Beer! and various other things

First things first: Today, we finally made beer!

Tom and I bought our supplies a month ago, and between one thing and another, we just haven't had time to get the process going. It takes about five hours to get a batch started. Finding five hours at home is not easy, but today we had lots of little chores, so we were able to do those and brew beer at the same time.

The best part of brewing beer (in my opinion, I'm sure Tom feels differently) is the words you get to throw around. "Time to sparge the mash!" might be my favorite phrase. And, of course, it was fun to do a project together.

The first part of the process is mashing the grain. Basically you take the dry, cracked grains and combine them with warm water, and make the liquid that will be the base for your beer. It has to remain at a certain temperature for an hour, it's a bit fiddly, but it's basically like making a big batch of oatmeal.

Sparging the mash!

I then took the spent mash out to the chickens, and that pile o' grain was gone in about five minutes. They LOVED it.

Then we added hops and boiled for quite a while. We added two kinds of hops, bittering and flavoring, and boiled after each addition.

When the foam 'breaks,' you cool the brew down quite a bit. After it reaches 70 degrees, you check the sugar content using a hydrometer.

cooling

science!

Meanwhile Tom had prepared everything with a sterilizer and it reminded us of cancer, funnily enough, where you have to have a sterile field before drawing blood (which we did at home every week for years). This was a sterile field for beer. Much nicer, and not life or death. :)

Then the yeast was added to the beer, whisked vigorously, and decanted into our carboy.

The only thing left to do now is wait!

In between beer processes, we got all our chores done. We even had time for some extra fun. I had a nice hike with Joe this morning in a spot I haven't been for a while in Shell Ridge. While walking I came across a camera, for monitoring wildlife. I've never seen one of these in the wild before.

Chamomile is blooming profusely in this part of the hills.

Adam and his friends went mountain biking in the same section of Shell Ridge this afternoon and came across a big rattler. They avoided him and had a great time. Unfortunately Adam took a sail over his handlebars at one point, and has road rash from his upper lip to his knee. He's now on the couch with a bag of ice.

Speaking of creepy crawly things, I found a paper wasp nest blown down from the eaves of our train shed. I have it in pride of place on our outdoor dining table. I appreciate paper wasps and never kill them - they pollinate as well as bees do, and lay eggs on soft-bodied insects, controlling that population.

I managed to get some art made for the chicken coop.

Let heaven and nature SING!

And I did some tidying up to ready us for next weekend and the Urban Farm Tour. Have you got your tickets yet? I'm really excited for the day. I think I'll make honey cake using honey from our hive, to share with our visitors.

It's definitely fruit time in the garden. These are all ripening and will be ready soon, but not soon enough!

peach

tiny apples

raspberry

blackberry

Meanwhile I'm harvesting and eating strawberries, blueberries, and huckleberries every day. The only veg we're harvesting and eating at the moment is peas, but collards and Bibb lettuce are not far away.

I did something this weekend that I'm particularly proud of. I signed us up for a meat CSA! Tara Firma Farms provides pastured beef, pork, and chicken to their members, delivered right to your door! We've visited this farm twice - Mother's Day in 2014, and to get a freshly-killed pastured turkey at Thanksgiving time. The property is idyllic and the animals all living out their lives the way they were meant to. We do eat meat, and I want to make sure that the animals have had good lives, not spending them in dark barns or in small cages with slatted floors, but rather running free in the grass, eating and rooting and mating and being animals. The meat costs more, and it should. Our weekly deliveries will start Friday, and I can't wait to see what we get, and share the cooking results with you!

And speaking of cooking, it's time to get to dinner prep. I've got focaccia risen and ready for the oven, and am making a seared scallop and bacon soup to go with it. Happy June to all of you!

Gates and a Bat Box

Another guest post from Tom about construction...

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One of our plans for this year was to raise the height of the fence that surrounds the yard, so that we could grow more food for us and less for our local deer population. This past weekend we finished the last part of that work, installing new and higher gates.

The work to make new gates gave me an opportunity to work with Elizabeth's dad Tim Killen,  who comes from a line of woodworkers and who blogs for Fine Woodworking. Tim's focus for a number of years has been in using SketchUp, 3-D modeling software, to plan his woodworking pieces. I'd dabbled a little bit with SketchUp, but I've always found that having a specific project is always a good way to learn software. This gate project would be a perfect opportunity.

After a few fits and starts and YouTube tutorials, I was able to work up a model for the gates:

Front View

Rear view

We had some lumber left over from the chicken coop construction project, and used that to form the main frames of the gates. Working with Tim gave me a chance to try making some mortise and tenon joints, and at one point we used nearly every clamp that he had:

The final gate design looks a little different than the model I'd created, as we simplified the work needed to make the pickets that attached to the frames.

The gates wound up being pretty heavy, so I was glad that I'd followed Tim's advice and ordered some pintle hinges online to hang the gates. Pintle hinges come in two parts -- there's a metal strap that attaches to the gate using carriage bolts, and a pin (the pintle) that gets screwed into the post. The gate is then lowered into position so that a loop on the end of the straps goes over the pintle. Here's a closeup:

Pintle hinge

 We used two straps per gate, and each one is rated to 100 lbs, so that should hold up. Here's one of the finished gates in place:

It was a lot of fun working with Tim on the gates, and I learned a lot (like, when you subtract off the width of the stiles when measuring your rails, be sure to add back in the length of the tenons, or your gate frames will be a lot more narrow than you had planned. D'oh!).

Our other construction project of last weekend was for an Eco-project for Adam's 7th grade science class. For this project, he needed to make something that would contribute to an environment. We've been working on making our home environment a better place for animals, both wild (birds, insects, lizards) and domestic (chickens, bees), and so we decided to follow that same path and work on a bat box.

There are a lot of plans for bat boxes online, and the construction is pretty straightforward. We settled on a design from This Old House that has a fun bat motif. The box itself has an opening on the bottom, and is fairly shallow – only about 3/4" between front and back.

Adam has to bring it in to school next week, then we'll put it up high on our shed.

Foraging for Poo?

There are times on my urban farm journey where I don't recognize myself. Slicing jalepenos to add them to almost every dish? Breaking my back using an ax to take out a stump? Opening a bee hive and studying the comb? These are all things I didn't do two years ago. Sometimes I say to myself, who ARE you?

Today, the answer to that question was quite clear: "Oh, you're THAT lady. The weird one."

This morning I took Joe into a part of the open space near our house, and I saw that the cattle were back. Seasonally, some farmer who has some contract with the city brings his steers here to graze; we see them every year. I like seeing them, though I think after the cattle leave, someone should bring goats in, because the cows don't eat the thistle, and it's taking over. But I digress.

As I was walking Joe, I noticed very many fresh piles of manure. "Hm," I said to myself. "I wonder if I could bring the wheelbarrow up here?"

So that's precisely what I did this afternoon. Except, the wheelbarrow wouldn't fit in the back of the Honda, so instead I brought two garden Trugs (I use these for nearly everything, they are worth every penny) and my trusty shovel. And Joe. Who basically sat himself under a tree far, far away from me, as if even he was embarrassed by my behavior.

I filled up the trugs, hoping no hapless hiker would come by, and rehearsing my explanations just in case. The cows hung out in a shady thicket near the nearly-dry pond. Three turkeys with a rafter of chicks strolled by, probably themselves eating bugs from the patties. A darkling beetle eyed me warily, probably pissed I was taking something from him. I wondered what a ranger might say to me? Was I removing precious resources from the open space? My two small buckets surely wouldn't count for much, surely there were plenty of 'resources' left to improve the soil and feed native wildlife.

None of my internal arguments mattered; no one came by to question my actions. I put the buckets in the car and got outta dodge, feeling slightly criminal.

I upended the buckets in my compost  - hopefully it'll speed up the decomposition of the pile of straw there. Then I washed my hands real, real good.

This patty was the size of a small dog

You can't see them, but the cows are chilling in this thicket of willows

Hard to see, but three turkeys and their babies were checking me out

Darkling Beetle

My haul. The poo looks dry, but when broken, was nice and fresh inside

break down that straw!

The surprising cruelty of nature

It's always surprising to me, anyway. Maybe some folks are jaded by what happens in nature, but I am always finding a certainly melancholy in natural systems.

This morning, early, I was out in the garden, and I realized I hadn't heard the young in the black-capped chickadee nest in a while. You might remember that there was a family of these birds living in a nest box behind a ribes bush, and I posted a short film of the mother bird visiting the nest.

I figured the birds had grown up and flown the nest, and it would be interesting to take what remained to work, to show the kids. So I opened the box and removed the nest, which was square - it totally filled the box. But sadly, there were two dead chicks on top of the nest.

I don't know what killed them. I don't know if something happened to the parents, and that meant the birds starved to death? Or if they something was wrong with them, structurally? Nothing can get in the box except very small birds, so nothing got in there and hurt them. Were there more chicks, and they flew away, and these two didn't make it? I'll never know.

It makes my heart hurt.

I've posted the pictures below - I don't find them macabre, but you might. The nest itself is very interesting in its layers, with dryer lint on the top (I regularly put dryer lint out in the garden for this exact purpose - another reason to stop using chemical detergents in our wash).

I decided to put the nest back out in the garden, on the ground - perhaps the tiny bodies can be used as nutrition by some other creature, perhaps the nest can be re-used by another bird.

Nature can be very joyful, but also quite sad.

Pictures below:

top view

the two babies

layers in the nest

Weekend Baking

My weekend consisted of very mundane chores, cleaning the house and doing laundry, that sort of thing. I spent a bit of time in the garden, making things look nice (the Urban Farm Tour is less than two weeks away, and I'm feeling anxious about the appearance of things!), but that does not a blog post make. Tom worked very hard to finish the gates and helped Adam build a bat box; I'm hoping he'll write a post about those things later this week. You may not be in the market for making new gates, but everyone could use a bat box!

I did get a chance to do some baking this weekend. For our Memorial day celebration, I made a blueberry cobbler with a biscuit topping, using a recipe from America's Test Kitchen.

It proved delicious and felt like the perfect late Spring dessert. This recipe calls for six cups of blueberries, so we could tell ourselves it was healthy and enjoy a nice-sized serving.

We've been watching The Great British Bake-Off as a family, and as a result, Kate's been interested in making pastry. So today we made Kolache, which I remember having as a kid and loving it (Mom, I need your recipe!). Kate wanted to make hers with a Nutella filling, so we made one that way, and one with a cream cheese filling, which is more Adam's style. While we were working, we spoke in British accents, which was fun. (Go ahead, I dare you to say "Let's place the pastry in the oven to prove" in a British accent. Fun, right?)

Kate rolled hers much more nicely than I rolled Adam's. But they both turned out lovely.

I'll leave you with a book and movie recommendation. I'm enjoying Pig Tales by Barry Estabrook; it is making me really think about how we source our pork and what kind of businesses I want to support. I'm also enjoying Farmland, which is streaming on Netflix at the moment. Yay for young farmers!

More this week, as we prepare for the big event on June 6. Yikes!