Month: December 2019

A Year in Review

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A great big Happy New Year to all our wonderful visitors and followers! May 2020 be a year of peace and good health to you and your loved ones.

Out of all the millions of blogs out there, you chose to pop over and visit our little corner of the world, and I just wanted to say how much I appreciate it.

Last year, I did a list of this blog’s top 10 most visited posts. I was all set to do it again, only to find it couldn’t quite work out as I intended. It turns out there are too many “tied” posts. A 2 or 3 way tie is one thing, but a 13 way tie? 😀 I also noticed that the top visited posts are almost all from last year. I was going to try skipping those and just do posts that were written in 2019, only to find myself back in that tied-a-dozen-times problem.

So here is the list of the top 5 most visited blog posts in the past year.

Five: New Range Hood – part 1 Thanks to my daughter, we finally replaced the original range hood, which was installed in the early to mid 1970’s. Part 2 is when we finally got the new one wired and working!

ingredients

Four: Sourdough Cornmeal Pancakes These are still my favorite pancakes. Recipe to make yogurt cheese, as a sour cream substitute, included!

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Three: Chokecherry Vinegar Drink This turned out to be a very refreshing drink.

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Two: Making Chokecherry Vinegar Here is the recipe for the vinegar used in the Chokecherry Vinegar Drink. This year’s chokecherries were frozen, and we plan to use them in mead making. Depending on how many chokecherries we get next year, I hope to make this vinegar again, just so we can make that drink!

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And the Number One most popular post in the past year: Gathering Chokecherries

I’m sensing a theme, here! 😀 This post is from 2018, but we got quite a nice haul this past summer, even though we gathered from just 2 out of 3 trees.

I hope you enjoy visiting these most popular posts of 2019 here at The Re-Farmer blog. Thank you, again, for choosing to visit our little corner of the blogosphere!

Happy New Year, from The Re-Farmer household to yours!

The Re-Farmer

Found the spot

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It’s been a busy couple of days, and any time I’ve gone to town during daylight, I’ve been trying to spot where I went through the ditch. I only had a vague idea of where it was, since I was a little too distracted to notice landmarks or anything. 😉

It was the only area with tire tracks through the ditch, so when I did spot some, I knew it had to be ours.

I found more things to be thankful for and surprised about.

One was the location. It was farther away than I thought it was. I was able to drive quite far before that tire went completely flat!

The other was the ditch itself. I was heading towards a marshier area, and the ditch on that side of the road became wider and shallower, instead of being the deep V earlier in my drive, or farther down the road, past the marshy area. Another reason I was able to get out of the ditch at all!

Also, what I had thought was fence posts in my headlights, wasn’t.

They were trees.

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Fantastic news! also… what?

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First things first, I got fantastic news this morning!

I came in from doing my morning rounds to find my husband on the phone; the garage had called about my mom’s car.

There is no damage.

None.

Not even the flat tire!

They pumped it up and checked it, and there’s not even a leak. It looks like the seal got broken at the rim and the air just leaked out. The tire and rim are just fine.

He did suggest an alignment, considering what happened, which I was planning to ask for already. They were already putting the tire back while he was talking to me, so the alignment is all that will need to get done.

Now I have to figure out when I can come pick it up with a second driver. :-/ He said there was no hurry on that. They’ll have it ready and waiting for me whenever I can.

So that is a HUGE relief!

Then there was the weird thing.

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Mead Baby 2.0: second fermentation

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First, the back ground, for those who are new to this blog. (Welcome!) All links will open in new tabs, so you won’t lose your place. 🙂

Mead Baby, redux
Mead Baby 2.0: active fermentation
Mead Baby 2.0: it’s a temperature thing
Mead Baby 2.0: temperature success

We’ve been keeping a close eye on our baby mead, keeping the temperature at the warm end of the temperature range recommended. If it dropped to 16C, I would turn on the electric heating pad to the “warm” setting, and that would bring it back up to 18C.

We could see bubbles inside the airlock, so there was still active fermentation – something we’re pretty sure had stopped completely well before this point in our first batch. The “burp” had dropped to about 23-27 seconds apart and seemed to be staying there for the past few days, so my daughter and I planned to transfer the must to another 1 gallon glass carboy for a second fermentation today.

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How things are this morning

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After our adventure last night, I’m rather impressed by my current lack of pain this morning! 🙂 I expected to at least be stiffening up by now, but at the moment, there’s just some minor tension in my neck and shoulders. I’m taking pain killers, anyway, but that’s really more for my arthritis.

I really don’t know a whole lot about my mother’s car, but my older brother had tried to help her with it a lot over the years, and knows it a lot better than I do. I wasn’t able to fill him in on what happened last night, but he was able to take a few minutes from work and call me this morning.

I was reminded of another reason it’s a good thing this happened in my mother’s car, and not our van.

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