Carrots and Sweet Potatoes

The harvest of multi-color carrots was pretty good.  We planted a second round of regular orange ones in late summer for a late fall harvest, as they are supposed to end up sweeter in the colder weather. 

Our sweet potato vines went crazy, and actually produced a ton of huge potatoes.  But when we went to harvest them, all but about 5 potatoes had been completely eaten by voles.  The voles tunneled in under the bottom of the boards that are the sides of the beds.  Next year we might do the potatoes in buckets instead to try to prevent that. 

Garden Late Summer

Our two best vegetables by far were the tomatoes and peppers, which all went crazy. The tomato plants eventually grew out the top of the bird netting

 We had to stake up the pepper plants because they grew so many branches that all had heavy peppers

 Sweet potato vines expanded all over.  Unfortunately the zucchini and squash plants in the back were decimated by squash bugs and rotted.

 We put up two different grape vines on the arbor we built over the entrance to the garden.

 We finally got the fence painted too

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.