Squash Season

Well, I think this picture says a lot about the season. Harvest time, time to prep the gardens for winter. I have a few days at market to go and then I will have more time for the gardens again. Ann  picked these squash last week after a very hard freeze that effectively ended the growing season for most things here. These will go in the pantry for our use this winter,yum! We are digging potatoes this week between road trips to harvest black walnuts. About the only things left to harvest from the gardens are Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and some broccoli.

We do have some Jerusalem artichocks to dig  as well as a bit of celeriac.I had a late planting of beets but I don't think they are going to make it. I wasn't able to get enough water to them when they were getting started. As you can see from this pic, leaves are turning and falling. I don't think we will have very good color this year, lots of trees dropped their leaves due to the drought. As soon as they are dormant I will start cutting balsam boughs for christmas wreaths and roping. I think nice boughs are going to be hard to find this year because of the dry conditions. A few wild mushrooms are fruiting in the woods since we had a few nice rain showers last week. Hopefully that will continue as we certainly need much more rain to replenish the ground water level.
We are off to harvest wild leeks or ramps as they are called this morning. We like to get them in the fall when they are much larger than in the spring. I'll have some pics of that and several other topics latter this week.

Stick Fence

Here on some pics of a cheap way  to build a temporary fence.This one was built for some ducks we were given. It consist of nothing more than alder poles pushed into the ground and some used twine from baled hay. It actually lasted over three years in usable condition. I had planned to try a taller version for a goat fence but never got time to do that.

Here are all the tools that were used to build it. This was a few years ago and it was not so dry.I simply punched a hole for each stick with the metal bar and then laced the tops and bottoms of the stick together. It is so dry this year it would be a lot harder to make the holes. I did not worry about making the sticks a uniform length when I was gathering them. After I had the fence all laced together I went back and trimmed them up evenly. With the high price of fencing materials I plan on using this method to make a larger run for our laying hens. They are a heavy breed so it shouldn't have to be to high to keep them in. Willow would probably work better since it is usually straighter that these alder were but the alder was handy and I wanted to clear the area out some anyway.

                                    Here are a couple other views.

Harvest season is in full swing here so I haven't had much time for writing. We are picking black walnuts this week. We picked more acorns last week. I also found a few bitternut hickory so we will try pressing those for oil later on.

Leaching Acorns

I don't think free food gets much easier than this. We harvested over 100 pounds of acorns under just one tree in about a hour and a half of picking. The picture actually does not show a spot where they were real thick.We picked again today, about 300 pounds today. Of course that is the weight  green,in the shell, and includes a lot of nuts that will turn out to be worm eaten or immature. We shelled some of these already, a five gallon pail full of cracked acorns yielded about one and a half gallons of good nutmeats.

 Here is a picture of our DAVEBILT Nut Cracker. It works great on acorns, I was able to crack that five gallon pail in about 20 minutes including adjusting it a few times.The adjustment for nut size is very simple. A pin is removed allowing the shaft to slide out.Then washers are moved from one side of the cracking plate to the other moving the plate in or out.A very well made piece of equipment well worth its price and a huge time saver if you crack any amount of nuts. Now if he would just come up with a device to crack black walnuts that fast I'd be all set! Cracking is only part of the job of course, the nuts still have to be separated from the shells.I am holding some whole acorn meats below the cracker but they don't come out that way, they are mixed in with the pieces of shell. These are red oak acorns and the only way we have found to separate them out is to do it by hand.

After the acorns are shelled they can be dried like that and stored if you want. We decided to process these all the way as we are almost out of acorn flour from last year. All acorns have to be leached to remove the tannins that make them very, very, bitter before you can eat them. Fortunately, the tannins are water soluble so it is not difficult to remove them but it is somewhat time consuming. The process of removing the tannins is called leaching and consist of nothing more that soaking them in numerous changes of water until they are no longer bitter.

 This can be done with hot or cold water depending on how quick you want to get the job done.Cold leaching takes longer but does not remove any of the fat in the nuts. We grind ours through a old meat chopper we keep for that job.The ground nuts are then soaked, drained, and soaked again. I start tasting for bitterness after the third water change. Acorns vary a lot in how bitter they are. Most white oak are not as bitter as most red oak but there are always exceptions.We prefer Burr Oak but this year they don't have many acorns in our immediate area. I'll try to get Ann to post a few acorn recipes once we get caught up, don't ask when that will be.

Flax Fiber

This has been one busy, busy week. We have been picking hazelnuts and starting to process some of them, have been at the farmer's market three days, have had to water all of our second plantings since we have only had 2/10ths of a inch of rain for all of August. Ann canned apple sauce and spaghetti sauce. I started digging some of my russet potatoes which look very nice even if there are not many potatoes in each hill. I'll probably dig some more of those for market this week.
Yesterday was a holiday and we had friends here so this will be a short week and another busy one. We picked red oak acorns today and will do that at least one more day. We also want to go harvest wild rice at least one more time and we want to pick more hazelnuts! And, I'll be at market three days.
 On a different note the pic is of some of our flax fiber which we processed some time last week. We just did that little dab to see what it would look like. We are quite pleased with it, Ann did the thigh twist thing with it and made a nice piece of fine cord. Hopefully we will have time soon to do up a large batch and get some actually spun. Ann has also been busy trying to get some more llama yarn ready for me to take to market.