The Arrival of Fall

 Fall is here.  There's a pretty serious drought going on (stage 2, heading toward stage 3), so leaves are dropping early, and some color started earlier than normal.  However, plants need less water as they're going dormant, so hopefully the long-term damage will be limited.  I've been watering trees and plants for over a month (during which time I've only gotten 1/8" of rain).

My paw paws have never produced. They've been in the ground for a while now and I keep hoping I'll see blooms in the spring.  Maybe next year.  This year they turned a nicer shade of yellow than I think I have previously seen (the above picture was taken about a week ago; the tree is leafless now after a couple of hard freezes).

The muscadine vines are now fully turned; the picture below was taken a couple of weeks ago as they were midway.  The vertical orange leaves in the background are poison ivy.

 

Now begins a brief four-month window of complete dormancy to get things done.  Spring is just around the corner.

Fall Bread

 With my sourdough starter, I get optimal rise in the dough (aka sponge) at about 75 degrees.  Above 80 the rise is explosive, and letting it sit on the counter for 7 or 8 hours leads to big prebake rise, sub-optimal rise while baking.  In the colder months, I have the opposite problem.  My dough doesn't rise much at all, so needs an oven proof session of about two hours.

This fall has yielded a rapid transition from warm (> 80 indoors) to cool (barely 70).  I baked one loaf that turned out great before I had to go back to oven-proofing.

Obviously, in the summer I could switch to a daytime rise, when I could control the time a little better than when it rises overnight.  But that would be disruptive to other things in the routine. So overnight rise it is.  That will work well for the next few months.

Another Gifted Tree

 A year and a half ago, someone took down a red oak and gave it to me.  Someone just a couple of weeks ago had a dead oak of some kind near his house, cut it down, and invited me to haul it off.  He cut it into max 6.5-foot lengths.

That enabled them to fit in the bed of the truck with the tailgate closed.  The tree was fairly small, so it fit easily into my log rack for bucking--and the individual segments were easy to handle even before cutting.

Bucking them only took 30 minutes or so.

It was described as being "dead but not rotten," and that looked pretty correct as I was bucking it.  But it's definitely not ready to throw in the stove next month. As I started to split it, some sections had the feel and smell of fresh oak, and the moisture meter gave readings of around 24% (though some were higher).  That's similar to the freshly cut (as of July) maple that I also have. Maybe by early 2023 some will be ready (if needed).

First New Zealand Litter

I got the breeding stock off someone on Craigslist, with no further information.   The first breeding didn't take, but the second one did:

They grow quickly.  The picture below was less than a week later:

And a few weeks later they were weaned and on their own...

They're older now, about 12 weeks, and at harvest weight.  The picture below shows a lot of them alerting to a noise off to the right.

They grow up so fast...

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).