Watermelons

The watermelon vines we had did pretty well, with each one producing multiple watermelons.   The only issue we had was determining when they were ripe inside.  As the first one we picked to early and it wasn't pink inside yet. 

 These were "Sangria" variety.  One of them either got too ripe or swelled too much after some rain, and split open.

 The other variety we had were "Stars and Moon" although we only got two off of that one, and neither had the big "moon" spot. 

Flash back: Summer Blooms part 2

Homebrewing happenings

Brewed my first high gravity beer back in August, a partial-mash Russian Imperial Stout, so that it will be ready by Christmas time.  That style is big and bold, and good for winter drinking.  It will be about 10% abv.   I brewed a 3 gallon batch that was left in primary fermentation for a month.   I used the yeast cake from a previous amber ale to ferment the beer, since high gravity beer needs lots of yeast to be able to ferment, as yeast can struggle with such a sugar-rich wort. 

 I then racked it into a smaller 3 gallon carboy for secondary fermentation.  It was in secondary for 2 months, and bottled in the middle of November.  I added some additional yeast when bottling, in case the original yeast was too tired to keep going to carbonate the bottles.  Hopefully it's carbonated and ready to go in a month.

 The hop harvest of the Cascade and Nugget hops turned out decent for the 1st year, which isn't supposed to be real great.

 You can see the lupulin powder inside the hop cones, which is what gives off the hop aroma and oils that flavor and acts as a preservative in beer.

 I had enough hops to use as the flavor/aroma addition in a batch.  So I decided to brew a Black IPA, which is basically a hoppy Indian Pale Ale, but has a little dark malt, so the beer ends up black.  But it doesn't have the strong roasted coffee and chocolate flavors that porters and stouts have.

I also dry hopped the beer with the homegrown hops, as the hops were ready for harvest in two batches.  Hop cones are ready to pick when they are crunchy and papery feeling.  Dry hopping refers to adding the hops directly into the secondary fermentation carboy, which adds a huge hop aroma to the beer. 

 

I have been feeding my spent grains to the chickens, which they seem to love. 

Catch Up Time

So we've slacked big time and not posted for over two months.  But we've still be taking pictures over this time of the garden and such, so here comes a bunch of delayed posts about various stuff about the end of summer and the fall.

Mead Update

So we got around to drinking a second bottle of the Berry Mead, and it's still quite "hot".  The smell is all harsh booziness.  The taste isn't near as boozy, but looks like we're gonna let the batch of bottles sit in the cellar until next year and see how it mellows.  From what I've read about mead, it usually doesn't hit it's peak until a few years old.

More Canning and Freezing

So we've been doing a fairly good job with preserving our harvest.  We pulled our carrots, and blanched and froze those.   Same with the soy beans.   This weekend we canned 13 pints of pickled peppers, and 7 pints of salsa, this time milder, we didn't include as many fish peppers.
As for eating fresh, our giant 6.5 pound zucchini turned into 2 loaves of zucchini bread, and a chocolate zucchini cake.

Dried Beans

So we let all the beans on the Italian Rose bean plants dry, to store as dried beans.  Once the pods changed from their bright red and green color to brown and crackly, we pulled them off.  We removed the beans by hand, and then put into an uncovered bowl to further dry.  In a week or so we'll seal them up in an airtight jar. 

 As you can see, the beans are white with red spots.  But a few beans were the inverse, being red with white spots.