Canning Rabbit Meat

The first litter of rabbits have now been processed.  Some of the meat has been frozen; some has been eaten fresh, and I have canned some of it.

I have never canned bone-in meat before.  All of my prior experiences have been with boneless beef or chicken.

My first attempt worked out okay, more or less.  The instructions for all meats are pretty similar.  Boneless are processed for 75 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts.  Bone-in meat is processed 65 minutes for pints and 75 minutes for quarts.

I had two rabbits to can. They were in the refrigerator, so I decided to go ahead and use the boneless time.  Two rabbits, roughly four pounds, went into three jars.

For raw pack, no liquid is added, so what you see in the picture cooked out of the meat.  A couple of days after processing, I opened one up to see how it turned out.  The meat was fine.  As with all canned meat, it was somewhat over-cooked and a little on the dry side, although it wasn't objectionable at all (rabbit meat is thoroughly cooked when it reaches a temperature of 165 degrees Farenheit, so heating it up to 240 degrees is definitely overdoing it from a taste standpoint--but it's the only realistic way to get it done).  The main problem was the bones: they more or less crumbled.  That made deboning a little tricky.  I'm pretty sure that's due to the extra processing time that I built in.  Next time I'll do the 75.  Overall, though, this is definitely a viable way to preserve the meat.

A Small Patch

 I patch jeans using an old scrap of denim from I don't even remember where.  It must've been jeans that were irredeemably ripped (I don't do cutoffs).  As I have cut pieces from the scrap over the years it has accumulated a long narrow appendage. It was too small to likely ever be useful, but I didn't a) need to cut a bigger patch than needed for a given job, because that just means more thread and sewing, and b) want to throw it out because someday it might be useful.

Someday arrived.  One pair of pants had a gradually worsening stress tear at the top corner of a rear pocket.

The picture shows it already patched up, but these kinds of tears are not uncommon--although I usually haven't gotten them on my pants.  Also shown is the source for patch material with the appendage mostly cut off.  This is because on the backside, the patch looks like this:

The patch is small--only about 1 1/4" x 3/4"--but it's big enough to overlay the emerging rip visible in the top picture.  Hopefully the adage of a stitch in time saving nine will apply here.  There was almost no chance that little fragment was ever going to be useful, so it's nice that it found a use.

The repair itself was not that easy: as the top picture shows, I had to drive the needle through the top corner of the pocket itself, which meant punching through three layers of denim.  I needed the thimble.

One thing that helped with all this (now that my eyes have reached that age...) was the big-eyed needles I got off Amazon:

They're not small-diameter needles, obviously, but they work okay for things like this.  And maybe the broader end is a little easier to push on, in addition to the big eye being easier to thread.

Hopefully this patch holds up as long as some others I've done (still going strong after five years now).

Death under the Black Walnut

 It was another bad day for a cicada.  As I have mentioned before, I have European hornets in the area.  I see them frequently during the summer months.  Every once in a while, I head a cicada alarm call.  When it's coming from the ground, it's invariably a scene like this:

It's usually around the black walnut tree by the house. European hornets are meat eaters, so go after a variety of insects.  As my other post showed, they are very aggressive in hunting, even to the point of cutting trapped insects out of spiderwebs (I have only seen that the one time).  Fortunately, they don't seem to go after people much, except around their nest (which is true of most stinging insects).

Sun Tea

 This is one of those things I grew up with and have assumed everyone knows about, but the knowledge doesn't appear to be universal. It is how we pretty much always made tea for iced tea in the desert Southwest.

The process is pretty simple: put some tea bags in a clear jar of water, set out in the sun for a while, and then you have tea.  It's sun- and temperature-dependent, but either working separately, or both together, will lead to some degree of success.  In other words, a cold sunny day or a warm cloudy day will work, but a cold cloudy one won't be so good.  Sun seems to matter.  Regardless of temperature, tea seems to turn out better when it's in the sun.

I was surprised to read that some feel sun tea is potentially unsafe. If the bags are contaminated, they could be correct, but that's probably very unlikely (see also below).  If the water is contaminated when it goes out into the sun, then having it sit out there warming up for a few hours certainly won't help, but if the water is okay at the outset, the tea bags would be the only thing that could cause problems.  In my new house, I was originally on a bored well that had some contamination issues.  I didn't make sun tea much back then because of my work schedule.  The water I was drinking out of the bored well was a mess generally, with or without making it into tea.

Although I've been doing it for decades, the process I follow is still ad hoc and it's widely tolerant of divergence to the upside: leaving it out for too long does not ruin it.  I have a jug that's about 1.5 gallons, and I put three Luzianne family-sized tea bags into it.  Four can be used and will make satisfactory tea faster. Lipton or any other kind also work.

 

Then I just go by sight. On a sunny day in the summer, it can be ready in as soon as a couple of hours.  If it's spring or fall and cooler, it might take four.  If it is cloudy, it takes longer. As noted above, cloudy days often lead to cloudy tea, but I haven't studied it systematically.

 

Lipton, Luzianne, and possibly others also have cold brew varieties.  I have only seen Luzianne on the shelf.  It does work okay, though I let it go for longer than five minutes.  It can be put out in the sun and works fine that way, though I haven't tried it when it was warm out, just when it has been below about 50 degrees.  It doesn't have to go outside: it can also be made on the counter indoors.  The taste is different, but it'll work if nothing else does. And obviously, if sun tea poses a risk, cold-counter tea does, too.

 

Once tea is made, it lasts through the day and usually is good into the next day--but beyond that is very iffy.  Sometimes it's cloudy and getting off flavors the next day, too.  Various sites suggest letting it cool at room temperature before refrigerating it to ward off cloudiness. When the weather is cool outside, this won't be as much of an issue, but when it's warm, the water will obviously heat up even if there's cloud cover.

One of the better aspects of tea made this way is that it is cheap: If  $3.48 (as of May, 2022) buys 48 family-sized tea bags, and each batch yields 10 glasses, that's only about $0.02 per glass for the tea cost, plus any sweeteners or other flavorings added at the time of drinking.  That compares very favorably with any pre- made or mixed tea product.  So drink up!

First Litter

I have two pairs of rabbits: two TAMUKs and two New Zealand Reds.  The TAMUKs are more heat-tolerant, developed at Texas A&M Kingsville, and have several breeds in their lineage, including New Zealands.  The TAMUK doe's first litter has arrived:

The litter had eight, but one fell through the sidewall of the cage to the ground and died.  Four weeks later, they have grown.

TAMUKs can have any color, and mixed-color litters are not uncommon.  The buck is sort of off-white.

Pretty soon they'll be moving to a grow-out cage of their own.  Things are going very well.

 

Patches on Top of Patches

 Patching clothes does work.  The jeans mentioned in the previous post are still in rotation four years post-patch, although some additional dings have been accumulated.  I have some other pants that are on a steep and increasing downhill slide, however.

I had some pants that needed to be patched in the knee a while back.  I don't remember exactly how long ago, but it was a couple of years.  Then another wear spot made it necessary to add a second patch immediately adjacent.  Then a third.  This is how the knee area looks now:

From behind, it's gruesome.

The patch at the left is the newest one; the pants haven't been washed with it yet.  It's the same left-right orientation as the front view above.  However, as you can see at the right of the top picture, there's another tear forming.  These pants may not be long for this world.  Patching is a thrifty way to extend the lifespan of clothing, but there are limits.

 In response to the obvious question, why not do a huge patch to cover the whole area rather than smaller ones: It's not obvious that a bigger patch will be needed.  Sometimes it's not.  A large patch is harder to put on (keeping both layers smooth and properly aligned) and uses more patch material and thread.  Plus, it takes a lot of time.  Speaking of patch material, however, I may be getting more from these woeful worn-out pants soon...

 

Spring Pruning, 2022

 I am virtually always late when it comes to pruning.  Every November I think that I'll plan ahead and get it done early, and every March I wonder where the dormant season went.  Some things are still dormant as of early April, but they won't be for long.  Better late than never, in any case...

This year I also need to pull out some of the fence circles I put around trees when they were first planted.  The trees had outgrown them, were growing through the fencing in some instances, and old enough to stand on their own. That's not to say that there won't be problems from the deer, but it should be relatively minor damage at this point rather than lethal.

This was not necessarily an easy task, but had to be completed before the trees leafed out.  I found that in some cases, the wire had to be clipped to free the branches, and some roots had grown over the bottom fence wire (no tree roots, fortunately--mostly grass, and in one case, privet). This points to one of the problems with the fencing: it discourages maintenance activities inside the wire.  Speaking of privet, this was growing inside the fence circle next to my Enterprise apple:

Once the fencing was out, the t-posts had to be removed.  Several years ago I got a t-post puller, and had seldom used it.

If you don't have one of these and you have to pull t-posts, get one.  I've pulled them up by hand and this is vastly easier, quicker, and doesn't tear up the ground as much.  The price from Tractor Supply is up from when I got mine, but it still isn't bad at under $55.  It's awkward to use in close quarters but does work well, even if it has to be short-stroked.

I was even later with pruning most of the muscadines.  Some of them leaked sap profusely after pruning, but hopefully they'll be fine as in years past.