Yesterday Mom came by for a work party. We bottled our 1st batch of Blackberry Zen a full bodied dry wine. We got 28 an 3/4 bottles from our 6 gallon batch. We drank the 3/4 even though it's suppose to age until August... It was pretty good considering it was the last bottle we filled which meant it had a lot of sediment. It was highly alcoholic and quite tasty. We also bottled a couple liters of Apple Ass Wine... it smelled like ass. I'll try to figure out how to salvage it. We've still got a gallon of blackberry vinegar that's aging. We'll start our 2nd 6 gallon batch of Blackberry Wine very soon. One of the bottles we corked is already worth a lot of money... it fell off the shelf and used my phone to break it's fall, so that bottle's gotta be worth at least a hundred bucks, easy. :~)
Another quick pictorial update. Click the photos to enlarge and read captions. Use the arrows on the enlarged picture to scroll through the details. The land is bountiful with food native to the region if you know what to look for and when to look. Yesterday was the 1st big Paw Paw harvest. About 15 pounds. I have recently discovered the mango/papaya/banana taste of Appalachia's own tropical fruit.. PawPaws are extremely healthy providing as much or more vitamin c, potassium, magnesium and amino acids as bananas, oranges etc. Having never picked Paw Paws I was maybe a little to lenient with what I picked up. Paw Paws go rotten in a flash and the very ripe ones are hugely messy to cut up (because they got squished in the bag on the way down the hill). This is why they are not a very commercially available food. So, I spent about 5 hours last night peeling, removing seeds and pureeing PawPaws. We got about 5 pounds of frozen PawPaw puree. There are many more Paw Paws ripening but the time commitment is daunting .. maybe we have enough. Rose Hips also seem to be ready, we have yet to pick them. They are a rich source of vitamin c and good for a tea that helps mostly stomach problems. We found what we believe to be wild grapes in a few places on the land. They are very small with a large seed. We haven't tried to process them in anyway; it seems like too much work. W's got some Golden Rod drying for medicinal purposes. We also are beginning to collect walnut, hickory nuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts in small quantities (most aren't fully ripe yet). I'm excited by the forage harvest because it is the natural offering of the land. As we work toward establishing a forest of food here and learn what plants are good for food/medicine, there should be more forage harvesting each year. It is a lot to keep up with, especially the processing for later use part. We're still collecting peeling and drying apples about every other day, Stirring wine about every other day and about once a week we've collected enough veggies from our "regular" garden to freeze another pot of soup. The work is constant and never ending. I'm slowly accepting that we're not going to get everything put up for winter. Hell, we don't even know what "everything" is yet. The work will obviously never end so now the challenge/goal is to make sure it doesn't always feel like work. I like foraging the land for natural food sources because it feels like a game of hide-n-seek... at least until you get home with the food. 8 -10 Hazelnut trees in a patch at the top of the lower meadow. These trees were revealed by chainsawing down the hundreds of menacing sumac puplings that had our food surrounded ;~) |
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December 2015
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