My dandelion wine was marginally drinkable at best. And then today Debbie said, “have you checked your sauerkraut lately?”

We had an extra head of cabbage earlier this summer. I chopped it up and sprinkled it with salt.

Cabbage and Salt

Then I tamped it into a crock nice and firm.

Tamping the Kraut

It all looked really good at this point. Nice fresh crispy cabbage, shredded, salted, and packed in a crock.

Looking Good

I weighted it down with a jug filled with water and left it to ferment.

Weighted Kraut

This was about a month ago. I had checked about a week ago and it was doing good. It was starting to ferment, but it was still crisp and smelling more like cabbage than sauerkraut.

I pulled the weighted bottle out today after Debbie said something and phew! You’re lucky the Internet doesn’t include an olfactory interface. It was foul. I poked around in it for while, hoping it had just rotted a bit on top, but it was uniformly disgusting. I took it outside and even then Debbie and Paul insisted I light a candle to cover the stench.

It was an unmitigated and smelly failure. Ah well, cabbage is a fall crop too, so I can try again soon!

I bottled my dandelion wine today. It had been settling and clearing for 3 and a half months and was looking nice and clear, so I figured it was time.

First step (after cleaning the bottle and all equipment) was to transfer the wine from the carboys into bottles.

Filling Bottles

It’s just transferring with a siphon. You put one end of the tube in the carboy and then suck on the other end until you get wine. Unlike siphoning gas, it’s an added bonus when you get a mouthful. Put the other end in your empty wine bottle and the wine flows. On the bottle end there’s a little gadget that when you lift the hose out of a full bottle it stops the flow until you press against the inside of the next bottle. Slick.

After the bottles are filled it’s time to cork them. In the good old days they pounded the cork in with a hammer. In these modern times I get out yet another gadget to cork the bottles.

Corker

You put the cork in the gadget and press the handles down and it pushes the cork into the bottle. It takes a pretty good push to seat the cork. If you’re not careful to keep yourself square to the bottle and push evenly, the whole contraption can go skittering across the counter with wine and profanity flying everywhere.

When buying store bought wine, I usually make my selections based on the attractiveness of the label. I’ll be sure to enjoy my dandelion wine more with a nice label.

An Attractive Label

Who could resist that bottle?

This is all very nice, but what about what really matters? How does it taste? Let’s find out.

Down the Hatch

Debbie said it tasted like drinking dandelion greens. Using winespeak you could say it is overly vegetal. Either one of those is a fairly accurate assessment. It’s not unpleasant to drink, at least if you like dandelion greens, but it definitely has too much green taste. I left the wine sit on dandelions about 6 days which must’ve been too much.

I can sum it up with a quote from the best movie ever, “quaffable but far from transcendent.”

Today we broke ground for the long-considered outdoor cooking area.  This all started in 2002 when my company was moving to a new building.  In the basement of the old building was a cast iron door from an abandoned coal furnace.  Since it was just going to be thrown in the dumpster, I brought it home.  I didn’t need a reason, Debbie and I both firmly believe you can never have too many heavy chunks of iron lying about.

Genesis

Sure enough, my faith in acquiring chunks of iron was rewarded.  In 2003 I saw plans for this adobe bread oven.  “Wouldn’t it be cool to build an adobe bread oven and use the iron door on it,” I thought.

The Initial Concept

The passing years have seen the initial concept blossoming by 2010 into a stone fire pit, smoker, bread oven, and work area.

The Current Concept

You’d think the Federal government was running this show.

We’re planning on using stone instead of brick as in the picture above.  The chimney on our house is stone, and stone figures heavily in our landscaping.  Building it from stone will provide a pleasing consistency, and in keeping with the ever expanding nature of the project, it’s the most expensive choice.

We had a fire pit made out of hand-me-down limestone in the area where we want to put the new structure, surrounded by crushed stone.  That all had to come out to make way for the Big Stone Cooking Area.    Our mason is coming tomorrow to start work so despite today being the hottest day in living memory, I hauled off all the old limestone,  filled in the old fire pit, shoveled up all the crushed gravel, and removed 2 sections of fence.

Shovel Ready

Jay Rosswurm, a local mason, is doing the skilled work for us.  Jay’s a 3rd generation mason (at least 3rd, maybe more, I should ask him).  He came over earlier in the week to look at our site and listen to our ideas so he could work up an estimate.  He doesn’t know it, but he had the job when he said to me, “I’ll have to ask Grandpa about the dimensions for the flue.”  That sort of filial respect, and the willingness to admit you don’t know everything, carries a lot of weight with me.

I’m already considering the first change order; what about a place for a gas ring for frying?

The sun had gone down, but it was still light. That’s the perfect time to shut in the chickens. They’re all in the coop and on their perch at that time, but they’re still awake, so you don’t disturb them by closing the doors.

And that’s what I did. I closed their door to the outside area, and then stepped out of the coop and slipped the latch on the dutch door on the coop. I turned around and…

there was a beautiful crescent moon hanging in the western sky. Venus was shining bright in the twilight gloaming.

The Moon, Venus, and my shaky hand

And just then a great blue heron cut across the sky, heading for his perch for the night.

Life is fine, my friends, and sometimes all you have to do is turn and look, and all the riches in this world are yours.

Debbie and I, and Spenser and Owen the wonder dogs, went out on the porch tonight as the sun was going down (way too late, we’re not fans of Daylight Savings Time).

A flock of swallows rushed through, going where? As the night deepened we started to see bats, we hadn’t seen bats for a couple years. I have a bat house in a wild cherry tree in the fencerow, I’ll have to check it tomorrow. The fireflies started to dance, and Venus, which is sitting on the western horizon now, appeared.

Spenser and I went to shut the chickens in. If you ever doubt the universe is unfolding as it should, you need to visit the henhouse at night. If it’s early, just getting dark, the girls are up on their perch, but still alert. They greet you with an interrogative “cluck, cluck, cluck?” A little later, almost full dark, and all you hear is a sleepy “cluck, cluck, cluck….”

All is well, it’s nighttime, we’re home, and everything is as it was, is, should, and ever will be.

It’s a perfect August morning here, 70 degrees and promising to get hot later, a soft breeze, and clear blue skies. It seemed like an ideal day to visit a farmer’s market. I made my way down Highway 205 to the Columbia City Farmer’s Market. It was in full swing when I got there about 9 am.

With the Indiana gardening season reaching its most bountiful time the vendor’s tables were loaded with the good stuff. I came home with a cantaloupe (or is it a muskmelon?), 2 eggplant, a pound of plums, an enormous bunch of loose leaf lettuce, and a free range heritage roasting chicken.

There’s going to be some good eating at our place the next few days!

We went to Portside Pizza at nearby Shriner Lake tonight.  We joined in on a gathering of family and friends to remember my brother Dave tonight at the last minute.  We’d never been to Portside Pizza.  We’d been past it any number of times, it’s on a favorite bicycling route of ours, but whenever we’d asked anyone about it, the response was universal. “Portside Pizza?  It’s really bad.” No one ever omitted the adverb “really.”

We were surprised and pleased to find it just delightful. Tuesday nights are some sort of special event night, yet our waitress managed to keep us in beer, no mean feat with our crowd. Debbie and I got a “Portside Pizza”, essentially an “everything” pizza and it was splendid. The crust was crisp, the toppings abundant, and it was hot through and through.

And the check was just 23 bucks for the pizza and way too much beer. If you ever find yourself Shriner Lake way, Portside Pizza is really good!

Check them out on Facebook: Portside Pizza.

We – Debbie, me, and Spenser and Owen the wonder dogs – went out on the porch tonight and watched the storms roll in.    Spenser’s afraid of thunder and lightning and hid behind us, Owen sat before us, nose to the wind.   Even our dull human noses could smell the growing corn and the freshening rain.  The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled and the rain waved across the fields like curtains.  The wind was cool, after weeks of blistering sun it was delicious.

If there’s anything better than this, I don’t know what it is.

Life, actually my mom, has given me peaches, so I’m making peach daiquiris.

Peach Daiquiri

A handful of ice, a teaspoon of simple syrup, a splash of lime juice, a peach, and a shot of rum.  Stir it all up in the blender and you’ve got the perfect use for ripe peaches on a blistering summer day!

Now that the wheat is off we’re baling straw.

Our combine makes the windrows of straw a little too wide for the baler. Baling will go smoother for us if we rake the straw first into a smaller windrow. I figured this was a good job to get the Super M out for and see how my engine rebuild last winter went.

The Super M and Rake

The M did good. There’s an oil leak, and the throttle tends to slip, but other than that it worked hard for 3 hours raking the straw. By the end I was longing for the modern tractors with cushy seating, a cab, and air-conditioning.

With the straw neatly raked, it was time to bale.

Getting Started

Full Load

We do it old style, baling the straw in small square bales that a person can handle. We can stack around 130-150 bales on each wagon. It’s hard, hot, dirty work. You’re quickly covered in chaff and pricked on any exposed skin by the straw. That’s why I’m in the air-conditioned tractor driving the baler and my nephew is on the wagon stacking.

Once they’re baled and loaded on the wagon, we then unload them and stack them in the barn.

The Unloading Crew

Stacking in the Barn

Stacking the straw in the barn is hot miserable work in the 90 degree days we’ve been having. That’s why the young’uns are in the mow.

Then we sell the straw. Sometimes truck loads to other farmers for bedding for livestock. Landscapers often buy numerous bales to mulch newly seeded grass. And we sell a lot one or two bales at a time to people to put around their dog house in the winter, mulch a garden, or use for a hayride.

It’s hard work on hot days, but it’s also deeply and fundamentally satisfying work. At the end of the day, and I mean that in the literal sense of tools put away and the sun going down, not as the pointless catchphrase it has become, you can look in the barn and see all the neatly put away straw and be very certain of what you have done this day.