Out in the North Forty

Holy cow, I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post! With lingering colds, Mark's various night meetings, Halloween activities, and all the other little life interruptions, progress has kind of slowed on the house. Mark is picking up the pace now and bought a big load of boards last night to continue his framing of the study and to start the framing of the hallway, half bath and my studio (I’ll post some progress pictures in my next entry). He had a cathartic experience taking a sledge hammer to the bathtub in the downstairs bathroom, and highly recommends it to anyone who needs to take out their anger or frustrations. I really wish I’d taken some pictures of this event because Mark informed me he smashed up most of the tub after work one night in his work clothes! What better way to take out the day’s frustrations?

I’ve been going over to the house at least once a week and working on the area I call the North 40. It’s technically the South 40 as it’s in the far south area of the yard between the garage and the back fence. We plan to make this the garden in the future and thought we’d better start raking some of the mess up. We have two green waste bins from the city, so it’s our goal to try to fill them both every week with big stuff that we don’t want to compost.

This is a before picture of part of the area.

As I began raking up all the debris in this area, I discovered that underneath about six inches of composted leaves, rotted fruit, etc. there were big sections of bricked patios that we had no idea existed. It looks like the Theobald’s, who I mentioned in a previous post were the owners of the house in the 70's and who did brick masonry as a hobby, may have intended to brick the entire world, or at least their entire yard. Two sections next to the garage and the west fence are big slabs of concrete or cement, but the other areas are filled in with red brick pavers.This is a before picture of back part of the area next to the garage.

This after picture of the same area (or nearly the same area) shows the concrete slabs I unearthed (literally). The tree in the corner is a pear tree and the concrete slabs go right around it.
This is the huge pile of compost I ended up with after clearing off the concrete slabs (it actually looks more impressive in person). Mark wants me to sift it all so we can use it around the yard. I'm sure it's great compost, and it would cost us a pretty penny to buy that much compost, but man it's going to take a while to sift all of that!
Another find in this area was more on the creepy side, and I hesitated to photograph it because it was a large clump of hair - human hair! We found one big clump, which we promptly threw in the garbage, then I found this smaller clump a few days later, which I of course photographed!

Thankfully, it appears to be synthetic hair, but I still get creeped out back there sometimes thinking I’m going to unearth some human bones next!

Another interesting find, but on the less creepy side was this huge tank, likely some sort of fuel tank.

We’d seen the larger hose sticking up out of the ground, but never really thought anything of it until Mark started poking around with the rake back there one day and hit something metal. This, like everything else was covered in six inches of compost, and as we started uncovering it, we were nervous that we’d found a coffin (this was after the hair incident). We’re thinking we’ll put this out during clean-up next spring in hopes that someone will come and take it for salvage.

And the last of my interesting finds in this area is a bottle that I discovered while raking some of the junk off the corrugated roof of the lean-to. It appears to be some sort of liquor bottle. Someone must have been having a good time, and wanted to hide the evidence!

I mentioned in past posts that there’s a sad, old apple tree growing back in this area with grapes growing all through it. About the second week of October the grapes were perfectly ripe, so Bella and I went over on one of the days she had off for UEA and picked a bucket of them. They’re concord grapes, and they smelled sooo delicious! I got ambitious and decided I’d make grape jelly out of them. I’ve made grape jelly once before out of grapes from my dad’s yard, and it was a pretty disastrous experience that ended up in a jammed up garbage disposal (don’t ask, and don’t bring it up with Mark…it’s still a sore subject). Anyway, I though I’d give it a go again and did more research and preparation this time. The results were much better, but I’m telling you, it’s a loooong process!

Once you clean and remove the grapes from the stems, you cook them for about 15 minutes to soften them up.

At this point you’re supposed to mash them up with a potato masher, which surprisingly I do not have. I started mashing them in small batches with a spoon and a fine strainer, but quickly decided that was not the way to go and got out my trusty food processor.

When I finally finished mashing all of the grapes and straining them, I was left with one bowl of skins and seeds and one bowl of delicious smelling juice.

The juice went into the fridge overnight so the crystals could separate. This is something I didn’t do the first time I made grape jelly, and the jelly ended up with little sugar crystals. Not a huge deal, but most people don’t really care for crunchy jelly! I passed the juice through a jelly bag to get all of the crystals out, and we were finally ready to make jelly!

We only ended up with 7 small jars of jelly, but it’s quite delicious, and I dare say worth the time it took to make it. I used the lower sugar pectin because the grapes were so sweet, and the jelly has a really good grapey flavor.

It's quite yummy on toast!

I had a little bit of the grape juice left over from making the jelly, so we poured it into a glass and drank it straight – no sugar added. It was super sweet and delicious!

I’m hoping that now that we’re giving this area of the yard some attention and that the grapes will likely get care and water on a regular basis that they won’t totally suck next year. What if they’re so sweet and flavorful because they’re neglected and get just enough water to make them super sweet? I think some grape growing research is in order!

Well, I thought I'd leave you with an image of fall from the house. We're lucky to have a lot of beautiful, mature trees in the yard, all of which are displaying their gorgeous fall colors right now. What's not to love about fall, especially when you can enjoy colors like these. Happy Autumn!