Hard wine!

I promise, this is not a post about collecting urine.

     Wednesday, after several months of neglect, I remembered about my wine! I took about twenty minutes siphoning the wine through a strainer, and gathered it up in one pot, and two bowls. In total, we ended up with seven and a half quarts of tangy, pungent wine!
     It tastes a lot like grapefruit still, but it's very dry, with a heavy dose of vapor behind it. My mother had about a half of a glass, and three hours later, she mentioned losing her buzz. Apparently, this stuff will knock you on your ass! I've personally only sipped at a few shotglasses full, but afterwards, I definitely breathed some hefty flames! Keep your ears open for my next wine-making project, the plan is to make about twice this amount out of oranges and fresh cranberries!

Random acts of generosity ( I hope)

     Okay, readers, here we go, getting back into the groove of sharing thoughts.
I had an idea earlier this year that I did not get the chance to act on, but I figured since the tap has been dry here for so long, I'd share the idea with you, and ask for your opinions on it.

     I have a chainlink fence, five feet high on all sides of my yard, and for the most part, it does its job well, keeping dogs in and unwanted guests out. However, the chainlink fails in one critical field: Privacy. So, we've been pondering for awhile here about what plant we could grow to cover our fence, and prettify the yard. Local ordinances won't let us replace it with a board fence (there goes the white-picket american dream). Anyway, my idea is this: Plant my front fence with hops and tomatoes. The I could use the hops to try my hand at microbrewing (which is on my to-do list). and as for the tomatoes, that's where the title of this post comes in. I'd like to post a sign that says "Free if you pick them" by the tomatoes, and smaller signs identifying the types of tomato. Tomatoes grow pretty fast, and while they don't fruit all year long, they would cover the fence for a good half of the year, longer if i tend to them well. I think it'd be interesting to see if the neighborhood (and any pedestrians walking by) would stop and pick tomatoes. Maybe I'd leave a pouch full of plastic grocery bags (recycled of course) hanging on the signpost.

     So, readers, what do you think? Is this idea something people would take an interest in? Would the neighbors enjoy the tomatoes, or are people too distrusting? Are there any other concerns I am overlooking? Let me know in the comments section!

Susy Homemaker Update!

     So, I'm apparently a few days behind myself when it comes to updating you lot on recent events, so here comes a (slightly late) Homebrew update!
     Thursday, I decided I was tired of looking at our disgusting jug of juice. I won't show you a picture (too nasty) but I will describe it to you. The wine had separated into three distinct layers: on the bottom, a silt made up of zest and pulp and other fine particles (i don't even know), in the middle, the wine, which was clear and beautiful, and on the top, frothy foam, thick like sea foam, with bloated raisins floating in it. Nothing glamorous here, folks. Anyway, we decided that the thing to do was to try to siphon out the good layer, and tried to filter the silt from the other layers.
     The siphoning went well. We pulled probably a gallon and a half of wine from the jug, and had another gallon of silty goodness leftover. The silt, we tried to filter through paper towels, coffee filters, a sieve, anything. Nothing would filter it. Everything clogged up in half a second, so we abandoned the silt and focused on the wine.
     Now, let's talk about this wine. It tastes almost exactly like grapefruit juice still, except for the vapors in the back of your throat from the alcohol. Oh, and the fact that it is six hundred times more sour than anything i have ever sipped before. It's literally one of the most sour liquids I've ever consumed, it makes me take on a literal sour-face, and I eat lemons for fun. We rinsed the jug, and poured the wine back in there, but we decided to add a bit more sugar, about one cup (packed) of brown sugar. Then, we shoved it back into our canning cupboard, and ran away.

     Meanwhile, on the gardening front, I am sad to report that approximately all of our delicious hot peppers have fallen victim to... THE GOPHER!  -Dun Dun DUNNNN! This is the most sinister gopher I have ever encountered, using guerrilla warfare to taunt me. He's taken out my hot peppers,five out of six of my bell peppers, and pretty much everything related to squash. Seriously, this is one evil little bugger.

The war rages on.

     That said, he seems to have an aversion to tomatoes, so those things are going NUTS! We have a couple dozen tomato plants all popping out little greenies! YAY! before long, I'll be canning tomatoes like crazy, in about a hundred different ways, which I will tell you more about as I get there.

     Okay, that's the Suzie Homemaker Update! Does anyone have any suggestions for my homesteading projects? I'd really appreciate any advice on Baron VonGopher, and how to get him out of my garden! Thanks, dear readers!

Grapefruit!

     This week, I decided to take care of some of the grapefruit on my (overabundant) tree. So, with the help of my sister, I climbed up there, and filled a laundry hamper with grapefruit. Then, I promptly ran out of time for the day. Oops.
     The next day, I found an hour to myself, during which I juiced all of the grapefruit, and gathered two and a half gallons of juice, which you can see in the picture on the right. (sorry about the bad pictures, one of these days I'll get a camera, and dazzle you all.) Then I added the rest of the ingredients to the jug. Here's the recipe, for those of you playing along at home:

2.5 Gallons of grapefruit juice


4 pounds of cane sugar


1 cup fructose


1/8 cup grapefruit zest


     The only tricky ingredient is the fructose, which I got at Henry's market. Basically, it's fruit sugar, which I was using to make up for the extra sour fruit. I shook it all up, and tied a rag over the mouth of the jug to keep bugs out.
     Now, let me warn you all, this is an experiment! I didn't really follow a particular recipe. As it turns out, grapefruit wine recipes range from "use a hydrometer to gauge the acidity, aiming for a relative gravity of 1.25" to "mix juice and sugar in a jug, wait till it's wine and enjoy." As a simpler kinda guy, I'm going with a jug of juice and sugar.
     According to my dad, his dad used to make the best damn wine, and if I am to get this to work, I am going to need some raisins. Apparently, raisins help kick over the fermentation process and get the wine really liquoring up. I'll be adding those as soon as I can get some, about a handful.

    So, that's the latest adventure in kitchening here, I'll keep updating about this as it goes onward, And letting you all know if it turns into wine, or just a big fat jug of bad smells.

     Also, for those of you with a sweet-tooth, I took a bunch of the peels of the grapefruit and candied them! I peeled them with a vegetable peeler, boiled them four times in fresh water, to rinse out all of the bitterness, then boiled them a fifth time, with about two cups of sugar on them. I let them boil ligthely like that for about two hours, then put them on a hard boil to thicken up the sugar syrup. After it started to get pretty thick, i laed the peels out on a lined baking sheet, ad let them cool before shaking them up in sugar. Apparently, by the way, shaking them up in sugar was a bad idea. They're a bit too sweet for just about everyone, but the flavor is fantastic!
So, that's what I've been up to this past week, What about you? what sort of experiments have you done in your kitchens? Let me know in the comments, I'd love to hear from you!

The Sky Boom!

I realize that this picture is neither incredibly exciting, nor clear, and yes, that is definitely my thumb, but what you are looking at is an awesome rig I built for watering my garden, and I am going to teach you how to make one!

Imagine a crane that follows you around your garden, but instead of a cable for lifting weight, the crane has a hose attached to it that lets you water your entire garden without fighting the hose. That is the SkyCrane. last year, we put soaker hoses through the entire garden, one in each of the raised beds. Unfortunately, the soaker hoses decided that one year of soaking was enough, and that from now on they are Spraying, leaky hoses. Obviously, I needed to find an alternative, so I decided to run a hose and water my plants by hand. It would give me a chance to get in there and notice the plants individually, and since I already had a garden hose, it wasn't going to cost anything. Perfect!
Then I tried lugging the hose through the garden, around the corners, and getting snagged on just about everything. That wasn't going to work for me. It was about then that I invented (okay, maybe I stole the idea from a self-serve carwash, but it definitely has a cooler name now) the SKYCRANE! (yes, I know, the skycrane is a heavy-lifting helicopter, but my nephew thinks the name is cool, so we're going to go with it.)
SO! Here, essentially, is what the Skycrane is: a T-shaped boom made out of lightweight fence-pipe, a set of counterweights, and a hose wrapped to the end, all supported by a fence post on the edge of the garden. It was incredibly simple to make, taking only about twenty minutes to put together, and because I built it out of scrap from around the yard, it was completely free.

Since I am not entirely convinced that my description is concise enough for you, I present a very technical digram rendered in exquisite detail:

Hopefully that clears everything up, but if not, be sure to post any questions in the comments section, and I will answer them ASAP. Hope you like it!