Mother’s Day Bottling Party
On May 13, we invited friends over for a bottling party. This is a wine, made from a mix of the 2010 and 2011 harvest. We are learning more about making wine. We used pectic enzyme to eliminate pectic haze. We added tannin to try to get that pucker. It still is a fairly sweet wine (we’re working on proportions) but it turned out well.
With friends helping, we had a little assembly line going with 5 people doing 5 tasks.
- one person to fill the bottles
- one person to hand empty bottles to the filler and hand full bottles to the corking operation
- one person to put the full bottle in the floor corker
- one person to put corks in the corker
- one person to work the corking lever
After corking, we sampled. Since the wine was bottled on Mother’s Day, we named it Mamasha Red (it is a red wine).
The last step was capping and labeling and storing in our clever card catalog wine cellar.
Growing tomatoes
I should just give up.
For years I try to grow tomatoes from seed with varying degrees of success. In recent years, I have had more failures than successes.
But this was the year it was all going to turn around. I started my seeds in February, earlier than ever, so they would have plenty of time to grow nice thick stalks. I now have an interior south facing window upstairs in the new dormer, so the baby plants could be in a warmer room than the enclosed, though uninsulated, front porch. I didn’t put up the grow lights because I thought the sunlight would suffice.
It is now the middle of May and this is what I have.
It is pathetic. In addition, those stalks are so fragile that I lost 4 plants due to the stalks just breaking.
Compare these sorry specimens to today’s purchases at the Farmer’s Market, from three different vendors.
Now, a side by side comparison.
I don’t know why I bother trying to grow tomatoes from seed, but every year, without fail, I attempt it again. Others do it. Why can’t I? Hopefully I’ll have better luck next year.
Patience and Perseverance
Last week, I bought a skein of wonderful, soft, shiny, dyed tencel yarn. It was a spontaneous purchase. The local yarn shop owner offered to wind the skein into a ball using the shop ballwinder. I agreed.
That was the first mistake. Such slippery yarn should never be balled using a ball winder. While winding it, the ball fell off the ball winder. The shop owner started winding the rest by hand. But 630 yards is a lot of yarn to wind by hand. She suggested I come back another day.
On Tuesday I picked up the yarn. The center pull ball looked sloppy. I decided to rewind it when I got home. That was the second mistake. Since the original was not well wound and the yarn so slippery, the ball fell apart. I had a tangled mess on my hand.
I was ready to give up. I was ready to go back to the yarn store, put the half balled yarn and remaining tangled mess on the “free” table.
But then I remembered that I had just bought the yarn. It wasn’t cheap. I still loved the color and the shininess of it. I still wanted to make a shawl from it.
So I sat down and started to untangle. That was Tuesday.
Wednesday, I untangled some more.
Thursday, I untangled even more. I was beginning to see some progress.
This was how far I got on Friday morning.
Do you see the ball of yarn? All that yarn was part of the tangled mess. By Friday morning, I had only a small amount of yarn to untangle. By Friday afternoon, I had finished. I have half the skein still on the ball winder and half the skein in a tightly wound ball. In another couple of days I will wind it all off the ball winder.
This was a lesson in patience and perseverance. I’m glad I didn’t give up.
