Mead Making with the Mermaid's Spirit

Today was our second annual mead making party. Last year we started The Mermaid's Spirit, which is a group of people within the SLO and Northern Santa Barbara County who enjoy brewing or learning about brewing. Jed and I still put ourselves in the second category. In the last year we've had epic failure with some of our flavored mead, a slight success/failure with the plain mead, and a really good review of our hard apple cider.

Today a few of us met up at our house in Paso and brewed 10 gallons of mead and 3 gallons of hard apple cider.

What we decided to do was to use the yeast from some of our 4-5 generation apple cider to use for the mead. With any luck it will be like our cider and will be sparkly. This year, we changed that aspect of the yeast, but we also added more honey to the mixture. Last year we used 20 lbs of honey for 20 gallons, equaling 1 lb of honey per gallon of mead. It turned out a bit weak and tasted very alcoholic. Of course there were also other elements at play with last year's mead as we moved around and probably didn't take care of the bottles in the best possible way. This year we used 35 lbs of honey in 10 gallons of mead making it 3.5 lbs of honey per gallon. We hope this helps the taste out and we look forward to bottling this batch.

Hard Cider Recipe:

(1) .75 gallon container of Martinelli's pure 100% apple juice in glass bottle (you can use whatever type of apple juice)
1/8th tsp of brewers yeast

Directions:
Pour yeast into apple juice. Shake and place airlock on top. Wait two weeks (first batch) and bottle. (This all depends on if your cider has finished fermenting or if you wish to stop it by this time. It also depends on the temperature of the cider that determines how fast it will ferment.)

NOTE: It needs to be 100% apple juice, not from concentrate.

Mead Recipe:

35 lbs of honey
8 gallons of water
(2) .75 containers of our hard apple cider

Directions for each of the 5 gallon carboys:
Placed cold water into two pots. Heated the water to 120 degrees and added honey. Once the honey and the water were well mixed we took it to the prepared warm carboys. (Think of glass carboys as jars when canning. If you're going to place hot liquid in them, you'll need to warm up the glass so that it won't shatter. ) We added one pot of honey water to the carboy and then added one of the .75 gallon of already made hard apple cider. Swill the hard apple cider so that all the yeast can go into the honey water. Then add the remainder of the honey water. Top with airlock and you're ready to go. We'll see how long this takes but it should be around 2 months.

Both drinks should be at about 15% alcohol or 30 proof when they are done.

On the Pigs of Evil

I'm normally very mild when I post to blogs... this won't be one of them.

I never thought I'd actually crave to kill an animal more than Tyson: I was wrong. My thoughts on animals: we make a contract, you(animal) serve your purpose and I'll feed and house you until you can no longer fulfill your purpose. At that time the contract will be re-negotiated.

How does this apply to the pigs of evil: Not doing their f*ing job, that's what it is. Frankly, their personalities suck, their breeding abilities are questionable and their attitude is freaking annoying. They cause strife between us and our neighbor and they don't graze.

Solution: Slaughter time. Next weekend we'll put them to their intended purpose so that we can make room for new piggies. This will also give us a chance to practice slaughtering bigger animals, which will be good. They're not that big but practicing on the anatomy will be beneficial for when we actually do get animals of an intended size.

We'll start over with the berkshires... we'll see about getting them very young so that they are not as skittish around humans... because frankly.. that's freaking annoying.

I'd rather be gardening

Work has been stressful lately and I keep finding myself wishing I was at home gardening. I was able to finish cleaning up the bed closest to the bedroom and planted the following this morning before I left to work: Lima beans, 2 types of peas, turnips, 2 types of red radishes, daikon radish, and red leafed lettuce. Due to ... circumstances I ended up having to work overtime today and was not able to finish preparing the southernmost bed on that line. Right now we have two planted (this includes the one I did today). The brassicas are growing well, but I would like to move some of the seedlings to another bed so that we can allow most of them to live out their intended purpose. If I can keep the chickens and goats from getting into my beds then they might just provide enough to feed us for a while. It looks like a lot of the cabbages sprouted so we'll probably end up making a large amount of kim chi. I look forward to being able to prepare and plant the rest of the beds. Oh, rototillers do not really work on our soil... tried and failed miserably.

My old bed is still growing, the brocolli will be picked soon, but I think we might just be able to make one bowl of stir-fry with them as the heads are not that big. The brussel sprouts are growing, as well as the red and green cabbages. Onions are doing well and I look forward to being able to pick those.

Chicken Pushers

Apparently, Jed and I have turned into chicken pushers. Whenever we start talking to people about our chickens or give them some of the eggs from our chickens they become interested in raising chickens. We've had a couple of people order chicks and others who are waiting to see if we have any spare baby chicks... We shall conquer the world, one chick at a time. On the plus side, I like chickens and fresh meat and eggs are always good. I hope they enjoy their chickens as much as we do. (To tell the truth, I have no clue why people have TVs, all I have to do is walk outside with some bread and watch the chickens bonk heads as they try to take it away and I'm amused for hours.)

Houdini Chickens

Tripoli has been sneaking into the house again. She's figured out how to use the cat door with the flap, and she'll probably teach the other chickens how to do it. Yesterday morning I walked out to open up the coop and then walked over to let the goats out... well I did see Tripoli running in front of me when I went to open up the goat pen, but I figured she must have run off with the rest of the chickens to scratch the compost pile. When I came inside I took off my boots and was putting on my normal shoes and realized that Jed's clothing drawer was making a weird sound. Tripoli was snuggled in Jed's black clothing and thus camouflaged. Now, I know for a fact that Jed's clothing does not make ANY noise no matter what I do to it. I walked over to the dresser, pick up Tripoli and set her outside.

Apparently, Jed found Tripoli asleep on the headboard to our bed today. As I cannot think of any way to keep the chickens out while letting the cats in, we'll most likely have to put up with shooing Tripoli out of the house most mornings. (I was contemplating putting something sticky to the flap door but it's bad enough trying to cut out all of Calvin's dreadlocks without adding something sticky to it.)

We also have one of the Rainbows magically ending up into the goat house. I took a picture of her on top of the goat house yesterday.. then I blinked and she was suddenly inside the goat house while the door was closed. I'm not really sure how she does it. I assumed that she squeezed in through a hole in the roof, but she was on the opposite side of the roof and suddenly, vamoose! she's inside. As we plan on eating her, I'm hoping this trait does not pass on to any baby chicks.

Trees in bloom

Spring must be here already, fewer nights below freezing and now our peach and almond trees are in bloom. Rosie has been working to learn how to trim and limb our fruit trees to get a better harvest and while it may be wishful thinking, I think I have noticed a healthier look to our almond after Rosie worked on it. It has been raining again, and some how the Pigs Of Evil have collapsed their pig house that I built to keep them out of the rain. So since I have a sunny day today (more rain tomorrow) I will have to add that to my list of chores.

Cows cows cows

Rosie and I have been discussing getting a cow, mostly for milk and partially for meat. But in order to be able to sustain a source of milk and beef we need more than one cow, generally speaking it takes at least two cows to get more cows. And while Noah was able to populate the entire planet with cows starting with only two beasts, Rosie and I are limited to the laws of genetics (miracles being in short supply this year). Thus unless we want to have cows with the genetic diversity of the English royal family we will need a herd of cows (last thing we need, royal cows......).

But we simply lack the space, time and money to set up a cattle ranch (I know I had a few million here a second ago......)

So where do we sit? I would like to see about getting a single highland cow once the goats are grown, that way the goats can help keep the cow from being lonely. And probably give the cow a personality complex (Am I a big goat or an adopted cow? Cow, goat, cow, goat, cow, goat, etc.)

Once, as an experiment, Rosie and I spent about a year with no refrigeration. Living with out the modern convenience of a fridge was not that difficult and it taught us about the keeping power of certain foods. Eggs don't go bad for about a month at room temp, meat needs to be used very soon, and milk goes bad after about 3 days to 1 week. The milk was the biggest issue as Rosie likes milk a lot and we use it for cooking. But had we a cow to get fresh milk from we could realistically go again without a fridge. Eggs and milk gathered daily, chickens killed and cooked as needed. Most veggies will last a long time if kept properly; canned, dried, cooked, etc.

So properly running our home could provide a lot of food with out the burden of a fridge. Not that I want to head that way again, but it always is good to be prepared to do with out.

Shopping goal

So Rosie and I where having a conversation about our goals for our homestead. One idea we are make a run at is to avoid the grocery store for a year, with a few exceptions. We are in the wrong climate to grow coffee and I am unwilling to put Rosie threw a year of me with no coffee, there are probably a few other exceptions we will need to make that we do not see yet.

We will not be able to start this effort for a little while now, we need to get our garden in order and producing better then it currently is. That will mean grains for bread and animal food, veggies and fruit for us to eat (and enough variety to keep us healthy and happy). We will also need to wait for either a cow or a goat to get milk from (Rosie the goat is still too young). Also we will need to wait and kill at least one Pig of Evil to provide protein, supplemented with the occasional chicken/goose/turkey/other. We also really like tofu and are not sure if we can realistically grow our own soybeans to make tofu out of, ditto for rice.

Is it possiable? We don't know, but it should be amusing to find out.

Victory over the Pigs of Evil

Victory over the pigs of evil. My much improved pen gate and the diabolically clever gate closing system was enough to over come the piggies of evil. I went out in the morning to check my new pig trap only to discover two 100lb furry torpedoes properly in their pen where they belong. The neighbor's horse misses his piggy friends though, he now spends his days over by the fence wondering why his friends don't come under the fence and visit him any more. As a concession to the horse we did build the pen very close to the fence to that they can at least see each other and "talk" back and forth a little.

Both lucky and unlucky for the pigs of evil, we came to the conclusion that where we unable to get them back in the pen it would be shotgun time. So now they have a stay of execution, but next fall or winter we will have pork galore!

Kablooie with Fermentation

Yesterday, while working out in the garden, both Jed and I heard a massive BOOM! followed by the sound of shattering glass. We both looked at each other and then ran into the house. We came into the house to find that one of my bottles of home made hard cider had fermented after being bottled and had enough pressure build up to blow up the bottle.... not just just a little, but epic bottle blowing of doom. We had glass embedded in the walls and found large shards of glass more than 30+ feet away. We're still sweeping up glass bits that we keep finding in unexpected areas, like the garage. What this teaches us is that we should always, always drink our hard cider before this happens. Or on a more sober note, just put the bottles into the fridge after bottling so that the fermentation process slows down. We'll post the images of the glass in the wall and the debris after Jed uploads them.

Man vs Piggies of Evil

Ok so the epic story of man vs pig continues. So when we first brought our pigs home they smashed out of the pen we had for them and ran around the yard like 40 lb furry torpedoes. After a few days of that the pigs of evil decided that they wanted to go hang with the neighbors horse, by burrowing under the fence. So Rosie and I recently built a new and improved pig pen. And the pigs of evil promptly smashed the cunning one-way pig ramp I made to get them to stay in the new tougher pen.

The next day I devised a rather ingenoious spring door to allow the pigs to enter the pen and have the door shut behind them. The pigs of evil broke the sping and once again escaped.

The day after that I renforced the spring and re-set my pig trap. It worked, the new spring survived the pigs of evil and they where trapped in the pen. The now 60 lb furry torpedoes just smashed threw the gate and back off to visit the horse.

Now I have an even more fiendish device to close the door after the (now 100lb) pigs enter the pen to get their nightly food. Using a weight and a rope the door will close behind them in a (I hope) fullproof trap for the pigs of evil. I also heavily re-enforced the gate. In the morning we shall see to whom this chapter of man vs pig will be counted for.

Baby goats!

We picked up some baby Boer goats. They're a little brother and sister. We plan on castrating the buck. They were already named when we picked them up this morning, the boy is Ramses, and the girl is... well, Rosie. So I have a jr. in the family and she's amusing. I sat in the back with both of them on the ride home. Ramses was very protective of her and she was very timid and frightened. In the end they both curled up between me and the back of the seats and rested while I stroked their backs. We put them into the old coop and that is where they are staying tonight. Upon getting them home, they turned total opposites. Ramses is very stand-offish and doesn't like being pet while Rosie runs around and frolics and runs over to be pet. We've established that rule number one is that she is not allowed to eat sweaters, rule number two is that she's not allowed to eat fingers, rule number three was no goat drool, and rule number four was no eating wrappers of any sort. After our initial stay with them in the old coop they ran around for a bit and from the window we saw them jump onto the laying boxes from which they would jump off as if they were to leap off a stage to go off goat-crowd surfing.

For the life of me I cannot find a counter anywhere online that can help me keep a yearly tally of the produce and eggs that have come in. It vexes me. We have an average of 7-8 eggs a day with the most being 10 eggs in a day and the least being 6 eggs in a day.

We just met the father of our next door neighbor and he's from Guanajuato. We stayed talking a while about animals, family, the economy, the housing market, and Mexico. We'll see if we can fix the fence that joins our property, hopefully tomorrow so that it's not toppeling over.

Jed fixed up the piggy pen today so that the door can swing freely and so that it can shut of its own accord. We hope to capture our piggies soon so that they can actually stay in our yard. We'll see about reinforcing the fences after they are captured so that we might be able to unburdon our neighbor of the little snots.

2/6/10

We begin a new year in our new home. 'o9 brought many changes into our lives, such as a new home with a bit of land so that we can actually get to do all the cool things we've only dreamed about. As our little home, now starting homestead grows and develops we were hoping to be able to keep an account of what we are doing.

To begin, at this point we have:

Chickens: 1 Silkie that Jed got off Craigslist for free, 9 Ameraucanas (we started with 10, but Tabby had a snack), and 2 Rhode Island Reds. So far, all the chickens are very friendly and follow us where ever we go. The Rhodes have been laying since September, Silkie has always laid, and the Ameraucanas started right after Xmas. We also have one ex-rooster, Tyson, that would attack females, but got over it as soon as his head was chopped off... he was delicious, I will grant him that.

Hogs: 2 Tamworths gilts. We got them right before Thanksgiving and have had them rocketing around the backyard and chilling with our neighbor's horse. We'll eat spots first... she's the one that refuses to come back home and uses the horse for protection... I refuse to have any sort of intelligent pig...

Ducks: Or ex-ducks I should say. We started with a set of 9, which were all eventually slaughtered for a feast. We acquired 4 Golden Hybrids and 5 Mallards... We now have well fed preditors in the area. I was able to witness the capture of a couple of ducklings by an eagle (Golden?) which was pretty freaking magestic, but none the less, dwindled our flock.

Cats: Our loving cats that have been with us since we were in the tiny apartment in Morro Bay. Calvin and McGee. Calvin is our smallish, black Main Coon that is the spawn of satan and McGee is heaven incarnate.. until he starts making those iegh, iegh, noises in his throat and Calvin runs to hide behind us before he gets a butt whoopin (or more accurately, McGee grabs him by his throat and pins him to the ground)

Garden: ... Or lack there of, we planted many trees: 2 cherry, 1 apricot, 2 apple, 1 almond, 2 olive, 1 peach, 1 nectarine, 2 sycamore, 1 ash, 1 poplar, 1 black walnut, many chestnuts (we're hoping at least 3 make it... the Tams think they are delicious), 3 ceadars, 2 pines, and 2 willows. When we got here there was only the almond. We've also added black berries, raspberries, boysenberries, grapes, strawberries, and blue berries. I've had two attempts at a garden so far, the first had tomatos and such until the chickens discovered that they were delicious.... We didn't get to harvest anything from there. As winter started we started a brassica garden. The only items that have not been ravished by the chickens and Tams are the cabbages and the brussel sprouts. We go out there periodically to encourage them to grow.

Bees: None personal so far, but we put a base out there for them with some lemon grass to draw them in. We have a ton of honeybees stop on by to feed amonsts the mustards. (Jed tried eating a bit of the mustard the other day and had to keep spitting it out because it was really strong... must eat them young...)

In the future:

Meat Babies: Or a term that Jed has asked me not to use. =) This refers to any kind of animal offspring we wish to have from our livestock. For example, we want to have dairy goats, but also have some kids to eat, as well as getting a Mulefoot boar to mate with our Tams so that we can have pig meat babies.

We have Dorkings, White-faced black Spanish, Blue Andalusians, and Standard Old English Game (25 in total) comming in mid-March. As well as a Barnyard Assortments (20 random fowl - chicken, ducks, guineas, turkeys, geese) sometime this year.

We're also scheduled to pick up a Nubian/Boer cross doe that has just freshened so we'll have milk, hopefully for 10 months.

I guess one thing to point out is... Jed has never lived near a farm before. This has made the whole process that much more entertaining as sometimes I'll ask him like "blah blah blah, goat breed types?" for which he'll respond, "Qua?" I sometimes forget that he has not lived around animals...

We're also using this as a way to keep track of our produce... and to this purpose

As of today the 6th of Feb, we've collected 48 eggs from our chickens in the last 6 days. We are now resorting to sticking cartons full of eggs into unlocked vehicles just to get them out of the fridge.

We are hoping that this record of our trials and lessons will be entertaining to people and inspire you to try a little sustainable living on your own, be that a small garden box in your appartment or plowing under your lawn to grow some grain. We have been enjoying this new life and want to show others the fun that can be had by homesteading in what ever way you are able.