Making use of the harvests!

Well, time does seem to be flying this year, although the weather has been fantastic hereabouts for the past few days, there's still a definite feel of the onset of autumn, the trees are taking on a gorgeous hue, there's a distinct nip in the air as soon as the sun dips and the nights are definitely getting colder!

We're still harvesting good amounts from the plots, but also having to take time to process it for storage and later use! Lee spent today processing about half of the sweetcorn, cutting the kernels from the cobs to produce our own sweetcrn kernels for the freezer, half the cobs produced about 10lb of sweetcorn kernels, quite a bit to use through the winter! Methinks next year we'll look into how to use dried kernels in order to maximise our storage!

The 15lb of grapes I harvested last week have been crushed and about a gallon of juice extracted, which is now fermenting nicely, proper homemade wine from grapes! This will make the 7th batch of wine that we've made this year, the first batch of Elderflower (the one from a kit) is now bottled and should be ready to drink by Samhain! The 2nd batch of Elderflower is still bubbling away nicely, as are the Elderberry and 2 batches of summer fruits, but the broad bean wine seems to be nearing the end of its fermentation, so hopefully we'll be racking this off in the next few weeks to clear a bit more, then bottling it for future consumption! One of the things Im finding almost as interesting as making the wine is also making labels for the bottles, a bit of pottering around in OpenOffice with a few free graphics has yielded both the Elderflower labels and the Mead labels below, which I think look great! Let me know what you think about them (yes I know, I dont need fancy labels, its only homebrew wine for our concumption, but as we've 42 bottles of wine and 30 bottles of mead on the go, I thought it best to properly label them, and once the design is done, its seconds of work to print a batch off and stick them to the bottles with a glue stick, much better than writing our the same label 6 or 30 times! Lol!!

 The honey we've saved from the wax cappings (a byproduct of the extraction process) has now been processed into 5 gallons of mead, which is bubbling away nicely in a fermenting bucket, and the wax has been melted down and the first 2 candles produced!

All in all its been a good year on the plots, we've still plenty of things left to harvest, plenty of crops still to process, and a lot of clearing and mucking of beds to prepare for next year, but it does feel as though its definitely all been worthwhile!

Hope your growing season has been enjoyable, your crops bountiful and your harvests are still safetly coming in! More to follow soon, thanks for reading!