Parsnip Harvest Officially Ends Season at the Long Shot Farm

Jeff dug out the last of the parsnips earlier this week, peeled and boiled them, and froze most of them.  That was the last of our vegetable garden for this year.  The only thing we are still harvesting are some of the hardier herbs - parsley and sage are still going pretty strong as they are on a protected side of the house.

Our next project will be bottling some more of last year's wine to empty out some of the carboys and get them ready for our currently fermenting batch of apple wine.  So bottle washing it is for now...in between Christmas preparations.

  

Apple Wine and Cider

Our family and friends have been enjoying last year's apple wine...so much so, that we are beginning to run short.  We certainly want to avoid that situation in the future, so Jeff went and got more apples last week.

This weekend - which was gorgeous again - we pressed another 20 gallons of cider.  We saved about 3 gallons of this for Thanksgiving (Tina found a great recipe for a cider Thanksgiving punch - which consists mostly of apple schnapps and cider with spices and some oranges and lemon slices for decorations).  The remaining cider is already in the fermenting vat for another batch of 2010 apple wine. With the earlier apple wine batch, we hope to end up with about 30 gallons.

Got some major house cleaning, re-arranging and decorating done this weekend as well.  Even finished our home office area.  Now we are almost ready for everyone to come and visit for Thanksgiving!

Fall Clean up Continues

It was a beautiful fall weekend, and we got a lot of things done outside.  The backyard's overgrown, messy flowerbed is no more:  after Tina transplanted all perennials worth saving to other flowerbeds and moved all the scattered large stones to the future stone wall, Jeff pulled out most of the tree-stumps with the tractor and then used his grader to level the ground.  Only two stumps could not be removed - one of the Magnolia trees is planted between them and they will now anchor a much smaller flowerbed.  After Jeff raked the space smooth, Tina spread grass seed over the bare ground.  Not sure it will still grow this fall, but it was worth a try, since the seed was left over from the spring planting in front of the house. We then removed the round turtle pen and mowed off the weeds (the turtle - being a desert creature - had to be moved inside for the winter).   

Tina also pulled out the dead annuals - since we had a pretty hard frost earlier this week, not much is left from any of them.   All this cleaning up certainly made the compost pile a lot bigger.  Jeff shut off all the outside water spigots, and we put away the water hoses before they freeze and crack. Mowed the backyard and the "orchard" one last time this fall, which made everything look rather clean :)

Also found time to play with wild grapevines, which Jeff and Jens brought back from Bedford after their Saturday hunting trip.  Tina wanted swags for the three windows in the back room, so she measured the windows and screwed the longest dry-wall screws she could find in the appropriate spacing on the backside of the corn crib - then she wound the long grapevines around the screws and Jeff used the more flexible vines to wrap around the swags.  This worked pretty slick!  We are letting them dry in position for a few days - when they are set in their new shape, we'll add some fairy lights (on the brown wire so they are hardly visible except for the lights).  If this does not look too gaudy, we may try another swag for the living room window - at least during Christmas time.

Plowed and Disked for Next Year's Berry Plants

Jeff plowed and disked another acre, getting ready to spread hard fescue grass later this week.  This will be our next acre of ground ready for planting blackberries in the spring.  We'll make rows for the berry plants right before planing, but this type of grass should not spread into the rows and should only have to be mowed a few times a year.  Hoping that plowing and disking will destroy any weeds (and poison ivy vines) that were present in what used to be a hay field.

Wine Storage Bargains Found at Yard Sale

I was looking through the classified ads trying to find used kitchen base cabinets for building a kitchen island and by pure chance came across a yard sale ad that listed "commercial wine racks" - not knowing what to expect, Jeff and I went to the yard sale and found what may well be our best bargain purchase yet.  The guy selling the racks was a very high end contractor, who had remodeled a multi-million dollar home, where the new owners wanted to reduce the size of the build in wine cellar.  The contractor pulled out the extra teak wood wine racks that were no longer needed and he has been selling them to friends for a while and wanted to get rid of the last 6.  These are not small wine racks, they are about 8 ft wide and 6 ft tall.  We bought all 6, of these, 3 are for individual bottle storage, the other 3 are for case storage - we also got all the extra teak wood which was used around the built in shelving, plus a small side rack.  All but the small extra rack are stored in the bottom of the barn, where we have yet to build a wine storage area.

More Blueberries

OK - so we got a great deal on some blueberry plants - at $2 each on closeout, we bought all 32 remaining plants and thus quadrupled the size of our blueberry patch.  Totally crazy...

 First we made the patch a lot larger (with the tractor), dug holes with a spade :), planted and then ran irrigation lines.  Luckily we still had some line left over, plus enough emitters to make this work. We've been irrigating every day since we planted..

Also found time to do some serious flower and herb garden weeding (sometimes I think I grow composting materials as my main crop), here is my "kitchen garden" by the front entrance door:

Fall Clean-up Started

Things have been hectic the last couple of weeks - too much going on at work, plus we helped Rachel, Zach and Toben move to Ohio this weekend.  They have a beautiful house and barn outside Mt. Vernon, about half way between Columbus and Cleveland.

But we still found time to work on our farm, mostly we spent the last couple of weekends cleaning up around the pond.  We cut down the remaining willow trees and pulled out their roots as best as we could.  Since we have had such a terrible long dry spell, the water level was at a record low - which allowed us better access to weeds around the banks.  We weed-whipped around the pond, push-mowed and removed all weeds, including the wild roses and poison ivy!  We also pulled out the old boat dock, which jutted out into the pond - but it was rickety and not too safe.  Taking advantage of the low water level, we cut off the decking portion, hooked it with chains and ropes to the high- lift of the tractor and lifted it off - after some creative sawing, the former dock became a front porch on Lars's playhouse in the woods. The pillars from the dock (old telephone poles) were pulled out with the tractor, and we will re-use them for trellises for either the grapes or blackberries.

Jeff cut down both corn fields, and plowed the lower one under - this will be a section of the 2011 blackberry patch.  We still need to finish plowing the remainder of the field.  Tina weeded and hoed the blueberry bushes - we lost two of them (too many weeds and not enough irrigation we think).  Will need to replenish those.

Also started doing serious research into current cover crop recommendations to get the 3 acre field ready for grapes. Found a lot of very useful articles online, also got a number of articles on winery equipment and overall setup.  During the last few weeks we also worked on the online course offered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)  called the Wine Industry Compliance Seminar.