A Blur of a Summer!

I went back and read the last post to see where I needed to start and started laughing at how much has happened since then!  There has been no end to the work that has happened this summer.  So where to start...

Everyone says not expect the hops to produce any cones the first year, but lo and behold there they were!  This past week we harvested about 4-5 lbs of hops, primarily cascade variety.  We are super excited to start brewing with our own homegrown hops.  Many of the beers we brewed this summer were made with homegrown ingredients, but it's really cool to take control of another of our inputs.  The list of beers we have made with homegrown ingredients is quickly growing and includes two dandelion beers, a honey basil ale, and a chocolate raspberry porter which is amazing!  We also tried our hands at mead making with a blueberry melomel, but we won't know how that turned out for a couple years...

Geoff loves tending the hops!

Here's a picture of the first attempt at setting up our new pool, we found out when they say put it on level ground they mean it!  I just thought it was a nice picture of the barn :)  The pool is now set up by the house on the only flat piece of ground we have.  Now if we could just get some heat!

Last month I bought a breeding pair of New Zeeland rabbits at the small animal exchange in St. Louis.  I built the cages myself in a morning, winding up with a nickel sized blister right in the palm of my right hand.  It was awful, but bunnies needed a home.  Next month we will start breeding them and growing their offspring for meat.  I hope to get a few more added to the breeding stock soon.  We will be setting up the 20 cages I picked up yesterday in the barn and starting a rabbitry!  This is Mars, named after the God Mars, who was the God of War, but also a guardian of agriculture!  Venus is our doe, you can see her in the background of one of these pictures.  She was named after Venus the goddess of love, fertility and prosperity.  We are very excited to have another meat source that we have direct control of, even if we are terrified of butchering the first batch.  The garden and hops will be enjoying some awesome fertilizer from them too!

This squash plant is a volunteer from the compost pile and is by far the biggest and best producing squash plant we have, go figure.

The first year of gardening has taught us to space things out a lot more!  Seems like the instructions on spacing we read were pretty bogus, we can hardly walk through the growth in there!  It is looking really good though and we are getting plenty of food!  I've been putting up frozen broccoli, zucchini, and pesto and canning pickles, jalapenos, and salsa. The tomatoes are starting to ripen very quickly, I'm a little scared of when the heavy harvest starts, we only have 30 or 40 tomato plants...  We also fenced the entire garden against the darn critters out here, it's been really nice having the fence up.

Green Brandywine tomatoes

Jalapeno peppers

Broccoli, still producing really nicely in this cool weather we've had this summer

Moskvich tomatoes, these aren't doing so well.  As they ripen they're tending to have blossom end rot, so I've chucked a lot of them.

Melons!

My dill is getting enormous!

Here's a harvest I picked one day a couple of weeks ago.  I'm starting to have a lot of work on my hands to take care of all this food!

Last week we visited Traverse City for vacation and had a blast.  We got to go to several microbreweries that we love, and also saw many many hops growing on the peninsula!    It was one of the best vacations yet!  Special thanks to our friend Mason for putting us up and putting up with us!