When I got up this morning, it was -33C/-27F with a “feels like” of -42C/-44F.
I’m happy to say that the van handled the temperatures quite well. Yes, we’ve been diligent in maintenance and improvements as much as we can, but it’s still a 15 yr old vehicle with almost 430,000 km on it, so I’m always going to be paranoid about that thing. :-/
Motivated by the temperatures, I stayed up last night to finish a shrug I was crocheting for myself. When my upper back gets cold, it triggers my chronic cough, so I just wanted a little something to throw on while around the house. I am wearing it right now, and feeling nice and toasty!
I think this is the first time I’ve deliberately made something, just for myself. :-D
Yesterday morning, when I went outside to feed the critters and do my rounds, it had already been snowing for quite some time. I had to brush several inches of snow off the platform bird feeder, but the deer feed just got put on the ground in the usual places.
Of course, it got completely buried.
By this morning, when I went to put more feed out, I found this.
Can you tell the deer were here? :-D
That is all deer tracks, except for my foot path closer to the house, and you can see where they dug into the snow to reach the feed (where you can see I’ve placed more feed).
There were a lot of fresh tracks under the overhanging branches of the spruces, as well as by the apple trees, and paths from where they jump the fences to get into our yard.
It looks like we got a lot more visitors than our usual group of 3, plus the loan buck! Either that, or they just came back more often.
Little Susan had an appointment with the vet, yesterday, and she is now recovering from surgery!
Since we had to make sure to 1) have her available to take to the vet in the first place and 2) make sure she didn’t eat anything after 8pm the night before, we brought her into the house as quickly as we could catch her, the day before.
It’s not that she was actively trying to escape us. She just wasn’t interested in being picked up or anything.
I want to thank those who reached out to me after my post about the various situations we’re having to deal with on the property. Your kind words and encouragement are greatly appreciated. Thank you.
The night I wrote about all that, one more thing got added to the list.
Yesterday’s plans to take my mother to visit her sister at the nursing home changed. I got a call in the morning, because she was worried about the weather. It was blowing pretty hard, and she was concerned. We ended up postponing for now.
When doing my rounds this morning, I found some minor tree damage from the winds.
For those who have recently started to follow this blog (welcome!), here are the previous posts about our second attempt to make mead. All links should open in new tabs, so you won’t lose track of this page. :-)
Since then, we have been monitoring the Baby closely. While there has been virtually no visible activity in the air lock, when we looked at the liquid itself, we could see that it was clearing up, and there was a steady stream of tiny bubbles of carbonation moving upward. If the temperature dropped to 16C, we would turn on the warming pad, which would typically bring it up to about 18-19C.
Recently, its temperature would drop to 16C a lot faster, and we could no longer see the carbonation. It was looking a lot clearer, and we could see a fair bit of sedimentation at the bottom.
However, it was less than 2 weeks since we started the second fermentation. While I’ve read a mead can be ready in that time, most videos and websites I’ve been looking at showed active fermentation for about a month, and gave advice on how to reactivate fermentation if it stopped to early.
Since that was the problem we had with our first attempt, we debated. Is it done and time to bottle it? Should we rack it into another bottle to get it away from the sediment and leave it longer? Do we add something to boost the fermentation?
I’ve read various ways to boost fermentation in mead, including those that recommend adding a chemical that is used in wine making.
Or we could just add some raisins.
So that’s what we decided to do.
With a 1 gallon carboy – and it’s not full – not a lot of raisins would be needed.
We added three.
Here are photos, taken a day apart, showing before and after we added the raisins.
As you can see in the photo on the left, the mead had gotten quite clear, and there’s a pretty thick layer of sediment on the bottom. It’s hard to tell with the reflections, but in the second photo, you can actually see a couple of the raisins floating at the top. The mead is cloudier, but when we shine a light into it, we can once again see that steady stream of bubbles going up to the top.
We’ve been checking its temperature regularly and, aside from an initial warm up after adding the raisins, it’s been keeping its own temperature at 19C.
Right now, the plan is to leave it until we can no longer see those bubbles, rack it into another carboy to get it way from the sediment, then leave it for a while longer before bottling it.
A lot of the information about mead making I’m finding is conflicting, but one thing that all our sources agree on is, the longer the mead sits after bottling, the better it tastes. Most recommend at least a year.
I doubt we’ll wait that long, but with bottles at 750ml, even with having less than a gallon in the carboy (and I expect we’ll lose more after racking it again), we should still be able to get 3 – 4 full bottles out of it, so we can have one right away, then try the others at different ages.
So if we want to start a malomel (mead made with fruit) as we planned, we should pick up another air lock and two, so we can have multiple batches going at once.
You know, for someone who doesn’t actually like alcohol all that much, I find the process of making it quite enjoyable!
Of course, things have been busy for the past while, even though we try to keep Christmas and New Year’s very low key. I finally have some time to settle in at the computer, so I’m going to take advantage of that and catch up in things.
I’ll be going backwards in time, for the most part. :-D
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? :-D 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!
Four: Sourdough Cornmeal Pancakes These are still my favorite pancakes. Recipe to make yogurt cheese, as a sour cream substitute, included!
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!
I’m sensing a theme, here! :-D 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 