Making Good Ol’ Fashioned Foot Wine

My cousin and her husband have been renting a beautiful A Frame house overlooking Keuka Lake while house hunting. This house overlooks quite a bit of vineyards and T had expressed an interest in making some homemade wine. I said it sounded good to me and once the grapes got ripe to let me know and we could go picking and we get get working on some homemade wine.

Well, the grapes were ready yesterday and there is no time like the present to get started so we took the kids down and started picking. All of the grapes that were available to us were Vitis labrusca meaning that they are not the classic or “noble” grapes like Merlot, Cabernet, Chardonnay, Riesling, etc. They were Concord, Catawba, and Niagara grapes, but they were what were available to us and they will still make a decent homemade wine if treated nicely.

We set the kids up with a bucket and T and I set about picking a mix of Catawba and Concords.

A Bird and M were good for about two buckets half filled then they decided it was much more fun to eat grapes as they chased each other though the vineyard rows.

After we had a couple of totes of reds, T an I filled three 6 gallon buckets full of Niagara grapes, and then we were off. By this time, it was getting late and the kids needed dinner so T and I made arrangements that he would take the reds and process them that night and I would take the whites and crush them and get them going. So T and M dropped A Bird and I off at home and were off and rolling to get home for some dinner.

A Bird and I woofed down a quick dinner and were out on the deck for some old fashioned grape stomping. Yep, we were using her little feet to crush them up.

Here we are as I am just lowering her in.

I think she likes it.

Then she started to get the hang of things. Two buckets at once !!!

L Bird was shocked as you can see, lol!

Then L Bird got into the act.

Finally all of the grapes were crushed and the girls left to hit the showers to rinse the sticky juice off their legs and seeds from their toes and left me with the job of straining the skins and pulp from the juice and transferring the juice to a carboy. IT TOOK FOREVER, well at least it felt like FOR-EV-ER. After it was all over, three buckets of grapes worked out to roughly 3.5 gallons, it doesn’t seem like much compared to the amount of grapes but it definitely is not a bad using your feet compared to a real basket press.

So now all of the juice is fermenting, both the reds and the whites. I’ll keep you updated on the progress of the foot wine, and I’m sure there will be some interesting tasting notes.

How did you spend your Sunday???

Look Out Kindergarten, Here Comes A Bird!

Well, its official I have a kindergartener. A Bird started her first day of school yesterday. I don’t know where the last five years have gone. It seems just like yesterday that it was just L Bird and I sitting in a dimly lit hospital room holding A Bird in our arms. She was so little and cozy wrapped up in her receiving blankets, now here she is a full fledged 5 year old embarking on a brand new adventure without Mom and Dad. I knew it was coming but I can’t believe it is here, it was one of my happiest, proudest, and saddest moments sending her off to school. But anyway here is how the day shook out….


She was a little nervous about riding the bus, but luckily our daycare provider’s daughter took it upon herself to sit with A Bird for the first week until she gets used to the bus ride. So that set A Bird’s nerves at ease. We all got to daycare a little early to snap a few first day pictures, then she gave L Bird and I a big hug and a kiss and hopped onto the bus like she had been doing it for years. The bus driver stopped her and introduced herself and told A Bird where to sit and then they were off. The whole process took less than five minutes.

I have to admit I got a little misty when she got on the bus and was gone, but L Bird was pretty upset and nervous about her getting off the bus and into the school. So we drove to the school and parked in the lot trying to see A Bird get off the bus. L Bird just wanted to gauge her reaction getting off the bus to make sure she wasn’t upset after the bus ride. We got really lucky and were able to see her get off the bus without her seeing us. A Bird looked confident as she hopped down and followed other kids towards the door. She was just about to enter the door when she gave a clear sign she was excited about school that put L Bird’s mind at ease. Ever since A Bird has been a baby whenever she gets excited she balls up her fists at her sides and kind of does this little shake with her arms, it’s like she has so much energy and excitement in her that she can’t contain it and it just comes out in this little shake. Just before she hit the door, she did this and we knew she would be OK.

L Bird and I tried to fill the day with tasks to keep our minds off of worrying about A Bird. We went out to breakfast, then came home and L Bird painted the nursery while I brought down the crib and changing table from the attic and reassembled them. Then finally it was time to go and get her off the bus. We got to the daycare a little early to make sure we were there in time for the bus, but apparently there are more kids this year so we waited what seemed like an enormous amount of time for the bus to finally show up and drop her off.

She got off like she got on, just hopped off the bus like she had been doing it forever. The bus pulled away and L Bird and I tried not to bombard her with questions but failed miserably. To A Bird’s credit she answered almost everyone. I think the highlight of her day was gym class, she looked at me and said “Dad, I had P.E. today.” I asked her what she did and she told us about playing some sort of music freeze game. She talked more about P.E. class and the P.E. teacher than she did her regular teacher and anything else she did that day.

All in all, it looks like her first day was a big success. She came home happy and ready to go back today. I know she’ll be fine but L Bird and I are going to take a little while to get used to this. I can’t believe I have a daughter in school, crazy right??

Harvest Time……

This has a been a crazy summer with a ton of stuff going on, so instead of making excuses/explanations of what has been going on I am just going to jump back into this blogging thing. OK? OK, so here we go.

We have planted a pretty big garden this year. This is the second year we have tried raised bed gardens, I have 6 - 4 foot by 4 foot raised beds and it has been working out well for us. We planted tomatoes, peppers, hot peppers, carrots, potatoes, onions, cucumbers, green beans, peas, eggplant, yellow squash, zucchini, watermelon, cantaloupe, and a lone pumpkin plant. We have been harvesting a lot of produce all this summer, but now fall is upon us we went out did a bunch of picking tonight since a ton of it is ripe.

That is about 40 Roma tomatoes, green beans, jalapenos, and a couple of eggs.

Fresh Carrots

Now, I have been growing potatoes by the bucket method for the last two years. Last year I didn’t get a whole lot out of the potatoes but this year I did a lot better. The bucket method is pretty easy, you take any old 5 gallon bucket, drill holes in the bottom for drainage, lay a layer of topsoil down, then place 3-4 sprouting taters in the bottom then cover with another inch of soil. Once the potato shoots break through and grow 4-6 inches high cover the shoots with top soil to just above the top leaves, then repeat this process until the dirt is at the top of the bucket and the potato shoots are growing from the top of bucket. Then keep watered and in the sun. It will flower, grow and at the end of the season die back. Once all of the shoots have died back, leave it sit for a week or two before harvesting. After that its pretty easy harvesting, just flip the bucket over, dump out the dirt and search for fresh potatoes.

I dump the buckets in the chicken run, because after I finish getting the potatoes the chickens like to peck and scratch through the dirt for bugs or whatever else.

I probably got about 3 – 4 pounds between the two buckets. Not too bad right.

So now I have to figure out how to can the tomatoes and make “dilly beans”.

How did your garden do this year???