More Arctic chills

Our weather has been so strange this year.  We'll have days of bitter cold, often with high winds, then there will be 1 or 2 days where it suddenly jumps up 25 degrees into the mid-20s to low 30's.  This weekend was pretty horendous with very nasty blowing snow and highs in the single digits, though you wouldn't think it given how bright and sunny this picture is.  The horses choose to stand on the lee side of the hills in their pasture and soak up the sun on those cold days.  Catlow of course notices that I came out on the deck to take their picture...is it time for hay yet?

Thankfully, many of those 1 nice day here and there's have happened on the weekend when I have actually been home.  And I've taken full advantage.  If the weather is at all bearable (minimum 15 degrees, and not too windy), I've gone for a ride.  Usually I ride bareback in the winter, but I have ridden in a saddle a couple of times.

I've been alternating between Stormy, Cody, and Catlow.  I'm not even going to try to ride Chico until next summer and I know he should be fully healed from last Fall's injury.  Then I'll be able to more adequately assess his long-term soundness potential.  Chico's wound is looking pretty good, by the way.

 

 

 

His hair on that leg is all crimpy, I think because the winter hair was growing in while he was wearing a bandage.  It tends to collect snow and ice-balls more than his other legs. 

It also makes it hard to tell just how big that fetlock really is.  It is bigger than the other, but I think it looks even larger with the crimpy hair.

Since it was so windy and cold today, I didn't ride, and I pulled the horses' hay over to the lee side of a hill to feed.  Usually they are fed on top of the hill next to our house.  Out of the wind, the sun made this weather totally wonderful.

And my dogs like the cozy little leeside as well, digging up frozen horse turds and doing their best to chew them up.

 

 

So, I like horse butts.  I'm sure everyone does, right?  All my horses have very different, but equally nice butts!

 

 Stormy

 

Catlow

Cody

Chico

 

My dark horses' coats are getting that faded late winter look.  I can't wait till they shed out this spring.  I'm ready for winter to be finished.  Usually I really like winter, but I've been so busy, away from home, and last winter was so long.  I feel like the majority of the last year has been winter for me!

 

Chico and Cody

Stormy again

 

So, have I mentioned that I love Stormy?  I do.  When I bought her, I thought I was going to keep her till next year and then look into selling her.  I may still do that...but the longer I have her, the less likely that is looking.   I just love her.  And she loves me too.  I love my other horses too of course, but she is just a sweet little peppy mare.  She's the bottom of the pecking order in my herd, but she still has her own "personality".  My horses have taught her some really nice manners.  She is not nearly so pushy about food as she used to be.  And she is so fun to ride.  She hesitates occasionally about going out alone, and we might have a very brief second of discussion about it, but really, she does whatever I ask of her.  I want to try to get her a little more fine-tuned at this point.  She still doesn't know a whole lot about leg cues (other than squeeze to go faster), but she is slowly catching on.  I am getting to the point where I can feel her slightly responding when I ask her to step over one direction when riding.  The reason we haven't gotten far yet is mostly my fault.  I just haven't been working with her.  I jump on and we go out for a ride.  I try a little bit on the trail, but I think some of this sensitizing of her body needs to happen on the ground, because she just doesn't realize she is suppoesd to respond any other way than she currently knows.

 

 

 

Last weekend I rode her with my 1964 Simco saddle.  It is a really nice old saddle that I restored and it doesn't fit any of my other horses.  I've been having trouble finding a saddle to fit Stormy.  She is narrow, but short - backed, so Catlow's saddle fits her back well, but the rigging is not in the right place for Stormy.  As is, Catlow's saddle rides up over Stormy's withers, all because the rigging pulls it up there.  It's really annoying and makes me not want to ride down hills in it at all.  I actually was thinking (daydreaming) about trading Catlow's saddle in for the same brand and style but a more typical rigging.  But that is going to cost a lot.  Then it dawned on me that I need to try my super old almost antique saddle on her.  And it fits!  So I dont' have to look into anything new for her.  The only downside of this old saddle is that it is heavy.  And with Stormy being my smallest horse, it makes me feel bad for her!  But, I have to give the little mare some big credit. 

 

Two weeks ago, I rode Cody bareback and we cantered up the snowmobile trail, which starts out at a gentle incline, but then gets really steep to get up to the top of the ridge.  We cantered along, and when we got to the steep part, Cody was already tired, but I urged her a little and she dug right in to get us to the top.  Then we had to stand at the top for a good 5 minutes without moving while Cody huffed and puffed and caught her breath.  Now, this weekend, I did the same thing with Stormy.  But I was in my 40 lb saddle on a tiny little mare.  Stormy started out cantering much faster than Cody, and when we got to the steep part, just chugged right up to the stop.  She wanted to stop and rest for a second too, but she was not huffing and puffing like Cody was.  Both of them have had the same amount of activity these last several months.  Stormy just has some really nice drive that is fun to play with.  She can be really fast!

 

 

 

And I think Stormy's delicate face markings are so cute.

 

So, two more pictures and these are not of horses.  This is one of our cows. 

 

 

A few weeks ago, my husband noticed that she had some pretty nasty eye discharge.  We got her in the chute to look at her and saw that she had a big tumor of her third eyelid (likely a squamous cell carcinoma).  It was so large that we couldn't cut it out in its entirety and to leave any in was just asking for it to grow right back.  These tumors can be really invasive into the surrounding bone and are one of the more common reasons that carcasses are condemned and not allowed to be used for human consumption.  It's commonly called "cancer eye" and is usually seen in white-faced cows because of the carcinogenic affects of UV radiation on unpigmented skin.  This cow is a middle aged brood cow and is a valuable member of our herd.  With her "cancer eye", she is worthless and will be condemned if sold.  But by removing her whole eye along with the tumor, we can be pretty sure to get the whole cancerous growth and prevent it from recurring.  Now she will have a long comfortable life having more babies.  I'm proud to say that my first enucleation/eventeration went pretty well, and she is healing as expected!  She is a little more wary after all is said and done though.

 



Arctic chill

Yep, It's cold here.  High of -13 today with -40 degree F wind chill?  We are free choice feeding the horses hay right now on the lee side of the hill.  No blankets, just a windbreak...the horses are doing fine.  They do have access to a barn, but the hill actually breaks the wind better than the barn does and the horses never use it.

Making wine

Many beginning wine making books say, once you start making wine, you cannot stop.  I can attest to that being the truth.  Oh, I'm sure you can dabble in it and then quit, but if you are the kind of person who takes pride in your work, you will strive to make each batch better than the last.  And along the way, you will progress from just following someone else's recipe to learning what components give the wine it's desirable characteristics, and then you will strive to use all natural components to balance your wine to make it perfect and all your own.  That has certainly been my progression.

A good wine is balanced in every way.  They don't all have to be the same flavor to be perfect, but it needs the right amount of tang (acidity), body (provided by your fruit), and zing (tannins).  And on top of that, you can change the sweetness to suit your tastes.  When I began wine-making, I thought I liked deep dry red wines like merlot, cabernet savignon, and shiraz.  I knew that wild fruits that I was going to be using to make wine couldn't really taste like a red grape wine, but I was willing to experiment.  I also knew that I didn't like really sweet wines, so I entered into it with the thought of making my fruit wines the way I like them.

My wine making journey began this summer.  A friend of mine gave me a book on making homemade wines as a thank you for hosting her wedding on our land.  I had helped her pick fruit for wines (and taste a few wines) in the past, but I wasn't ready to begin for myself then.  The right circumstances had to present themselves.  Mid-summer, I was home for a week vacation and was presented with a bounty crop of wild black raspberries on our land (we also call them black caps).  I was also desperate for a way to connect to the land and grown crops again, since I'd started my fourth year of school, which meant I was in clinical rotations all summer and wasn't able to grow a garden and was only home on certain weekends.  Wine making became a perfect hobby to become involved with to bring me back to the land.  All the fruits I've used were harvested either wild on our land or directly from local growers (cranberries).

Wine recipes are by the gallon.  One gallon makes 5 bottles of wine.  When I first started, I wondered how I was ever going to drink all this wine.  I'm not really a big drinker.  I often open a bottle of wine to enjoy a glass, and the wine turns bad before I get a chance to finish the whole bottle.  At this point, I don't know how I'm going to possibly be able to make enough to share with all the people I'd like to taste my wines!  I'm even up to using 3 gallon carboys (which make 15 bottles at a time!).

Needless to say, I've gone from just trying it out, to researching more in depth about acidity (I even got an acid titration kit), and striving to make a deep rich wine that is balanced enough to rival those deep red merlots I used to like so much.  And you know, I don't like the merlots and shiraz so much anymore.  I have learned to really appreciate a fruit wine, especially since I made it myself from wild grown fruits like those tiny sour grapes, black raspberries, blackberries, elderberries and so on.  My elderberry made with toasted oak chips it currently bottled and aging.  I'll let you know next year how it turned out!  So far, it is drinkable! 

If you ever want to try a good commercial elderberry wine, I highly recommend Three Lakes Winery in Wisconsin.  They do ship, so try it!  They have some other really fantastic semi-sweet fruit wines.  Their elderberry is sweeter than mine, though has the same flavor and is very unique.  It is said that a good elderberry wine can rival a deep red grape wine.  I've found our Wisconsin elderberries to lack acidity so I had to experiment to blend with other acidic fruits.  My first elderberry wine is just straight elderberries and I added powdered acid blend to give it that body and zing.  My second is combined with cranberries and it definitely has a zing combined with the tannins from the elderberries.  I can't wait for them to finish fermenting.

That is the one difficult thing about making wine...waiting for it to be ready to drink!  I of course have been sampling the wines all along the way and know how much they change from the primary fermentation with active bubbling and raw yeasty sharp flavor, to the mellowed smooth flavor of a more mature aged wine.

This last weekend, I had to make another batch of black raspberry wine.  It has quickly become the favorite of the ones I've made so far.  It is also the sweetest one and I want to try to fine tune it now.  I used all frozen fruit picked this summer.  The bulk of this wine is black raspberries, but it also had a good share of red raspberries and blackberries, with cranberries, crabapples, and raisins to balance the acidity and add tannins.  I added less sugar and used yeast that had settled to the bottom of one of my other wines that is currently still fermenting slowly.

I poured boiling water with the sugar dissolved in it over the thawed berries in a stainless steel pot and let it sit overnight.  In the morning, I added pectic enzyme that will help the wine clear when it reaches that point (pectin from fruit can make wine hazy, especially if the fruits were boiled).  Later that afternoon, I added the yeast drawn off from my other wine, in addition to yeast nutrients.  Then I poured the must (what you call the baby wine) into a food grade bucket and covered it to prevent fruit flies from weaseling their way in (fruit flies carry bacteria that will turn wine into vinegar..thankfully they are not very abundant at this time of year - this can be a hazardous process when the fruit flies are thick and they are definitely drawn to the smell of fermenting fruit!). 

 

It took a couple days for the yeast to reproduce enough to make lots of bubbles and float the fruit pulp to the top of the bucket.

 

During this time, I stirred the pulp down into the liquid several times a day.  This blows off gasses and aerates the must so the yeast can really reproduce in the beginning.  After a few days, the wine really starts to smell like yeasty alcohol.  I LOVE this smell.  It makes me happy.  This newest batch was my first batch in several months, and I hadn't realized how much I missed the smell of wine fermenting until I smelled it again!

 

 After 5 days, I poured the must through a jelly bag (a bag with a bit courser mesh might work better) to strain off the pulp.

I had to squeeze the wine out of the pulp and I think it would be better to have a bit courser mesh for this part.

I made enough wine for 4 gallons, though I did run a little short and had to use a half gallon for the last jug.

I can't figure out how to get this picture to load upright.  The other one worked!  It's frustrating and I edited this picture exactly the same way as the previous picture.

 This can be a messy procedure, especially if you are a little careless.  I just wipe the rims well.

 

 The final step is to add the airlock that will let carbon dioxide from fermentation escape, but not let any oxygen in.  Now I place the carboys in a warm dark place (my side hallway), and let them sit.  In a month, the yeast will start to settle out and the wine will clear.  At that time I'll rack (move) the wine off the sediment into a new carboy, and let it sit for another month or two.

 

I usually taste it along the way and I also might add more sugar if I feel like it needs a little more sweetness when it gets close to done.  I might rack it again before I bottle it, but I basically wait until there is no more fermentation occuring and the pressure inside the carboy has equalized (you can tell by the position of the airlock).  Then I know I can safely bottle it without worrying about it exploding later.

 

  The last step, I bottle it!  I use recycled bottles that I've removed the labels from (hot soapy water and an SOS pad or a knife work pretty well for the stubborn ones).  At first I used wine bottles with screw caps, but I graduated to using corks.  I got a decent corker that makes life easier and is much more versatile than waiting for enough screw cap bottles to use. 

 

I kept thinking I need to make labels to complete the package.  I even told my mom I was going to call my wine operation "Wild Spirits Wine".  My mom has also gotten into the wine making spirit.

 

Imagine my surprise when I opened my Christmas gift this year from my photo editing sister to find my own wine labels!  She used a picture I'd painted a while back, and designed a label around it.  It looks awesome!  Now my wine is complete! 

 

It is really fun to bring a bottle of my own wine to a get-tegether to share with friends and family! 

 

 

Well, if being a veterinarian doesn't work out for me, I'm all set for my second career!  I wonder what kind of process it takes to get a license to sell wine? 

 

I highly recommend making your own wine.  It really is a simple process, but you can make it as complicated and specialized as you want it.  You won't be bored with it!

 

The books I started with were:

 

 

I used both books and have gleaned and combined recipes from both.

 

This is my very first wine recipe that I used mostly from the first book:

For 1 gallon:

4 lbs of black raspberries

8 oz of raisins

1 1/2 cups orange juice

2.5 lbs sugar

1 teas acid blend

1 teas yeast nutrient

Yeast (can't remember which variety I used)

 

It turned out really well, though was a little sweeter than I wanted it.  Most everyone else just loves it though.

 

 

 

Christmas

Christmas was a big hit this year in our house.  Our daughter is now 3.  When we asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she said, without any hesitation, a dollhouse.  And repeated asking always yielded the same thing, a dollhouse!  "Just like the one in my book", she said!  So, Daddy, oops, I mean "Santa", got to work on building one.  And we modeled it in part after the dollhouse in her book.

I think it turned out pretty well!  And the cat likes it too!

We have had some really up and down temperature here, and lots of snow.  During the "warm" days (temps around 20 degrees F) I have been able to take some really nice snowy trails rides with my mares.  Those rides were so heavenly...just the quiet rustling of the hooves in deep powdery snow.  The mares have been pretty cooperative despite not having been ridden since before I got Stormy.  I'm looking forward to the high of 30 degrees on Saturday and another ride!

In between meals, the horses are always digging through the deep snow for more grass morsels.

Stay tuned...I'm planning a post about wine making very soon!  I have some pictures all ready for it!

Darkness

I've been missing my horses.  I've spent the last week at home, but I'm gone all day on my latest externship and I leave early and don't get back until after dark.  So it's been over a week since I've seen my horses in the daylight.  Without a barn with lights, it makes it hard to really check on them...but they are all there and upright for every feeding.

And this weekend marks the last cram session for an exam that I hope I'll ever have to do.  I take my national board exam tomorrow.  Wish me luck!

And I'm going to post the transition collages I made for Chico and Catlow that show their progression since I adopted them as yearlings until now.  Can you believe they are 9 years old already!?

Together at last (2)!

 

Cody trots to catch up with Catlow, who moved down the valley to graze.

After separating Stormy out, Chico hurries to catch up with Cody and Catlow.

Stormy makes it back down to the others after I shoo her away, and Chico right away sets in to chase her.  She's not to happy about it...with a swish of her tail.

All the activity gets Catlow riled up too, so she launches into a gallop!  If Catlow is going to run, the whole herd will run!  I love the power in Catlow's launch!

They are all feeling a little sassy!  Well, Catlow and Cody are...I think Stormy is just trying to stay out of Chico's way!

 

 Catlow is really digging in!



Sassy!

My dogs think they should chase the horses as the horses run past and my poor cruciate ligament tear/repair dog, Jasper, trips himself up in the grass and goes head over heals!

Don't worry, Jasper is okay.  It just hurts to see him so debilitated.  I'm pretty sure catching Lyme disease set off his cranial cruciate ligament tears.

The horses get separated.  Stormy ran into the lower pasture and whinnies pitifully to her separated friends.

So they all head down to be together.

Once together, they are still riled up!  I love the tails in the air!

 

 Then they settle down, with Chico and Cody standing side by side, like they used to.  Stormy looks on like she'd really like to be next to her Cody.



I do think that Cody missed Chico.  She touches him affectionately here.

Stormy decides she's had enough of them for awhile and trots up to visit me again.  Sure, maybe she thinks I'll feed her, but she really does seem to be bonding to me!  Every time I come outside, she looks up and stares at me with this penetrating look.  None of my other horses do that!  Griffin used to always notice me and acknowledge me too.