Early crops

This year, I've mostly been growing chickens.

Mead batch 3

A cellar filled with bottles of mead is quite essential for the good life.
Chilled in summer evenings, mulled on cold skiing trips and a barrel for the party -there are few occasions which are not improved by mead.

I'll probably never start up my own micro brewery, but making your own booze is a fun and useful hobby.

Currently my third batch of mead is gurgling away happily under my kitchen table, and it smells absolutely delicious. I've made some changes from the previous two that I hope will pay off. Most importantly I've substituted the cheap honey from the supermarket with light summerhoney from a local beefarmer. The taste of the honey is definitely what is most prominent in mead, so it makes sense not to skimp on this. 

Secondly, I've used apples instead of apple juice. I'd love to say that there were a lot of sound reasoning behind this, but mostly it's just an idea that fresh apples from the supermarket are slightly more historically correct than cheap juice from the supermarket. Oh, and I also used apples in the starter. Theoretically, wild yeast on the appleskin would make a yeast culture on its own, but I chickened out and used some dry wine yeast also. I pathetically comfort myself thinking that people in the past would probably treasure a good yeast culture, taking as few risks as possible with the precious honey.
I'm ridiculously excited about this one, I'll be very disappointed if it goes wrong.
I suppose I ought to write down everything I do with it for further reference. 

First step was to create a starter. Wine yeast, water, a spoon of sugar and an apple cored and chopped all went into an old waterbottle. I gave it a good shake and left it there over night, to make sure that the yeast have started it's blessed process of turning sugars into alcohol.

Next day we made the must:

1 kg of apples cored and chopped up.

3 kg of honey (This is quite a bit I think, but I so love the honey taste)

1 kg cane sugar (a bit extravagant perhaps)

enough water to reach the 12 litre mark in the bucket.

I do not bother to boil the water (We have our own well of quite "soft" water, and I've never had problems with it before) except what went over the apples (they are not organic, bummer, so I do not trust them 100%) and I heated some in a kettle to stir out the honey. The lovely woman who taught me to make mead told me that it's important that the honey is not heated above 70 Centigrades as that will spoil some of the flavour, and I stick to that rather than take any chances.

We now had a mixture that taste absolutely divine. Especially mixed with good rum. I have on later occasions made some honey & apple infusions. Nom.

We actually drank a bit of it while waiting for the must to cool down.

After several cups of honey/apple/rum, we eventually gave up on it ever cooling down to room temperature and went to bed.

Next morning, when the must had finally reached a yeast friendly room temperature, we poured in the starter and gave the fermenting bucket a good shake.

Giving it a good shake was something I continued to do the next 4 days. At this stage the yeast needs oxygen to thrive.

Now, after three weeks the bubbling have slowed down. I should probably rack it to secondary fermentation soonish. And it taste good even though the alcohol is a quite prominent. Alas, I've done a little bummer. I totally forgot that halving the batch would mean that my 20 litre glass carboy will only be half full, i.e. half full of air. 

So I can take my chances on that working out, or take my chances on doing the secondary fermentation in plastic bottles. I'm leaning towards the second option, mostly because it will leave my last carboy free for some rhubarb wine making in spring...

Update 06.03: Racked the must to two five litre PET plastic bottles that I put in the cellar. The alcohol content is about 15%, and apart from the prominent alcohol and a faint hint of yeast it taste quite good: The taste of the honey is fairly unchanged, just less sweet. The tart taste (and smell) of apple is also rather prominent, which at this stage I'm pleased with. I'm guessing that this mead will be slightly on the sweet side (even though I hope the level of alcohol will still rise a tiny bit), so some tartness won't go amiss. And if the previous batches are anything to go by the honey will dominate as the mead age and mellows.

Mornings...

The enjoyment of my wonderful pick-me-up-in-the-morning smoothie is somewhat marred by the sudden realization that it looks like cat vomit.

It taste good though, and it wakes me up, so I'll write down what I put in it:

1 old banana
1 orange, and some orange juice
A generous slice of ginger
Chilipowder
Cinnamon

Close your eyes, and enjoy with a cup of coffee.

I'll label this as nom, despite what it looks like.

Procrastination

Why is it so difficult to keep up regular blog updates (or for that matter answering mail)?

Some of the answer might be this:

Anything that have to compete with my happy frolicking around in the woods with my dogs have a tendency to not happen.

Summer soon, please?

The lazy fucking farmer is writing with fingerless mittens on, drinking rooibos tea, listening to the eminent Brenda Fassie and dreaming of African sunshine.

The lawn

The lazy fucking farmer really can't be arsed to cut the lawn. That should go without saying really. Of all the things to spend time and energy on, mowing the lawn is so far down on the list it drops right off it. If I had to mow the lawn, I wouldn't have a lawn.

Truth to be told, I'm slowly increasing the area used for vegetables at the cost of lawn area. Carrots taste better than grass, so I think this a logical step. On the other hand, one need some places around the house to just trample around on. If everything was garden, getting from A to B would quickly be some kind of crazed combination of slalom and hurdle.

The lazy fucking farmer is stuck with at least some lawn.

Happily we have a horse. A horse is superior to a lawnmower in many ways:

1. Grass gets magically transformed to horsepower and fertilizer.
2. I do not need to buy fuel, as the grass itself fuels the horse.
3. Hence I don't use gasoline and thereby reduce my carbon footprint (although I suppose the smug levels I might have gained by this are mostly eaten up by the diesel required to keep the old pick-up truck going).
4. Operating a lawnmower requires work. First I'd have to earn money to buy it, then I'd have to walk around behind it and when it breaks down I'd have to pay someone to fix it. Arguably maintaining a horse also requires work, but they smell better.
5. You can convince a horse to give you a nice massage. A massage by lawnmower would likely be the end of you.
6. Having a lawnmower requires time. Okai, so does a horse. This point is totally invalid when I think about it.
7. Time spent with a horse is incredibly much more rewarding than time spent with a lawnmower. Being with a horse might even heal mental illness. Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy may be contested, but Lawnmower-Assisted Psychotheraphy doesn't even exist. 
8. You know the annoying grass that grows in nooks and crannys that you just can't reach with the lawnmower? A horse can.
9. When I lie in my bed munching apples (an activity very high on the list of what I like to spend time doing) I can just shout for the horse and throw the apple cores out the window instead of taking them to the compost.
10. A horse will often greet you with a whicker. If a lawnmower greets you at all it is with infernal noise.
11. Horses simply have a lot more uses than a lawnmower. Getting shitfaced on ale and mead, dressing up like a viking and riding a horse about actually feels rather epic. Getting shitfaced on ale and mead, dressing up like a viking and riding a landmower just isn't the same. To illustrate: 

The most epic google result of "viking on a horse"

The most epic google result of "viking on a landmower"

Okai, the posture of the guy with the lawnmower is pretty epic. It could have been Túrin Turambar right before he decide to fall on his sword (grass can do that to you. I spent a summer working in the park department in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland -a place with too much grass and too few trees, and the feeling of defeat when you realize that grass grows back and you have to cut it all over again is excruciating). But the presence of the lawnmover is totally ruining the mood of an otherwise great picture. Which kind of proves my point. Also, it should be taken into consideration that while the other pictures of vikings and horses were almost all epic, the people with landmowers just looked like twerps. Admittedly, they also looked like they were pretty high on something (possibly on the mixture of fresh cut grass and exhaust fumes); but it's a pleasure I find myself quite willing to forgo. I bet it doesn't taste half as good as ale anyway.

The only instance I can think of when a lawnmower will be more useful than a horse is in a zombie apocalypse. After all, I've seen Braindead. But while zombie apocalypse is something we all prepare for, just in case, how likely is it really to happen? And even if it did, I'd rather pick up a chainsaw or a shotgun than a lawnmower anyway.

So having concluded that horses totally pwns lawnmowers, how do you mow your lawn using a horse?
It is quite simple really:

1. Fence off everything you don't want the horse to eat.
2. Let the horse loose.

This might of course not work if you live in a place without sufficient distance between you and the neighbours. If so, the lazy fucking farmer recommend that you start looking for a new and better home.
If that is not an option, perhaps a herd of well trained rabbits is something to look into?

Horses only munch on the lawn of course.
They never start on the berrybushes.
Ever.

Sometimes I hate it here

Last spring, all my squash and cucumber plants froze to death. A few other things died too. Despite living a protected life in a greenhouse. So this year I took steps to give the poor sensitive things some more protection, adding a thermostat oven to the greenhouse. Despite this, Jack Frost have crept in and offed my most promising darlings. Some of them might survive, but others look like they have definitively moved on (I do not really know where plants go when they die, apart from the compost, or even if plants have souls. That would possibly be worth a post in itself. But I strongly feel that having struggled on in a harsh environment from an early age my brave squash plants had deserved better than this. A plant heaven of everlasting summer, reincarnation down south in more gentle climates or somesuch). They had itty bitty flowerbuds on them and everything *sob*.

Also, I have been pondering where to put all the tomato plants I have, making odd plans like for example portable tripod mini-greenhouses from old fenceposts. As of this morning, finding space for tomato plants is not something I have to worry about any more.

It's a really annoying dilemma. If I sow too early the plants get too big for the living room, I move them out in the greenhouse and they die. If I sow later they survive the spring, but they don't get ripe before the autumn frost kills them. There are occasional nights when the temperature creeps under zero until midsummer, and winter (i.e. snow) is usually here in October.

Being an organic farmer (I went to organic agriculture school and everything) I'm supposed to work with nature, but..
THE LAZY FUCKING FARMER IS NOT CONTENT WITH ONLY EATING POTATOES!
I want some variation in my diet! I want to gorge myself on melons and pears, but I accept that it is near impossible in this frozen mountain hole. A little tomatoes and cucumbers though, perhaps a hardy little apple tree? Is that really too much to ask?

Fuck you nature, this is war. Next year I'm moving the greenhouse to a more secluded part of the farm and putting in a bigger oven.