The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

Free plant story #1: Last weekend, while doing my normal Craigslist cruising of the Farm and Garden section, I noticed someone who was willing to trade strawberry and raspberry starts for poppies. Well, our yard produces crazy amounts of poppies (and they’re pretty, if short-lived, when I forget to weed-whack them down.) So I dug up a couple of them and ended up getting a bunch of strawberries, rasberries, and as a bonus, a rhubarb start in exchange. Everyone wins – we were both just getting rid of plants that were getting out of control in our yards.

Free plant story #2: Last November we were in Leavenworth for Thanksgiving. On one of our walks I noticed an entire hillside covered with hops (the plant that adds the bitterness and aroma to beer). I stole away for a half hour and scavenged a bag full of hops, and though they were pretty brown, they smelled really good. My extreme-brewing brother Alex was all for doing an experiment with them, but my scientist-brewing brother Ian was appalled at the sight. A few months later they remained unused, so my laziness decided for me that it wasn’t a great move to brew with them, and into the compost pile they went.

However, I didn’t only harvest expired hops that day. I also pulled up a couple chunks of root (hops spread like crazy and any part of the plant that touches the ground will send down roots). Over the winter I had a couple pots with these roots sitting in the back yard, and they just started sprouting. I installed some wires for the hops to climb on the side of the house, and by the end of the summer they should be 15 feet in the air, ready to make some tasty beer.

What do you do when everything is buried under snow and ice? We’ve got a farming blog to keep going, and there isn’t a whole lot of farming going on. A little bit of home improvement happening, but that’s not so blog-worthy. I did take some pictures of my plum mead when I made it awhile back, and I’m sipping on a little bit of it tonight, wondering what direction it is going, so I thought I’d post a little something about that.

The tree in our front yard turned out to be a plum tree, which was very exciting to us, not having the benefit of talking to the previous owner when we bought the place. I made a big 5-gallon batch of ginger plum wine in September, and it is coming right along. It’s my first batch of wine, so I don’t really know how to judge it. I suppose if I can drink it, that’s a start.

Mead is a more elegant art, a family trade passed down by my dad to my brother Alex, and now to me. Captain Shafer and I went to a mead and cider clinic at Larry’s Homebrew down in Kent this fall, and it was a good overview of the process, replete with mysterious contradictions and a sense of reverence toward the conversion of honey to alcohol. Standard clover honey was bashed, so I went with a blackberry honey from Madison Market, plus a few bags of plums we had in the freezer.

All in all, it seems like it’s on the way. It’s still a little sweet, which tells me the fermentation might be stuck, but I’m OK with that for now. I’m going to leave it in the carboy and just see what happens in the next month or so. Maybe add a little honey and see if anything happens.

Plus, I was out of acid, so there is no added tartness in the recipe so far. I’m not really missing it too much, but I might throw in a lemon or two. And it’s pretty murky, especially compared to the ginger plum wine. Hopefully it will clear up eventually.