Pruning the Muscadines, 2025

 Muscadines flower and set fruit on new growth, so annual pruning helps ensure that abundant new growth will yield a good harvest.  There's one caveat: once the sap starts to run, they'll leak sap profusely when cut. It can go on for days.  Pruning earlier in the dormant season is helpful to avoid that, but they won't be noticeably hurt by the leakage.  With the best of intentions, I plan to do this at the end of January, then the realities of January weather deter me.  When it's 45 and windy, it's not going to happen.  So this year, the end of February and beginning of March it was.  I did not prune them last year, so there was a lot to remove.

 

The pictures show the before / after for my Ison, which is easily the most vigorous and productive of the plants that I have.

The sap was running, especially with the last ones pruned, but it wasn't too bad: it stopped after an hour or so.  I have seen it much worse.  Now it's just a waiting game until they break dormancy.

The Delawares Are Laying

 I got some new chicks last fall--hatched at the end of September.  A prior batch of Delawares from the same hatchery, hatched at the same time of the year, (Cackle) started laying in mid-Februrary.  Right on schedule, these are starting to do the same.

 

Things got off to a slow start, but they are rapidly ramping up.  My peak production months are typically April and May, and by then they should be laying almost one egg per day each.  The size always starts off small--35 grams puts the one above solidly in the peewee class--but they rapidly increase.  Some are inching into the small category after just a couple of weeks.

 

I sold off the prior batch, but their production held up very well through three seasons of laying.  At the time I sold them, they had just gone through a molt, and were just beginning to lay eggs again on the other side.  I found someone who was okay with getting old hens (and a matching old rooster) because he'd had some predator losses.  I hope they're working out well in their new home.

 

Khorosan Wheat

 Khorosan, aka Kamut, is similar to durum wheat.  Durum is commercially used for pasta primarily.  Some day that khorosan is not that good for bread.  Out of curiosity, I got some khorosan flour from Azure and decided to see what it could do.  First up was pancakes, where it made a yellow batter.

The finished product was pretty yellow, too; I usually make pancakes out of 100% red whole wheat.

 The flavor was... ok, but nothing great.  Next up was bread, baked more or less 50/50 with white bread flour.

 The bread is fine structurally--the dough was a bit brittle (insofar as wet dough can have that property); it cracked a bit as I was forming it into the loaf shape before putting it in the proofing basket.  But the bread itself looks pretty much like normal bread.  It tastes like dry spaghetti, which validates its durum lineage.  That's not necessarily the best thing in bread, IMO, but I may try pairing it with red whole wheat to see how that tastes.  I'm not thinking I'm going to stock up on a lot of this.

 

 

 

 

Reviving a Sourdough Starter

 I have been baking sourdough bread for a long time.  The first few loaves were leavened with yeast, but then I switched to a sourdough starter.  I soon got another starter, but that one soon fell by the wayside: I got a couple of loaves out of it, but it soon began to smell like baby vomit, a not uncommon problem.  I tossed it.  But the OG starter survived, and I used it for the next 15 years.  Sometime last spring, someone gave me another starter, which I revved up and started using, as well.  It was more vigorous than my other one, which had been slowly declining.  My practice was to bake one loaf per week, putting the starter in the refrigerator in between uses.  I'd feed it, then a few hours later take off what I needed, and put the remainder away.  The decline was pretty rapid once I got the other starter. I was alternating weeks, so each starter was fed every 14 days or so, then put back in the refrigerator.  Soon, both starters were pretty weak.

 Doing two feedings on the new starter worked pretty well, and I started using it most of the time, eventually idling the OG starter altogether.  I did some reading and I realized I was doing a lot of things wrong.  There are a number of websites around on managing and reviving starters. I should've been feeding the starters just before refrigerating.  I will do that going forward.

After the OG had been in the refrigerator for a few months, I hauled it out and fed it.  And fed it again.

 

The above picture was taken a few hours after the second or third feeding.  It was not quite flatlined, but there wasn't much life.  I continued with the CPR, switching to 2x daily feeding (and discarding, to keep the jar from overflowing).  The house was in the 60s, and I also put it in the oven on proof for a few hours (temps when the oven is running on the proof cycle go as high as about 116, but are usually about 95-105).  Finally, after several days, I got this:

 

It is doubling well and has the normal lactose-tangy aroma.  No baby vomit. It's actually showing more life than my other, newer, starter at this point.  Going forward, I think it's apparent that using them once every couple of weeks isn't enough--or at least that if they are not used for that long, feeding just before refrigeration (and maybe weekly while refrigerated) will help.

 

Sloppy Hoppy

 As I have mentioned before, I have canned a lot of rabbit. With the bones, quart jars are more or less needed, and the odd-shaped pieces of meat mean the quart jars won't have as much meat in them as they would if they were packed with boneless chicken breast chunks, but the process overall works well.

Then one has to figure out what to do with the canned rabbit.  It can be used any way you would use canned chicken, and another option is to use it in place of ground beef--they obviously are not the same, but one idea I got from a few podcasts was to make sloppy hoppy--i.e., sloppy Joes using rabbit meat instead of ground beef.  I looked and found some Crock Pot recipes, which I then adapted.

 

1 quart canned rabbit (usually about 1-1.5 lb of meat)

1 can tomato sauce (or tomato paste; see below)

2 Tb dried chopped onion, rehydrated

1 tsp. powdered garlic

2 Tb mustard

1/4 c brown sugar (or Whey Low for low-carb)

2 Tb white vinegar

2 Tb water (if tomato paste used; omit if using tomato sauce)

1 tsp Worchestershire sauce

1/2 tsp salt

My first attempt used tomato paste, because I thought the sauce would be too watery.  I would judge that to be a swing and a miss.  It ended up being edible, but it was obviously dry and it over-cooked and burned a little at the top edge in the Crock Pot (cooking time is about 4 hours on medium, which I have done, or 2-3 on high, which I have not tried).  The second effort with tomato sauce turned out well.

It's worth keeping in mind going forward.

 

 

 

Learning Cast Iron

 A number of years ago I somehow stumbled onto the Kickstarter campaign for Stargazer, which was seeking to make a line of cast iron skillets (10 inchest first).  I chipped in and soon had my pan (it's an original run; no manufacture date is on the assist handle).  Then... I pretty much didn't do anything with it.   I cooked a couple of things in it, but it more or less just sat around, eventually developing a little rust in a few spots.  I hadn't ever really cooked much with cast iron.  It came nominally seasoned, and what I had cooked in it had worked out okay, but it never made it into daily (or even monthly) use.  Finally, I did a little research, got a cast iron eraser from Lodge to remove the rust spots (that worked okay, not great), and did two coats of avocado oil seasoning at 400 degrees for an hour.  That worked well enough that I decided to try fried eggs.

The eggs are working out great; mine don't necessarily slide around the pan on their own, but neither do they stick--exactly.  Usually a nudge from the spatula is needed to make them mobile. In the picture above, an egg is shown with about 3/4 tablespoon of butter.

I have also done cornbread and pancakes; all work well.  For the cornbread, I used the tallow recipe mentioned previously, and it worked very well.  The surface area of the pan is about the same size as that of an eight-inch square glass dish at the cooking surface, but then the walls slope outward and up.  It is probably an insignificant difference.  The cornbread was not noticeably thinner than when baked in glass, but the crust was much better-developed. I put the pan in the oven to preheat, then used some lard to grease the bottom and sides before putting the batter in. This may be my go-to method in the future.

There's a lot cast iron can do and much it cannot do well.  I'm going to be experimenting more with it in the future.

 

The Summer of the Gallinippers

 

This has been a hard growing season. Although rain has fallen, it has been in concentrated dumps over a day or two, with little rain otherwise.  July, for example, saw 8.5" overall, more or less, but almost all of that fell on three days.  I got 3.6" on the 28th, and soon thereafter had my first sightings of the Psorophora ciliata mosquito, aka the gallinipper.

At first, I assumed they were pseudo-mosquitoes--there are a few insects that look like giant mosquitoes but aren't--but these were real.  And as the University of Florida notes, they were aggressive.  The good news is that they're relitively slow-moving and easy to see.

 The article also mentions that they lay their eggs in damp soil, and they tend to emerge after heavy rains flood otherwise dry areas.  A three-plus-inch rainfall will do that.  They were only around for a few days, then diminished, as August turned dry again.

August was very dry, with less than 2.5" overall, 1.75" of which fell on a single day.  I got about 1.5" of rain in the first 24 days of September, then Hurricane Helene blew through, dropping over 10" in 3 days.

Not a drop of rain has fallen since then, which is now almost a month ago, but the gallinippers are still causing problems, although their numbers are down over the last couple of weeks.  Even a light frost hasn't crimped their style.

Presumably they've laid their eggs in more soil that's hopefully dry most of the time.  Their numbers are somewhat smaller than the more ubiquitous mosquitoes, like the Asian Tigers, but they're more bothersome nonetheless.