Apple Cider

Tim, the empty Fast Ferment, and the full bottles.

After visiting a commercial brewery in-progress over the weekend, Tim was newly inspired to get to work on his brewing project. Tim bottled his 5 gallons of extra-hoppy IPA for their final phase of fermentation, then got busy grinding up apples from Eastern Washington and our own property. 

Getting ready to make cider, Tim read complex plans for building your own wooden cider press, then read DIY alternatives using a like-new garbage disposal and some buckets and hoses... For a few dollars, Tim got a great juicer from the thrift store - surely a $100+ item someone was excited about in the '90's, used once, and has now finally cleaned out of the back of their pantry as was so popular. Maybe juicing is back in style and I'm out of the loop, but I do remember this trend when I was young of used-once juicers in the backs of pantries. It turns out juicers are totally rad! We chopped up rather hard apples from our trees and threw them down the feed tube where clear juice came out one side and dry pulp out the other. From many many apples we made nearly 4 gallons of juice and about a gallon of pulp which delighted the chickens and goats.

Immediately after collecting all the juice in our Fast Ferment, Tim added 4 tablets (one per gallon) of crushed campden to kill anything untoward in the juice. After 12 hours, I added about 3 teaspoons (3/4 per gallon) of

some time late tonight or tomorrow morning (24-48 hours after adding the campden), we will finally throw in the "Pasteur Champagne" active dry wine yeast. I'm not sure when the hops go in, but Tim also got an ounce of hops for the cider.

Jewel Creek Farm

Over the weekend we finally made the long drive over to Eastern Washington, then north to Canada to visit a farm we'd learned about before fishing. After eight hours of driving, leaving the house a 5pm after work, we found ourselves on an old logging road without cell service somewhere in British Columbia. After another hour of heavy off roading with are stoutly steed, Marcy the Mercedes, we found our way back to the gravel road we'd been on and went another mile, I mean kilometer down the road to be welcomed by a lovely sign pointing to Jewel Creek Farm and a comparatively excellent old logging road to the 'big house' on the property where we were met by our host, another visitor, and two friendly dogs at 2am.

 

After getting some much desired sleep, I woke early in the morning to take Tilly and our two new pack members for a long walk around the 160 acre homestead and surrounding "crown land" then came in to share our eggs and veggies with our hosts for breakfast.

We spent time harvesting hops, digging potatoes, swimming in the nearby lake, and staying up late around the campfire visiting with new friends.

Oliver, our host, is working on building a commercial brewery on part of the property, as well as hoping to set up an "eco village" of like-minded folks. Tim particularly enjoyed seeing all the brewing equipment, log mill, and the enormous shop.

We hope to get back again this fall for another visit with our new friends.

On our way home, we passed the fire camps of hard working fire fighters combating the raging wildfires of Eastern Washington and we saw blackened earth and trees along the road with a few plumes of smoke in the distance. The remains of the smoke from the peak of the fire still lingered over the towns we drove through and filled our car. 

At the top of the Cascade Highway pass, we stopped to get out for a run and stretch our legs down the Pacific Crest Trail. We passed a through-hiker just finishing his journey from Mexico to Canada. Some day I hope to hike the Washington portion of the trail. 

And then there's this...

I've been working on building long-term garden beds in the lower corner of our lot by my compost. The fence is in, the potatoes have broken down compost into good soil, and I've got a good start on building terraced retaining walls out of bricks for the beds. Here is one corner bed emerging from the ground with a level for a guide. Still a lot more work to do!

Also, the chickens have under-mined the nice patio I built in front of the barn and the low corner is beginning to fall away. I'll need to address this soon as well. The work never ends!

Between adventures

Life is good! Life is busy! Life is rich and full and sometimes that means the house doesn't get cleaned and pictures don't get posted and blogs don't get written. It's important to write this all down, to look through the pictures to remember how happy and blessed we are with so much good in our lives.

Tim's beer brewing has been going well. He's making an IPA which is a particularly long-process beer. We have an upside-down tear drop shaped plastic container called a "Fast Ferment" the yeast and beer "wart" went in after boiling the sugar, hops, and other ingredients like a tea. After letting it sit and bubble away in our dark closet for a week or so, the dead yeasts are removed from the bottom of the batch to keep them from affecting the flavor. Tim found some local hops to add in as a "dry hop" for extra hoppy flavor. The extra hops soaked a few days in a big tea bag before being taken out again. Early next week it will finally be time to bottle the beer! A little sugar candy will be added to each bottle to feed the yeasts and make the beer carbonated, so in another week we should have home brew to drink and share. While working on his brewing, Tim found a hops plant for sale and brought it home to add to our garden. Though it is a single hops plant so I feel it should be called our "hop", singular. (Hop hop hop!)

Tim and Mike watching the races from the beer garden.

Joe and Ronie made a quick stop through to check on their boat and decided to take it off the market to instead start gearing up for a comfort trolling trip through Southeast Alaska. While they were in town, our friends Mike and Holly came over from Port Angeles to join us watching speed boat racing in Oak Harbor.

When we first moved to the island two years ago, Dad gave us a membership to the local shooting range for Tim's birthday. Unfortunately, the week we signed up and went through the new member orientation class was also the week Tim had the terrible accident with his wrist and we never did get to go shooting. Finally, with Tim's hand back in working order, we renewed our membership and got to go have a day at the range! The bar/restaurant is busy but the range seems to be always empty despite being a really great shooting range with many different set ups. Tim tested out his newly rebuilt long gun and we had a shoot-off with our pistols, starting with close range targets and moving on to freehand shooting at metal targets the size of a playing card at the far end of the range (50 yards). I didn't think there was any possibility of hitting such small targets at such a distance with anything short of a sniper riffle but we both hit the targets multiple times and Tim even hit his standing unsupported with one hand. We found something we can both do together that isn't a project we fight over! ("No, it's MY turn to change the oil!! You can hand me tools.") 

The last weekend of August, we headed to the State Fair in Munro. Last year we went for the drift racing (Sunday), this year we decided on figure-8 racing (Saturday), but of course that's only one small part of a long day of greasy fair food, giant bunnies, baby pigs, deciding on our future duck breed of choice, and more greasy fair food. 

We were particularly inspired by a pair of boys who had rigged up an impressive cart for their goat and taught her to pull. Clearly, Esther and Petunia need a double rig and will surely be brilliant at trotting down trails with all our gear rolling behind.

That's an alligator. She was very mellow and had little tiny teeth. She's a particular kind of alligator that is mellow and friendly. There were also some giant tortoises cruising about, all from a teaching zoo or wildlife education center of some sort. Clearly the novelty, noise, and greasy fair food won out over remembering what the handlers said. 

Teamsters: 8 horses navigating an obstacle course and backing up a trailer - maadd impressive.

Though we went to the fair looking forward to car racing, the horse show turned out to be even more impressive. Before the draft horse show, three horses were in their arena with young girls instructing them on a variety of maneuvers. Aside from running and walking and switching directions on the lunge lead, one girl had her horse sit, lay down, and roll over. Another horse had two little girls on it's back, one standing and waving a flag while the other bounced a giant ball all around and under the horse. The third horse seemed to do everything without hardly a whisper from the girl directing and ended with a bow. As they left the arena, the announcer said all three horses were under 3 years old and had been caught from the wild in the last 90 days before being trained entirely by these children. I didn't believe him and asked the girls after the show. Evidently there is a whole program and they told me more horses would be doing demonstrations the next weekend.

While Tim stayed home and worked on changing out seals and fluids on the truck (see that shiny, newly painted red super charger? I hear the paint-job adds 25 horse power), I went back to the fair again the next weekend with my friend Bianca and her 2-year-old daughter, Lyla.

Heavy Labor Day traffic kept us from getting to the fair in time to see the mustangs-tamed-by-children, but we did have a pretty good time eating fair food (isn't that really what it's all about? Templeton from Charlotte's Web told me so) and seeing all the animals. 

Tim, Tilly, Mike, and Holly headed up into the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula for some car camping over the weekend. I hear Tilly was full of trouble, determined to eat everything in sight and got sick while Mike ate way too many hot dogs and Tim was cold and wet in a tiny tent. One of those "misery makes it more memorable and memorable = fun" trips, like most of our camping trips, though I hear the first night was pretty good with fun mellow time around the fire with good friends. 

Well, I can't very well show pictures of Amanda in the dress before the wedding! Gotta keep it a surprise, especially if Brother Daniel were to see. So there you go - she's in the dressing room there with the dress. Close enough.

I opted out of the camping trip this weekend to join my soon-to-be sister-in-law wedding dress shopping. We tried on many dresses at a few different stores ad learned you must have one of those professionals on hand to dress you. When her friend Katie and I tried to dress her, the dresses looked silly and stuck out in all the wrong places. Once an attendant came in and tied all the ribbons in just the right places, she looked stunning. Some of the dresses still stuck out in all the wrong places because people who make wedding dresses seem to think that's a good look, but the others were a mix of "nice", "pretty", and "stunning". The second place we went shopping, we had an appointment complete with complementary blue champagne (in case girls trying on wedding dresses need to be more giggly or have something blue to spill on all that white). There was an attendant assigned solely dressing Amanda while Katie and I sat on a couch sipping our champagne and practicing with our "no"/"yes" voting cards with the family and friends of a second bride-to-be. 

If you click on a picture it makes it bigger and gives you a slideshow of all the pictures in the post.

Okay, I can't not put a picture of Amanda in her dress - she was so beautiful! And it was so beautiful on her! And look how happy and glow-y she is!!! Clearly, something good is going on here. Well, I had to censor the photo a little - can't be giving anything away, but look at Amanda's face! Look at the woman in the background cheering and smiling! That was one of the women there to support the other bride, but everyone was so excited about seeing Amanda in her dress. There are still more dresses to try on, but we've set a high bar for finding a dress that makes Amanda feel even more wonderful and special and beautiful and to find a dress she's even more reluctant to take off. I didn't really expect wedding dress shopping to be so much fun, I don't think Amanda did either, but seeing her glowing like that was really really wonderful and we all were grinning. 

Wow! That got me so excited I nearly forgot about my last piece of news: jobs. Specifically me having some. I think I'm at 5 jobs. I am now listed as a substitute for the South Whidbey School District and the Whidbey Waldorf School, but I also have some really cool jobs starting this school year. 

I will be spending one day a week leading early elementary students in the Calyx school garden. Calyx is a really great new-ish program which acts as a sort of home-schooling supplement program, offering outdoor learning 4 days a week for elementary students.Calyx students learn math, science, reading, writing, and history through earth stewardship and outdoor hands-on learning at the South Whidbey State Park as well as in the art garden they have built together.

The Calyx garden is a sort of magical place with a mix of music, art, flowers and veggies. I am looking forward to meeting the kids in the coming week and watching them grow in the garden along with any other opportunities to grow in my involvement with Calyx.

At the South Whidbey school gardens, students had their first day of eating kale, tomatoes, and carrots as they explored the mystery of what was happening to the sunflowers. Sammy Squirrel was very cooperative with coming out at the end of the students' discovery time to reveal the answer. After the classes ended, we had a planning meeting to talk about the coming year and my involvement with the garden. The plan is for me to teach the kindergarten and special education classes in the garden. I am planning to reclaim a bit of unused space between one of the greenhouses and a playground to turn in to a sensory garden for the little ones. While the older students focus on commercial food production for the cafeteria, I want the young discoverers to be able to learn through play, touch, smells and colors, creating a safe place for them to experiment with what makes a seed grow and other  outdoor learning questions. 

Additionally I will be tutoring at Ryan's House, an organization supporting homeless youth. Some of the young people are working on GEDs, others are struggling to stay in school and earn that diploma. One needs some remedial help to be ready for community college, and others just need a little more support so they can catch up or get ahead in school. Hopefully I will be able to build good connections with students and provide valuable support to them academically and for life.