Another project this winter was to rebuild the closing arms on the drill that we use to plant soybeans and wheat. The original John Deere design was not well thought out and after a few years of use (well, more like 20 years) the closing arms flop side to side and don’t reliably close the soil over the seed.

We purchased a well thought out rebuild kit from the excellent R K Products. To install the rebuild kit we first had to cut the roll pin off that held the closing arm on. Then we had to grind the weld off the pivot pin on the closing arm and punch it out by smacking it smartly with a sledge hammer.

To put the rebuild kit on we had to weld in a new pivot pin, then slide it back into place with the appropriate wear plates and washers and torque it all down to 85 foot-pounds.

And then repeat for all 24 closing arms on the drill, 12 of which are the ‘front rank’ which means to work on them you crawl underneath the drill to get to them. Great fun!

The final product looks like this.

Rebuilt Closing Arm

As you can probably guess, the new parts are the shiny brass colored ones.

We definitely have the wintry rain thing going on this year. After a brutally dry summer it started raining in mid-October and hasn’t stopped. We did some renovations on our shop last spring, so now we have a nice place to work while confined by the wintry rains.

One project we’re working on is to convert our equipment to apply nitrogen fertilizer on corn from anhydrous ammonia to UAN. To do this we’re adding saddle tanks on the tractor to carry the UAN, which is a liquid.

Fitting the Saddle Tanks

We bought a set of used saddle tanks, seen above, to carry the UAN on the tractor. The guy we bought them from had used them on an International Harvester tractor, so we had to do some metal fabricating to make them fit on our John Deere.

Then we’re adding coulters and knives to inject the UAN in the ground. These coulters make just a narrow slot for the knives, so we don’t disturb our no-tilled soils very much.

Coulters and Knives

Since UAN is a liquid naturally we need a pump and plumbing to move it from the tanks into the ground.

Plumbing

If you look at that picture full-size you can see some black lines drawn on the plywood bench. That’s my plumbing design showing how the fertilizer is going to flow through all those parts. I have my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to plumb all this up and have fertilizer going where it should.

We’ve got a couple of month before the wintry rains leave us. That should be enough time for this project.

We have what Debbie and I call at our house ‘Amish TV.’ That is, free broadcast TV. So when I get a night in a hotel with cable TV I get dizzily excited by all the options. Tonight with all the events over at the National No-Till Conference I started channel surfing through all the options. And they were:

1. Hockey (Are we in Canada?)
2. People turning a mattress over (MTV. Not accompanied by music. I guess MTV has nothing to with music these days.)
3. Commercial
4. Talking Head (Mitt Romney is rich, can you imagine?)
5. Wipeout
6. I Love Raymond rerun
7. Kevin Hart (comedy?)
8. B&W movie about Napoleon (Really)
9. George Lopez rerun
10. A Spanish language channel (grouped next George Lopez reruns, I get it)
11. A Rock movie (Rock the ‘actor’, not the music)
12. Locked inside an abandoned beach house (I have no idea why)
13. A ‘House’ marathon (Hugh Laurie, not Norm Abrams)
14. King of the Hill (the only thing I’d watch so far)
15. Commercial
16. Pretty in Pink (Molly Ringwald, so cute)
17. Commercial
18. Little House on the Prairie reruns
19. Commercial
20. BET (I have no idea what this was showing)
21. Commercial
22. Bizarre game show
23. I have no idea what this was, other than I couldn’t press the channel button quick enough. Disney XD.
24. Weather
25. Commercial
26. Made for TV movie
27. Commercial
28. Say Yes to the Dress (A Bridezilla reality show?)
29. Cuba Gooding on Obama. (An MLK day special is the only explanation I can offer for this)
30. Flying Wild Alaska
31. America’s Most Wanted (the show even Fox didn’t want)
32. Commercial
33. Commercial
34. Commercial
35. Ax Men (loggers working hard)
36. Commercial
37. Golf (Live, they said. Bonus!)
38. Commercial
39. Talking heads yelling at one another
40. Commercial
41. Made for TV movie
42. House of Payne (a holy roller series?)
43. Fox ‘News’
44. Cialis commercial. (seek immediate medical attention if watching this commercial for more than 4 hours.)

People pay money for this?

Fortunately I brought plenty of books with me. (On paper, not a Kindle, so quaint.)

I’m at the National No-Till Conference in St. Louis. 3 intense days of speakers, classrooms, and roundtables on no-till farming. They do give us breaks for supper though. While being away from home and eating by yourself isn’t that much fun, I still try to seek out interesting places to eat. Tonight in downtown St. Louis I found a winner at the Peruvian restaurant Mango

I’d never been to a Peruvian restaurant, so it caught my eye was I looking through listings of restaurants in downtown St. Louis. I know next to nothing about Peru or what they eat, so I had no idea what I might be getting into.

When you’re seated they serve you a little dish of plantain crisps with a cilantro, garlic, aji chile, and olive oil dip. I don’t like cooked bananas, but those plantain crisps were incredible. Give me a bag of those and I would eat them until I was sick.

I started out with a Papa Rellena which is a whole potato stuffed with beef and onions, then crispy fried. The potato is golden and crisp outside and floury and light inside. They served it with a pickled onion salsa that was a nice complement.

My main course was grouper served on a tacu-tacu cake (which is beans and rice). It was garnished with red, yellow, and green pepper strips, and crispy thin noodles. And it had an aji pepper based sauce that gave it just a nice peppery bite. It was all perfectly executed and I seriously wanted to lick the bowl to get all of that sauce.

No point in stopping now, for dessert I had Pionono which is sponge cake rolled around dulce de leche (caramel sauce), dusted with powdered sugar and drizzled with caramel and raspberry sauce. My server asked me if I wanted ice cream with it, but I showed one tiny bit of restraint in the evening and passed on the ice cream. The dessert was delicious. The sponge cake was light and airy and kept the dish pleasantly light.

If the outrageously delicious food wasn’t enough, the service was flawless (although my server didn’t look old enough to be out after dark by himself). And the restaurant was beautifully decorated in an über-cool renovated warehouse space. Even better, for downtown in a major city it wasn’t that pricey. I was out of there for less than 40 bucks for appetizer, dinner, and dessert.

One of the tastiest and most well-executed meals I’ve ever had.

Some two weeks later the Day of Pigs III finally ended.

On the Day of Pigs I’d put the ham and shanks in a brine mixture to cure. Yesterday, after two weeks in the brine, I took the meat out and smoked it in my Jay Rosswurm Signature Big Stone Cooking Area smoker.

I used a mix of hickory and wild cherry for smoking. Nephew Tom brought over a side of bacon he had cured to smoke at the same time.

We smoked the meat for about 3 hours and then fried up a bit to see how it tasted. Quality is job one at Skunk Hill. Both the bacon and the ham were splendid!

The ham was huge so I boned it and froze it as ham steaks, ham bits, and 3 good sized ham roasts. The bone and nasty bits I threw in a pot with some onions, carrots, and celery and cooked down for stock.

Tonight I canned that stock and I declare the Day of Pigs III finished!

It was time again for the Day of Pigs, the third year in a row of cutting up half a pig at Christmas time.

Paul, Lisa and I trundled over to Custom Quality Meats on Carroll Road to pick up the pig at around 8 a.m. It was a very nice and big pig, the half weighing in at 113 pounds.

We had the counter ready for action and had the pig in pieces before we could even get the camera out.

Paul Cutting Up the Shoulder for Sausage

Owen of course was very involved in the proceedings.

Desperately Seeking Pork

Nephew Tom joined us, and soon we had a 3 man crew on the sausage line.

Tom, Josh, Paul

Curing the bacon is one of my favorites parts of this. I love the home-cured bacon.

Curing Bacon

I did two cures this year. One using maple syrup as a sweetener and the other using the apple syrup I made earlier this year. I’m excited to find out if any of the apple flavor will be apparent in the finished product. The bacon will sit in the cure for a week and then I’ll smoke it.

Here’s the meat ready to be ground into sausage.

Sausage To Be

We had enough to make 25 pounds of sausage. We made 5 pounds of 5 different types. Breakfast sausage flavored with maple syrup, breakfast sausage flavored with apple syrup, chorizo, andouille, and Italian.

Stuffed Sausage Everywhere

We used collagen casings this year. In year’s past we’ve used natural casings (intestines). The collagen casing are certainly easier to stuff.

I smoked the andouille in my Jay Rosswurm Big Stone Cooking Area using corncobs.

Smoked Andouille

We saved off some of the fat and cooked it down for cracklings and lard.

Rendering Lard

Unfortunately, as I’ve done before, I burned the cracklings.

The day was getting towards evening and I was whipped. Paul and Lisa on the other hand continued on making cakes for Christmas under the watchful eye of Colonel Sanders.

Filling the Cake Mold

Yes, that’s a car shaped cake mold.

Owen chipped on the cake making by eating a custard filling that had been set on the porch to cool. Fortunately he managed to get the plastic wrap off somehow with his nose, instead of eating the wrap too. He got scolded and was very contrite the rest of the day.

That pushed finishing the Day of Cakes to the next day. We cleaned up most of the carnage and finished the day outside melting raclette over the fire and enjoying it on some of our fresh sausage, bread, and vegetables. Owen, back in semi-good graces by this time, got to lick the raclette stone after it cooled.

The day ended well for everyone!

As Christmas approaches we like to gather around the fire and sing Christmas carols. Here’s a contemporary favorite, “Away in a Dog House.”

Sung to the tune of “Away in a Manager”

Away in a dog house,
No crib for his bed
The little dog Owen
Laid down his sweet head

The stars in the bright sky
Looked down where he lay
The little dog Owen
Asleep on the hay

The cattle are lowing
The poor doggie wakes
But little dog Owen
No barking he makes

I love thee, dog Owen
Run ’round and don’t bite
And stay by my side,
‘Til morning is nigh.

Be near me, dog Owen,
I ask you to stay
Close by me forever
And beg every day

Chase all the dear children
In thy tender care
And take them to heaven
To bark at them there.

The Inspiration. Little Dog Owen, Asleep

Debbie and I went to a wine tasting at Cap N’ Cork (Captain Crunch as Lisa names it) and when we were leaving I noticed they had a hard cider from Oliver Winery in Bloomington, Indiana.

Having just made my own hard cider that I was convinced was the best cider ever made, I couldn’t resist getting a bottle of Oliver’s to compare. Tonight I chilled a bottle of mine and the Oliver hard cider to compare them.

Mine and Theirs

Well, Oliver clearly wins the packaging contest. Even considering my attractive labels as shown here,

The Attractive Bottles

Oliver’s cool aluminum^[1] bottle beats me hands down. Debbie, perhaps feeling sorry for me, said she’d start hand-painting my bottles.

But I don’t care about pretty bottles. I’m all about function over form. My cider on the left is clearly less clear than the Oliver cider. It’s also, although you can’t tell from the picture, much more fizzy. I like my more cloudy product, it looks richer and fuller.

And that’s pretty much what the taste came down to. Mine tastes earthy and full and rich. The Oliver is tastes bright and clear and sharp. Mine is like beer, and theirs is like wine. Even though they’re close to the same in alcohol by volume, they also drink like beer and wine. My goes down like beer, smooth and easy. The Oliver cider goes down like wine, by the time you get to the end of the bottle, it’s tasting very dry.

Both Oliver’s hard cider and mine are splendid, different, but each wonderful in their own way. Oliver hard cider is widely available, at least if you live in Indiana. Mine is only available here at Skunk Hill, and not for sale. But if you stop by I’ll be happy to pour you one.

1. I spelled ‘aluminum’ right on the first try without using the spellchecker. I’m so proud of myself!

Debbie and I obviously need more to do. We’ve started a winter-long backgammon tournament and I’ll be posting the results on the backgammon page on the right.

I’d bottled my hard apple cider on November 22nd, so here on December 10th it was time to see how it did. I chilled a couple of bottles and then popped the top on one and poured.

It fizzed nicely in the glass. I had added apple juice concentrate hoping it would ferment in the bottle and add fizziness. That step worked.

The color and clarity were nice, light yellow and slightly cloudy, just what you’d expect.

A cautious sniff revealed no off odors. Nothing to do now but taste it.

…. ahhh ….

Success! It tasted wonderful. Light and fizzy and bright and sharp, with a lingering finish of apples.

I’ve had lots of failures with fermented beverages, that makes this hard cider all the more tasty!

The Splendid Result

The Attractive Bottles