On Wednesday it didn’t rain and it was dry enough for me to mow the lawns one last time. I raced home from school and quickly did the chores and then jumped on the mower hoping I could finish our lawn and the Shillig’s lawn before it got dark. It gets dark so early now. I did finish. When I was done, Josiah cleaned up the mower for me and I parked it in the shed where it will stay until spring. I’m finally done mowing for the year. I finished just in time.
I thought that I was done canning for the year. I’d already put the canner back in the woodshed. But on Thursday I wasn’t called in to school and I had time and buckets full of apples on the back porch, so I made applesauce and canned it. I decided to make this batch of sauce out of the Winesap apples I’d picked a few weeks ago. They are very firm apples and they cooked down into a beautiful smooth sauce. I made seven quarts.
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| Winesap apples ready to be transformed into sauce. |
Then I thought that, as long as I had the canner out, I might as well make some jam. I had bags of frozen blueberries that we picked last summer. I made ten pints. It was a chilly day and it felt good to be in the steamy kitchen all morning.
While I was canning, I kept an eye on the bird feeders out the kitchen window. All morning there were the usual visitors. I had the camera at the ready and took photos now and then of the different birds. Then at 10:00, I looked out and there were a dozen Evening Grosbeaks at the feeders. I grabbed the camera and got some good photos of them. They are such beautiful birds. They’ve been back every morning since then.
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| Regulars at the feeders: Red-breasted Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Cardinal, Blue Jay, House Finch, The Great Bambino (the children named him that, I don't know why). |
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| Evening Grosbeaks. |
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| A closer shot. |
I read an article from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that said there is a shortage of wild food up north. There are no conifer seeds and berries for the birds this winter, so the birds that usually winter up north are moving south looking for food. That’s why I have Evening Grosbeaks and Pine Siskins at my feeders. From what the article says, I can also expect to see Common Redpolls, Bohemian Waxwings, and maybe even Pine Grosbeaks in the weeks ahead. I hope I do. I’ve never seen a Bohemian Waxwing or a Pine Grosbeak before. I’d like to add them to my life list.
On Thursday evening we took another batch of apples to be pressed into cider. This time we went to our local Amish friend, Levi Borkholder. He has a gas-powered hydraulic press in his cellar. We took him seven buckets of apples, a mix of Winesap, Northern Spy, and Caville Blanc, and he pressed eleven gallons of cider. This cider is different from the first batch. It is sweeter with a touch of acidity, but doesn’t have that slight tannic astringency that made the first batch so refreshing. That last sentence sounded like those pretentious descriptions that wine aficionados blather on about. But fresh cider is so delicious and so different from anything sold in a store, it’s hard to describe the taste. We are drinking one gallon right now and we put some in the freezer for later. I’m making vinegar with five of the gallons.
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| Levi Borkholder's cider press. |
Any year that we have enough cider, I make vinegar. It’s a two step process, simple, but lengthy. I start by filling a big vat with five gallons of cider. For step one, I add some yeast and let it ferment for about a week. I keep the vat in the downstairs bathtub where it’s out of the way, but still accessible. After the yeast has turned the cider into alcohol, I siphon it into a big glass jar and add vinegar mother, which is the bacterial culture that turns the alcohol into acetic acid. I set the glass jar in the kitchen on top of the clothes dryer where it will be warm and out of the way. That’s step two. The alcohol to acid fermentation takes anywhere from three to five months. After that, I siphon the finished vinegar into gallon containers. My homemade vinegar is different from the store-bought kind. It’s fruitier and milder – there I go sounding like a wine connoisseur again.
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| Vinegar making, step one. |
After getting rid of three skunks, I saw fresh lawn damage on Wednesday when I mowed the lawns. The damage over in Shillig’s yard was pretty bad. That meant there was still at least one more skunk out there. On Thursday night when Josiah went down to close the barn, there was a skunk right in our front yard. He shot it and disposed of the remains. That’s four skunks we’ve had to dispose of. If they would just stay in the empty lot next door or the pastures on the hills above us, I wouldn’t care about them at all, but I can’t have them ripping up my yard. I hope that was the last of them.
It snowed on Friday and again yesterday and it is cold enough that it has stayed. We have about three inches of it on the ground. It was a wet snow, the sticky sort of snow we usually get in the fall. The powdery stuff comes later during the bitter cold days of January and February. I have to admit there is something exciting about the first real snow. The first snows of the season make me feel a little giddy. I won’t feel the same way later in the winter when I’m tired of it all and longing for spring.
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| Saturday morning. |
There is something pleasant about doing the chores on a snowy morning. Yesterday morning when I went down to the barn I felt it. Josiah went with me. We had feed to unload. Hefting the bags of feed and trudging through the snow, opening the barn loft and breathing in the smell of the straw and the chickens in the coop below, felt good. The chickens were happy to see me as I tossed cracked corn down to them through the opening in the loft floor. I felt happy as I watched them scratching in the straw, clucking as they gobbled up the corn. Being there was pleasant. I felt it and Josiah felt it. The barn feels cozy on a snowy morning.
And then coming back from the barn into the warm house feels even cozier. Josiah made a fire in the wood stove. We ate breakfast. Then we moved on into the day. I spent most of the morning making more jelly. I hadn’t put the canner away yet and there were bags of raspberries and elderberries in the freezer. So I spent another morning in the steamy kitchen filled with the fragrance of raspberries and elderberries, watching birds at the feeders out the window with the snow blowing around. I made seven cups of raspberry jelly and six cups of elderberry jelly. It was a very pleasant way to spend a cold morning.
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| This week's canning, the last of the year. |
That afternoon Josiah and I put up our outdoor Christmas lights. We’d planned to do it back when the weather was milder, but never got around to it. With the snow making things look so wintry, we were inspired to do it yesterday. We put them in the traditional places – along the back porch eave, along the front porch eave and down the porch posts, and around the little lilac bush between the front porch and the road. Although they are up now, we won’t start turning them on until the day after Thanksgiving.
Miriam is not here. She left on Friday and drove down to the Thayn’s for the weekend. Tomorrow she will fly to St. George where she will be until after Thanksgiving. We are missing her.
We are home from church now. We’re having homemade pizza for lunch. I love pizza. We’re also having leftover butternut squash soup that I made yesterday. I’d never made it before. We have an abundance of butternut squash and I wanted to try something new. It turned out to be delicious. Now I’m hungry just thinking about it. Josiah is making a fire in the wood stove right now. It’s a cold day and that will make the house comfy and cozy for the rest of our Sabbath.
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| Sad snowy jack-o-lanterns ready for the compost. |
