Richness for my plants

I just fed my garden some of the richest, blackest composted dirt today, and I'm expecting beautiful results from my fruits & veggies since I did. These tomatoes better be huge, the tangerines better start growing, and my lemons better resemble mini-suns by the time they're ready to be picked, all as a "thank you" to me for taking good care of them.




I've been saving my food scraps for a while, and adding them to a wooden box that is my compost box. I've been doing this for almost 2 years now, turning the scraps over regularly and watching the food and leaves slowly turn into this black, rich, moist soil. Hell, it looks so good I wanted to try some myself!

A weekend of Wine Chemistry

This past weekend was "Wine Chemistry" weekend that I signed up for in Sonoma. I spent two days learning about tartaric acid, PH, sulphur dioxide, etc etc. We signed up for the course thinking it was going to be for home winemakers like us. When we arrived for the class, the first surprise was that there was 50 people signed up for the class! The guy running is Clark Smith, someone who (apparently) is quite well known in the Napa and Sonoma area as a wine expert. His website is: grapecraft.com

Clark's first words of the class were: "Out of everyone here, there's only 3 of you that are home winemakers. The rest of you are either professional winemakers, or own a winery. So I'm going to make this a very high level class." What tha'? Tom and I were both there, so that's 2/3 of the home winemakers?

The discussion was high level, and I felt like my brain was on overload (not exactly what I had in mind...I figured I'd be sipping on wine and getting a tour of the wineries. Not exactly writing and being asked to remember complex formulas.)


In the end it was extremely stimulating. The first day was all about chemistry, measurements, suflite formulas, etc. etc. Tom, his Aunt Dorothy (a serious winemaker by the way, she owns a winery in Iowa called www.wideriverwinery.com) and I retreated to a tasting room nearby to review our 'homework' for the night. Our heads were spinning as we thought about everything that we went over.



Day 2 was better. The first exercise was for everyone to picture the wine that they wanted to make. Who did we expect the customer to be? Where did we picture them drinking the wine? What feelings did we want them to have when they drank it? From there we were supposed to work backwards to how we would make this wine, what type of grape we would use, what time we would pick the grapes, and how the design of the bottle and the mood of the tasting room would fit with this wine. Very interesting stuff. The weekend finished with a lecture on how we should be "artistic" with our wine. Let the wine go where it wants to go...nudge it in the right direction, but don't get caught up too much in the #'s. Think of it as a symphony that you're conducting, with many moving parts....PHEW! That's what we've been doing the whole time! Forget this chemistry crap!



The best part of the weekend was the connections we made, and we took advantage of it on day three. For those that are keeping track, day 3 was a Monday. Tom and I went wine tasting, and we first visited Alan Viader at Viader Wines. Awesome wine, and our boy Alan turned out to be the head winemaker (he was real modest the whole weekend. When we got there his picture was all over the tasting room.) We then went over to Madrigal Wines, where a classmate set us up with her boyfriend, who gave us a 3 hour tour of the winery, even though he's never met us. He pulled wine out of barrels to have us taste it, and asked us our thoughts. Shit, Tom even told him at one point that he thought one thought a wine smelled "Bretty." The winemaker agreed. Bret is when a wine has a little bit of a growth to it. I could tell you full word for bret, but that means I'd have to go look it up.

And now I'm home measuring the PH of my wine, and my head is still buzzing from all the info I learned. How am I going to remember all this? I guess we'll just have to make more wine...

Could it be? Could our wine actually taste like...wine?

The wine has been aging for almost four months now, in 2 five gallon carboys; and we have an extra 1 gallon of wine also aging. Today was the day for us to "rack" the wine, the second time that we've racked the wine in the aging process. When you rack the wine, the goal is to siphon the good wine off of all the sediment that settles to the bottom throughout the aging process. The remaining sediment is called the "gross lees" and gross it is. It's a thick and sludge-like.

Look what a wealth of knowledge I am these days, huh?



Being that this was our second time doing it, Tom and I had our routine down and it was relatively stress-free. The big revelation for us was when we sampled a glass of each batch (we call each separate container it's own batch.) Now, the first time we did this and sampled the wine, it was cause for concern. the juice was cloudy, it had a slight smell of sulfur, and there was still a lot of fermenting still to take place. We were worried that the whole batch might be bad.

This time was way different. And waaay better. Each batch of wine tasted better than the one before it. Even our one-gallon jug of wine, which would be used to top off the big carboys; tasted sweet and reminded me off blackberries.

We also started to nail down the name of the wine, and what the label is going to look like. But I'll keep that one a surprise for now...

The Crush

This year was the year that Tom and I decided that we were going to make wine. It came from us talking about our ideal jobs, and where we’d want to be, and we both had the comment that “it would be great to own a winery at some point, that would be the ultimate dream.” So then we sat down with a pen and paper and thought, what would be step 1 for being able to do this. It was decided that starting off as home winemakers would be a good step in the first direction.

So in late August I ordered 200 lbs from Stillwaters Vineyards, a winery in the Paso Robles area that caters to home winemakers. They let you come pick out the grapes when the brix level is at the proper range, which is somewhere between 24-26 (Brix is the measurement used for sugar levels in foods and liquids, fyi.) Luckily for us, the brix got to that point at the only weekend that we both could meet and pick them up. So, Tom took the train down from San Francisco , and I drove up to Paso Robles where we would rendezvous for the grape pickup. We both arrived at about 2, and headed to meet Paul Hoover, owner of the winery.

When we arrived, he showed us our grapes, which were Cabernet Savignon grapes. “There you go guys, all yours.” Whoa whoa whoa…this just wouldn’t do. We both didn’t travel 3 hours to just grab some grapes and run. So we told him “this is our first time making wine, any suggestions for us?”

Well, he instantly changed his tune. We went right to the back, and what he started as a five minute pick up, turned into about a 3 hour tutorial on the full winemaking process. It was awesome.

This is how the winery ferments their wine. Big, fairly open containers that the crushed grapes sit in. It made me feel better looking at this, because I realized that wine in general isn’t really made in a sterile environment. There was a healthy dose of fruit flies around, and we actually saw a praying mantis crawling around the tanks. I guarantee a few fruit flies ended up in the wine.Think about that next time you toast your expensive bottle of wine.

He also showed us the tanks where they do their secondary fermentation. Huge barrels of wine. bubbling with carbonated bubbles that get released through those airlocks on the top. I'm having a tough time grasping the idea that I'm going to be get my wine to even do this.

The grounds were awesome, and after our tutorial we retired to their tasting room, where we sampled a lot of their best wine. We'll see how ours stacks up...

The next morning was when the crush started at our house. We had friends and family over to help us, and we needed it.

After putting the wine through the crusher, we needed to pull the stems off of the grapes. This was a serious job, and it was good that friends were there, because we needed everyone's helping hands, reaching in and pulling out all the stems. What we thought was going to take an hour ended up taking about 4 hours.

We added sulfites, yeast nutrients, and what we thought was the yeast. Two days later the must hadn't heated up at all. Panic time! After a series of furious calls, Tom and realized that we hadn't actually added yeast. Sweet, it's only the most important aspect of wine making. I drove up the the Culver City Brew Co on a rainy, miserable day after work and got the yeast before they closed. It was added, and almost within hours there was a temperature change in the vat of must. So, the grapes now sit in their skins for a week as part of the "primary fermentation."

A lost friend, or just nutrients for my plants?

We lost a good friend the other day. My fish, Oscar, finally keeled over and died after swimming around in my aquarium for almost 5 years. I’m not sure if you can tell in the picture, but this fish was a HOG by the time he kicked the bucket. He ate goldfish (and many of my other aquarium fish) en route to growing to be at least 2 lbs by the time he finally died.

It was a sad experience taking him out of the tank, especially because there was 2 or 3 times where I thought he was dead, and went in to pull him out, only to have him start swimming for a day or two, almost like he was trying to prove that he wasn’t dead yet.

Once he was dead, I decided that the best way to honor ol’ Oscar was to plant him in the ‘garden’ as a way to help nurture the soil, and plants that I plan on growing over the winter. So, I dug a grave, and shoveled him in there. I added a couple of scoops of compost on top of him (filled with earthworms, in order to help with the de-composing…) and then patted dirt over the hole of his grave.

Now, I know this is disgusting. Trust me, I know. But now that I consider myself a full-fledged farmer, I can look at the circle of life as a complete circle, from fish to farm; and I don’t really have any problem eating some nice romaine lettuce, or sugar snap peas that will be growing over the grave of a lost friend.

F$&*ing Squirrels

Now I've got another enemy of the garden. I've come out a couple of days to find holes dug in a lot of the pots, with dirt scattered everywhere and general root damage occurring to many of my plants. I was not happy about it at all.




My roomate Jared alerted me to the problem on a Sunday: "dude, I just watched a squirrel bury a peanut in one of your plants!" Seriously? A squirrel is burying nuts? I thought that was just a wives tale, about squirrels burying nuts to get ready for winter. I saw it with my own two eyes though, and you can see from the pictures what I found this morning when checking the plants.



It looks like a peanut from a ballpark, where is Mr. Squirrel getting his hands on these things? Is one of my neighbors handfeeding him these things as a joke?

I'm one of the biggest animal lovers I know, but when it comes to defending one's own farm, serious measures need to take place. So I had to dig into the garage and find one of my toys from high school, the ol' 45 caliber BB gun that brought me so much fun and disrepute when my friends and I toted these around shooting each other with them. I haven't gotten a clean look at Mr. Squirrel yet, but when I do he's going to get 'tapped' by a bb or two, just so he knows which garden he shouldn't be messing with.



Some positive growing news though. Check out this morning's tomato harvest. The heirloom tomatoes are still going strong. Also, this small tree is a mango tree. The last time I ate a mango I stuck the pit in a pot of dirt, and a beautiful little tree is starting to grow from it.

Farming ain't easy

So I've learned it's not all roses and butterflies trying to grow our own veggies. It turns out that it's more difficult than I thought to get a full salad from my backyard pots. The damp weather in Hermosa seems to be an issue. There has been a white, powdery substance that formed on all the cucumber and squash leaves. It seems that it's a mold/mildew that is the result of too much humidity/water. I've had to constantly trim back a lot of the leaves, and it seems that after getting a few cucumbers, the vine might not be ready to produce any more.



Here's how the garden looks now. You'll notice that the heirloom tomato plants are HUGE. They are starting to tower over the neighbor's fence, and the tomatoes are getting so big that they're folding a lot of the plants and almost breaking the roots.




Here's some of the tomatoes. A lot of them have eventually ripened into a deep red, but in all honesty, I've eaten them so quickly that I forgot to photograph them. I actually prefer when they are a little greener, they're not as sweet as the fully ripened ones. They're really beautiful.




The one squash that grew has gotten to be a considerable size. Now, I know what you're thinking. Why so pale, mr. squash? I'm not sure, but the interweb says that they should taste about the same. We'll see, I'm going to saute it soon, and hopefully not gag over the flavor.




Is it wrong that composting is still one of my favorite activities when it comes to the garden? As I tell my friends...I'm a soil man. I keep the food scraps in a wooden bin, on top of our concrete backyard, but somehow the compost inside has become overrun with red wiggler worms. Literally, there's probably 100 worms in there, chomping their way through all my food scraps. They probably are all a little tipsy after I added the leftover vodka-infused watermelon after the 4th of July...






The avocado tree and grapevines are growing nicely though. No fruit on either, maybe next year though? If you look closely, you can see how the grapevine is wrapping itself around the stakes








And of course, if I'm going to get fruits/veggies produced, I'm going to figure out a way to incorporate it into a drink. Here's a Friday after work, I made a "Pimms Cup" drink garnished with a homegrown cucumber, and sliced a green tomato as a snack.