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.”

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 – 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.

Debbie and I have started writing a weekly column on buscovoice.com. If you’re one of the many who just can’t get enough of the witty, insightful, and often brilliant writing on zumbrun.net, check out our Two Farmers and a Fork at Local Columnists

We started harvesting wheat on Monday.  It was typical wheat weather, temps in the 90’s.  Fortunately the air conditioner in the combine was working good.

We got to try out the new grain cart.

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I only dumped a little bit of wheat on the ground learning how to use it.

We ran about 4 hours, then a bleeder valve on the fuel filter of the combine broke off, squirting diesel fuel everywhere. How does a bleeder valve break anyway? So this morning the day starts with a parts run into McAllister in Fort Wayne. They have a miserable supply of parts so most likely this will get ordered from Indianapolis and we’ll have it tomorrow.

A later note: I was wrong to bash McAllister. They did have the part, I put it on, everything worked fine, and we’re ready to roll again.

Wow… Wow… Did I say wow?

Sustainable farming, slow food, local eating, etc are often, and often justifiably, accused of being elitist, impractical, expensive, utopian.   I agree with  lot of that criticism.  The idea that we’re going farm vacant urban lots or create vertical gardens and feed the world is just dumb.

Utopian dreams aside, there’s a lot I agree with in the whole ecotarian movement.   You should eat locally when it makes sense.  Sustainable agriculture makes sense (Well, duh.  Who’d be in favor of unsustainable agriculture?).  Cooking at home from scratch is sensible.    You don’t have to go off the deep end and vow to only eat locally for a year, insist all chickens be allowed to run free, or never let anything containing white sugar pass your lips.  There’s a sensible middle ground.

Harvest House exemplifies that middle ground for a restaurant.  You step into Harvest House and it’s nice. The decor is pleasant, and it’s spotlessly clean. Nice. You look at the menu and it has what you’d expect in small town breakfast and lunch place. Soups and salads, sandwiches and a white board with specials.  Nice.

Then you get your food and take a bite and you realize it’s a lot more than just nice, it’s something special.

I had a breaded tenderloin with ‘Harvest House chips.’ Pretty standard fare for Northeast Indiana. We love our breaded tenderloins. Breaded, salt-laced, deep fried delights with only the barest hint of pork under all that breading and grease.

The Harvest House menu advertised their tenderloin as hand breaded. And it was. It was a piece of real pork, tender and moist, not pounded paper thin, but a tasty quarter inch slice. The breading was panko-like and fried to a perfect light golden brown.  It’s OK to eat meat.  It’s even OK to eat breaded, deep fried meat.  It doesn’t have to be an overly processed, overly breaded, overly salted, overly fried gastronomic nightmare.

The Harvest House chips were like homemade potato chips. A bit thicker than commercial chips, and unlike commercial chips they actually tasted like potatoes.  Like the tenderloin, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a fried potato with salt on it.  It doesn’t have to be the smallest wafer of potato possible that hold together when fried in whatever is the cheapest oil available (i.e., commercial potato chips.)

There’s a little information available about Harvest House on the web. It talks about their commitment to and use of recycling, sustainable farming, and local produce. Their restaurant is living proof that these concepts aren’t unaffordable uptopian dreams, but something that could be, and is, happening today right in our backyards.

If you find yourself anywhere near Albion, Indiana at breakfast or lunch time (seven days a week), you should stop at Harvest House.  I’d provide more explicit directions, but honestly, if you can’t find something in Albion you need more help than I give you (hint, it’s by the stoplight).