Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

The first frost took us by surprise a few nights ago, so the next day we pulled in most of the remaining garden veggies before a really thorough freeze turns them to mush.

We’ve hauled in a big load of green tomatoes from the truly dead plants, but the area that I over-planted and didn’t trellis still has green leaves in the matted lower layers, so we’re leaving a bunch of fruit on the off chance it might ripen on the vine. (See, this was not neglect, it was a frost survival tactic!)

Unlike the tomatoes, the squash plants are completely done. This was a huge zucchini plant just a few days ago:

There were still flowers on some of the wilted zukes, and I couldn’t help messing with this one in Photoshop a little…

We hauled in the last of the delicata squash, even though many are far too young to finish ripening inside:

These poor little infant delicata went straight to the compost:

…as did their vines:

Cabbages are still going strong:

And so are the aphids on this half-forgotten kale plant (rather, they were until a few minutes after this photo was taken):

Basil seed is plentiful:

and tobacco is pretty in a red sunset. The leaves turn yellow from the bottom up, and are harvested continuously as they turn…picked green, they’re unlikely to ever cure into a mellow smoke.

Finally, the flowers that I hope will provide seed for next year’s tobacco plants – and a little friend:

As is usual this time of year, posts have been sparse right when there’s the most cool stuff to blog about – 36 hour days would be just about right for August and September.

We do have one milestone to report – with a borrowed cheese press and a copy of the excellent Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll, we have created our first hard cheese, a farmhouse cheddar that should be edible in just a month or two.

But who can wait a month or two? The cheese has been sitting out for a week to form a rind (really should have been a few days), and today we waxed it for storage, but one end was uneven enough that we worried about the wax being able to form a good seal…so we cut it off and ate it, and after only a week it’s already….CHEESE!

Here’s the cheese before waxing:

Here’s beeswax in a can, on top of some canning lids in a small cooking pot to make a double boiler. The brush is a “chip” brush – they cost almost nothing at a hardware store, and their natural hair bristles won’t melt in the wax.

…and here’s the finished product, an inexpertly made and waxed yet already tasty cheese from our good little mini-Oberhasli goats:

What? The cheese wasn’t the stinky part? No, it smelled quite nice. My tobacco, on the other hand…it’s coming out barely tolerable when dried over the course of a few weeks…probably intolerable to any non-smokers in the area. To make it really smooth requires a year or more of careful aging, actually a fermentation process.

Here it is in various stages of the first slow drying (greenish ones are just picked, some in the upper left have been drying for 2-3 weeks already)