Planting Day - 12 Weeks In

I went out the other day and weeded again. It took 90 minutes or so. I made several interesting discoveries.

First off, there was a patch where no wheat was growing. Since I weeded at a different time than I usually do (in the late afternoon), I noticed that this bare patch matches almost exactly the shadow cast by one of my big maple trees. So, one mystery solved.



Secondly, I didn’t bury the seeds very deep. In fact, I just sprinkled the wheat seeds across the topsoil. The roots have not penetrated the newspaper or spread out horizontally very much. Now that the stalks are growing, some of them have very little connection to the earth. Some have fallen over and others I have accidentally pulled out while weeding. So next time, I will bury them.

The good news is that 31 stalks have ears of grain on them. We finally got some rain about a week and a half ago, and it looks like more could still be ready to produce some grain.


My pot of winter wheat seems to be done growing and is turning brown. The wheat kernels are still soft and green on the inside. I pinched one off and squeezed it between my fingers and it gushed a white paste.

Meadmaking

So today (and by today I actually mean Monday, June 22nd) I headed off to the local brewshop. I bought bottle brushes, yeasts and a automatic siphon.

But I suppose I should take about my meadmaking history, my credentials, so to speak. I was first introduced to mead about 10 years ago by a gaming buddy of mine, John. He brought a bottle over that was just heavenly. As I’ve already mentioned, I have a very sweet tooth, and his mead was the first alcohol that had really tasted good to me, without being mixed with syrup or hidden by soda.

The next time he made a batch he invited me over to help and most of what I remember of that day was watching a gigantic pot of honey water boil while we scrapped scum off the top. Once it cooled we mixed in some freshly squeezed orange juice, making it actually not a mead, but a melomel.

John later moved across the country and when he left he gave to me all of his brewing supplies, since they were so large to try and ship. I gave it a try on two occasions. The first time I made very young mead (I was impatient in my youth) that tasted strongly of yeast and was pretty harsh. The second batch I decided to let age longer, but I think I let the vapor lock dry out and the must went bad.

So today, armed with a new and quite wonderful book, The Compleat Meadmaker, by Ken Schramm, I decided that I wanted to give it another try. The summer has been very busy, but I felt like I needed to get the mead going over the summer, since we don’t heat our kitchen/laundry room over the winter, and the yeasts need the room temperature to be in the 60s.

So I’ve been looking around for good prices on honey. WinCo had orange blossom honey for $3.24 / pound, but could only sell them in little 2 cup jars or in the industrial 40 lb. buckets that they got them in. I only need 18 lbs. for this recipe, so it was a bit of a conundrum, but eventually I decided to get the big bucket and have enough honey for two batches.

The recipe I’m going to try in the Sweet Show Mead on page 164 of The Compleat Meadmaker. 18 lbs. of honey, 4 gallons of water (bottled spring water), and some modern yeast energizer and nutrient. The yeast I used was two packages of dry Lalvin D-47 yeast.

I heated one gallon of water to boiling in a large stock pot. I then added the 18-20 lbs. of honey (using a sterilized soup ladle). This took a lot longer than I expected and by the time it was all in the temperature in the pot was 110°, while it was supposed to be about 150°. The recipe wanted the honey water to sit at 150° for a while to kill any bugs in the honey. So I heated it up on the stove to 150°. No problem.

The next step, was to pour the hot honey water into the rest of the water. There were two important sub-step to this:
Don’t pour the 150° honey water on yourself (which I managed to succeed at).
Use refrigerated water so that it would reduce the overall temperature of the honey water to 80° so that the yeast could be added at a happy temperature for them.

Well, I had forgotten to buy the water until just a few hours before starting, so it wasn’t very cold and only dropped the overall temperature of the must to about 125° -- way too hot for the yeast. But, not anticipating this, I had already proofed the yeast -- poured it into some warm water to re-hydrate it and get it going. The instructions on the package had been very adamant that the yeast should bloom for 15 minutes and no longer.

It took something like three hours for the honey water to cool down to 85°. I was worried that the yeast might not be good anymore. Maybe they had woken up, found nothing to eat and starved to death. But I pitched them in anyway, and the stirred the heck out of it, to aerate the stuff as much as possible. Then I sealed it up, attached the vapor lock (a water-filled valve that lets CO² exit the airtight container, but doesn’t let bacteria-filled air in) and waited.

By bedtime it wasn’t doing anything but in the morning it was bubbling away.

It started fermenting with a Specific Gravity of 1.140. That’s a little higher than expected, so I probably put in more that 18 lbs. of honey. I want a sweet mead anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

More details as things develop.

Sorry for the delay

Life has come to a head and I haven't been able to post about the meadmaking on Monday. Nothing bad is happening, just a lot of projects coming due at once. My roleplaying game, Ellis: Kingdom in Turmoil, which I try not to talk very much about here, is coming along _very_ well and I am doing a lot of playtesting and final refining. But it has taken me away from writing about mead and wheat.

The short of it is: the mead did get started and it is bubbling away in the kitchen right now. Due to a few small errors it took much longer than planned and I did worry that I had bloomed the yeast too soon. But I had no reason to fear. By morning those little guys were eating their way through the honey maying wonderul CO2 and ethanol.

More tonight or tomorrow as things calm down.

--Tim

Hi honey! I'm Home!

I just got back from WinCo, a local chain of discount supermarkets. I have a 40 pound bucket full of honey. That's $123.50 of honey.

The meadmaking will start tomorrow!

Working the Fields

So if the heavy plow is turning over the ground, all of those weeds and grasses are being flipped under 4-8 inches or soil. That’s a lot deeper than my inch of topsoil and newspaper.

Just as a quick experiment, I recently broke out the shovel and dug down 6 inches or so and flipped over the turf. It’s been 10 days now and nothing has grown up there, whereas with the newspaper I had dandelions poking through within a few days.

Quoting from The Carolingian Economy which is in turn quoting from a capitulary from the year 800 from the town of Le Mans in Western France:

Every man holding a quarter of a _factus_, must be plowing his lord’s land a whole day with his beasts and thereafter his lord may not ask him to do handiwork service [such as carpentry or weaving] during the same week. And he who has not enough beasts to do this in one day shall complete the work in two days; and he who has only four infirm beasts, incapable of plowing by themselves, has to join other beasts in order to plow the lord’s land in one day and thereafter shall do one day of handiwork services in that week. And he who cannot do anything of these and has no draft-animals shall work three days (in a week) with his hands for his lord from dawn until sunset and his lord shall not ask more from him.

The emphasis is mine and shows that even with the heavy plow some people were still working the fields by hand. It implies that a day’s worth of plowing was equal to 3 days of hand turning the soil, though plowing could be much more efficient and this may be simply as much work as a lord could get out of a peasant and still allow him to take care of his own fields (especially since how much of the day is not specified for the plowmen).

So I think I have to call my first field a failure. I mean it’s been a lot of fun and I am very happy with it. But the experience isn’t medieval enough. I’ll keep posting about it and continue talking about the experience.

The important question though, is what do I do to fix it next time? What can I do to make my experience more medieval? I could plow, but I don’t have access to a team of oxen, horses or even a tractor. And the space I have is really too small for that anyway.

I could use a sod cutter. A sod cutter is a modern piece of equipment used to remove grass in those strips that you can buy from landscaping stores. They work essentially like a plow except that they have a moving blade that cuts horizontally under the level of the ground. Here’s a video showing how they work:



The problem with a sod cutter is that they all have a pre-set cutting depth -- which is 2.5 inches. While that is great for grass and gets the majority of the grass roots, it won’t get some weeds and if you just flipped that over you’d have a dense web of roots pointing up. I don’t think that would work.

So, I have bought myself a very nice spade and will do it, like in the quotation above, by hand. I have marked out a 600 square foot section of the lawn and I have plans to make a sowing tool. I’ll plant that section this fall with winter wheat and see how it goes.

You can trust that I will post all about it (and what it does to my poor old back) when the time comes.