The tallest corn in the *world*

My county fair is happening this week and there is a contest for the tallest corn stalk. If this corn weren't part of my Three Sisters garden and supporting pole beans with roots intertwined with pumpkins, I would totally enter it. It is an heirloom, multi-colored dent which will hopefully be tortillas one day.

I am 5'8" and the corn is way above my head.

It is even above my outstretched arm. It may actually be a hazard to air craft.

15 years...

September 26 (tomorrow) marks 15 years of JoBi. Over those 15 years we've taken many photos with the camera held at arm's length to capture a day or a background we wanted to remember. Sometimes, we even handed the camera off to someone else for an additional photo.

To celebrate our 15th (dating) anniversary, I made a little slide show of some of these photos. I expect this may only be of interest to our mothers, but if you'd like to see the video it is below. Bill calls it "The Documentation of Our Chins Getting Bigger."

Things which are new...

We have some freshly fallen snow.

We also have white and blue eggs, which means our dorking hens (white) and our  Araucana / Easter Egg chickens have started to lay.

  And... we have two new balls of black fur.

We went to the Humane Society last evening and found this 3-month old cuddly pair. They are brother and sister and they were dumped at the back door of Indianapolis Animal Care and Control. According to their medical history, they were sick little kitties for a while, but the Humane Society gave them some TLC until they were all bouncy and ready for a forever home.

This is Lt. Col. Coopworth of the First Mouser Brigade. He is demonstrating that kittens are really fast.

This is Lady Corriedale. She is demonstrating that kittens believe everything is a toy. She was previously playing with Bill's shoe (which she fits inside of), the zipper on my hoodie, and a leaf that was tracked into our kitchen. Her favorite toy seems to be the Woodpile Jungle Jim.

Sugar Pie is both glad to have Coop and Corrie in the house (she enjoys romping with them), and a little confused about why we are being so snuggly with squirrels. They are all getting along surprisingly well. There is much running and tumbling so it is good that kittens are made of rubber and bounce back from falling down stairs or rolling off a couch.

We think they like it here.

Sunday is for Homebrew

Here's what it looks like around here today.

We're brewing our first all grain beer.

And, you can't make home brew unless you are also drinking home brew. We're tasting our latest batches....the dark is a spruce ale, which I think is DELICIOUS (Bill says "meh") and the light is a Tripple which Bill quite likes and I think could use a few more weeks of bottle conditioning. There is also popcorn and cards.

Sugar Pie is here too. Moving too quickly to be caught on digital film, but still adorable.

Growin' growin' growin'

"Halloo!" say the chickens.

Would you like a tour of our garden? And by "our" we mean the garden that the humans so evilly will not let us get into?

This is the area from a previous post that was weed free. It is no longer as such. The bean teepees are just starting to produce fruit now that it is cooler. 

The winter squash are coming along. Butternut:

Sweet Lightning pumpkin. They are individual serving pumpkins. About 3-5 inches.

We've got 7-8 cantaloupe nearly ripe. This is the sweet passion variety and legend says if you eat them in the field in moonlight, much passion ensues.

Our sweet corn is taller than the weeds:

Some Thai hot peppers. This plant is so tall it reaches my mid-thigh. The little peppers will turn red and Bill has designs on stringing them up and drying them for winter stir-fry.

The fall beds have been planted. Lettuce, spinach, beets, and fall radishes, which can apparently be stored.

A pumpkin turning orange!

These are gold peppers. None have turned gold yet, and they start to rot when they touch the ground. We picked 15 or so and made tamale stuffed peppers with local pork.

The tomato zone... please notice the drip irrigation line. It took me a full week to install it throughout the garden and as soon as I was done, it rained. It's been raining about every 3 days since then.

The tomatoes have cracked under the pressure. I'll be making some tomato basil jam with them tomorrow.

This was Sunday morning's harvest. The beans have been dillied. The cantaloupe will be eaten tomorrow (Bill says the internet says to let them sit for three days after picking). The jalapenos will be stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. That's right.

We have a million jalapenos. This is one branch of one plant. We have 6 jalapeno plants. !!!! We've got some pickling and want to leave a bunch to turn red, but we've been eating a lot of spicy meals lately.

Shelly says, "that's enough. Time for a nap." Bye!

We got rain! And firewood!

 

It finally rained last weekend. We could have guessed that it would have to be a pretty powerful storm to make it to us, given that all the smaller storms were either deflected around us, or broke up before they reached us. Apparently drought is self-reinforcing, and it took a mighty storm to break through all the dryness.

 

The winds were about 80-90 mph and trees were toppled everywhere. The trees that didn't fall over lost huge branches, or their entire tops. We've got a ton of firewood for next year, and today the sounds of dueling chainsaws are echoing throughout the street.

The storm woke us up Sunday morning around 5:00. It was powerful enough that Bill suggested going downstairs to check the radar. By the time we were half-way down, we could hear branches slamming up against the house and decided to skip the radar and head for the basement.

When we were in the basement, the power went out. And then we wished we had thought to bring a flashlight on our evacuation.

As soon as it was light out, went to inspect the damage.

We're not entirely sure what happened to Bill's stove. Perhaps the wind pushed on the walls and the insulation leaked out. Besides that, it is unscathed.

 

The chickens, turkeys, garden and outbuildings are all fine. Our neighbors are all safe and power was restored by noon.

The 'hood looks a bit wind-tossed, though. What surprised me was how far branches flew from their trees. The branch in front of Bill is from that silver maple tree about 50 yards behind him.

 

The corn across the street was all bending in one direction, so we knew it had been straight-line winds and not a tornado. 

 

Our sad, scraggly old peach tree fell, missing our car by a few inches. 

 

Even after the big storm, we're still way, way down on rainfall. We've had about 2.5-3 inches this past week, but the creek down the road is still a bunch of stagnant, disconnected puddles. 

 

We'll be busy for a few weeks cutting up firewood. We've got maple, mulberry, locust, walnut... such a lovely variety. 

 

This is our neighbor's tree. Our neighbors on the other side lost a bunch too...they moved in 2 days before the storm. Such a crazy way to be welcomed to the neighborhood! We met them last night as they were clearing some brush. We're all bonding over the hum of chainsaws.

"You can blog about the oven if you want"

As you may recall, Bill finished his masonry oven a few weeks ago and we did a test burn. He found that he really liked it and yesterday he did a longer burn and some serious baking.

That's 4 pizzas, 6 loaves of bread, a dozen muffins (those were mine!) and some granola. Starting at about noon, Bill fired the oven for six hours, actively adding wood and keeping the flames going. Then he let it rest for an hour, without adding more wood, so the temperature could become more even throughout the oven.

The first thing to be cooked were the pizzas. They're done in about 3 minutes and can be cooked by both direct heat (from any remaining chunks of flaming wood) and the indirect heat that is radiating out from the very, very insulated oven walls.

Then he cooked the bread. I think it was done quicker than it is in our house oven, and the masonry oven has much higher capacity. 6 loaves were a piece of cake and Bill is confident he can probably double that comfortably. This is good because we like to eat bread!

The muffins went in next and then finally the granola.

As we were sitting there, daylight and oven heat fading, Bill said "you can blog about the oven tomorrow if you want." I'd been waiting to post an update about it in case he wanted to share his excitement with you. But, I think his mood is better captured in photos than in words. He's pretty proud of his work and glad to be reaping the rewards.

(That's an excited face. Not a creepy I-want-to-eat-your-head face. FYI. In case you were confused.)

The final stages of the process involved framing the dome in metal, plopping up some board stuff (the stuff that goes under your hearth - wonder board??), filing with vermiculite and adding a roof.

The very last bit is the decoration. Probably stucco on the top and bricks on the bottom.

Oh - and see that door? The wooden one?

Yeah, that caught fire.

What's this??

Four giant bowls full of dough?

 

Could someone be preparing to use a recently completed masonry oven for the very first time???