 25 – 30 minutes. Cover crust with a little butter right after baking to keep it soft.
We had another beautiful wedding for friends in our barn today. It was an evening event and though it was quite warm, it was a wonderful afternoon and evening for an outside ceremony.
The wedding was quite unique, in that the bride and her father rode to the ceremony on horseback and the flower-girl was leading another horse ahead of them. The horses were decorated in the wedding colors, and the flower-girl’s horse even had sparkly flowers throughout her mane. After the wedding, the bride and groom rode once around our pond – and a “just married” sign was pinned to the wrapping of the horse’s tail 🙂
We had offered the use of our barn and did not have to do much else – other than that Jeff had volunteered to make chicken corn soup. He and Caleb, the bride’s brother, made over 10 gallons of very delicious soup the day before. The other food was prepared by the bride’s family, including the wedding cake (which the bride had decorated herself).
The ceremony took place by the pond, the dinner afterwards was in the barn. The bridesmaids, flower girl and “mini-bride” all got dressed in our dining room. It was a lot of fun to watch the girls get ready.
Everything went off without any hitch – it was a lovely wedding and everyone seemed to have had a great time.
Hopefully we’ll have more pictures to post soon.
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| Rehearsing with horses |
We mowed off our potato patch to get ready for digging and found several pumpkins within the weeds. Our pumpkin vines have been very prolific this year and some stretch the entire width of our garden. Jeff smashed quite a few stray pumpkins while mowing, but the orange ones caught his attention and were “saved”. They now decorate our kitchen door.
We only dug a bushel of potatoes today – enough for all our visitors to take some home and a side dish for tomorrow’s pig roast. There are still plenty of potatoes and pumpkins to harvest.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on our first Chambourcin harvest. Since this is only the second year for the grape vines, we removed all grape clusters, except one, from each vine during early spring. The grapes have been growing beautifully and we’ve been testing the sugar content every couple of days. Our plan was to wait at least until Labor Day weekend….but our plans did not work out.
A huge flock of migrating black birds attacked our grape vines this morning – Jeff thinks there were thousands of them, he said they were sitting on the telephone wires as far as the eye could see, and every tree was full of them as well. They pretty much demolished our grapes…probably ate 2/3 of what we had.
So this evening, Jens came over and we picked the remaining grape clusters. We used our (sterilized) apple cider press to crush the grapes and then we manually “destemmed” them. We still ended up with about 17 gallons of “must”, which we will be fermenting. The juice tasted great through, just a bit tart, but very flavorful and fruity.
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| Everyone used buckets |
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| Got everything ready first |
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| Crushing grapes |
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| Buckets were dumped into tubs |
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| Destemming close-up |
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| Team destemming |
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| Final (twilight) clean-up |
