Lone Tree Farm

“When life hands you lemons(eggs), you make lemonade(pickled eggs).”

The “S” in Sunday stands for sourdough. (With homemade butter! Glorious!)

Mrs. Lone Tree got inspired and thought; “It’s a good time for sourdough”, and violá! Two loaves, one with olives.
Mr. Lone Tree thinks “Any time is a good time for sourdough.”

Today’s harvest; Cayenne and sweet Italian peppers, jalapeños, habaneros, a Fresno chili, and eggs. Willow approved.

First racking of the white from this year. Racking is where you let the fermented wine settle for a week or so, and siphon off the clear stuff leaving the grape settlement on the bottom. This is repeated a few times, becoming clearer every time.

Well… We lost our red wine crop. 10+ gallons. It looked like a banner year. They were finished fermenting and we noticed a fine, silky thread-like mold on the top. Turns out, our Campden tablets, used for disinfection, were bad. Bummer. Ah well.

Onward.

To bounce back, here’s our homemade hot sauce set up to ferment, using habaneros and carrots that we grew this year.

Yesterday we harvested… a lot. Suffice to say, we’re not going to show a photo of our crop, but let’s just say we did very well this year. 🌿

In lieu of a picture of that, here’s a pic of some scrumptious ricotta stuffed buns with green onions from the garden.

Another busy day here on the farm. We finished what we started yesterday. That is, we processed the grapes. We washed them, put them to the crusher, and in the case of the white, put it into the press and squeezed all the juice out and it now sits in a 6 gallon glass carbouy waiting to start fermenting. The Frontenac, the red, is just pushed through the crusher/de-stemmer and is put into buckets with the skin on to ferment. Probably another 5-6 hours today. But we’re done! We’ll see how it comes out! Fingers crossed! 

We made a semi savory jelly for chese and crackers . My son, upon tasting it, dubbed It “dinner jelly”, and he’s not wrong. Sweet banana peppers, Fresno chilies, red onion, basil, vinegar, and sugar. Really excellent and different.

Spent about 5 hours harvesting grapes today. We have two kinds; Frontenac, and Cayuga, Frantenac is red, Cayuga’s white. It was a banner year! We were aggressive with the bird netting early in the season. And it paid off. Here’s the beginning of the process.

Will it be good? Will let you know in six months. It’ll either be fantastic, or will take the paint off the deck of your boat. Fingers crossed. 

Lots of things happening here on the farm. Processing apples for one!