Harvest Moon

It was yet another busy weekend on the Four Mile. The last of the tomatoes where picked, crushed and packaged up.

 The Freezer is now full of tomatoes, sauce and peppers. We may need to invest in a larger freezer, this way i can turn the one we have now into a lagering fridge for my beer. :)
Then it was time to work on the vineyard, tilling the rows to get ready for the winter. Tilling the rows will allow me to mound dirt onto the base of the grape plant to protect it from nights where the temps drop well below zero. I also can take an extra vine and bury in in case a freeze completely kills the vines, the buried vine will survive.

 In using these practices on a small vineyard, hopefully i can maintain grape plants that normally would not do well in this region (e.g. Riesling, Cab Franc and Gewurztraminer).

 The two middle rows that haven't been tilled yet, right now have Cayuga and Lacrosse grape plants.

 These will be moving to, what i hope is going to turn into, a larger vineyard up the road. This will be for varieties native to our area and well suited for this climate. In their place i will be planting Cabernet Sauvignon, Lemberger and Chardonnay, which will be on the other side of the yard. I also have 2 other native varieties, Frontenac and De Chaunac (also known as Seibel).

While i was doing all this I was also brewing the 4th installment in my IPA series. Since each batch has been using the yeast from the previous, each batch has to be stronger than the next. This last one will weigh in at a heavy 11% ABV, up from the 7% of the first batch. Did i mention i love strong beers? I also took a pic as promised in a previous post of my home made immersion chiller. Its ugly but it does the job.

Now for a little something i made over the weekend, i call it my Harvest Bake, since it pretty much all came from the garden. You take a spaghetti squash, cut it in half, scoop out the guts and bake on a cookie sheet with some water at 375 for about 30 minutes.

 Remove from oven and cool, they scrap out the stringy squash with a fork.

Mix with some tomato sauce and what ever veggies you can find, I had some zucchini and sweet potato. Then add cheese, I use Vegan Gourmet Mozzarella when i bake.

 Then bake covered at 350 for 30 mins, uncover and bake another 15.

Nice and easy.