The REAL Way To Shell Popcorn!

After trying to get the popcorn off the cobs by hand, we decided there must be a better way!  Well, there is...............it's called a vintage Black Beauty Corn Sheller, circa early 1900's, made in St. Louis MO !  Our neighbor Frank had one of these contraptions and we asked if we could borrow it for a while.   This is a great little hand cranked machine that strips the corn kernels off the cobs, and even gives you the dry corn cob back easily!

We set up a big tub on the table, and decided to try the corn sheller.   Our popcorn isn't quite dry enough yet, but in a week or so we should be able to strip off all the popcorn a lot easier than doing it by hand.

A close up of the vintage corn sheller.   What an invention!

And it really works, too!

After stripping the corn kernels off the cob, this little vintage gadget even gives you the cob back easily !

You can see this is a Black Beauty corn sheller.   It says made in St. Louis MO.  A quick research on the internet shows that this was made around early 1900's or before (back when we actually made long lasting stuff in the good old USA!)

There is a You Tube video of one of these in action.  Hope this link works for you to see how neat it really works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW3ZskBzAEs
(edited to add:  I see that this link does not work.  Well, if you go to You Tube and just type in Black Beauty corn sheller, it will be the first video on the list)
We just love using vintage machinery and gadgets to do things.  And when they actually work, that's even better.   Sometimes country boys have the neatest old toys.  Since we have 100 lbs of popcorn to shell, this will certainly make the job easier.

Popcorn Party!

Today we harvested our popcorn crop.  Oh my, did we get a huge load of popcorn!  We estimate that we will have about 100 lbs of finished popcorn.   Can you believe that?  We can sell some at market when it is dry, and I think I know what everyone on our Christmas list will be getting this year as a gift from us!
     After the cobs dry a little bit on their own, we will don a pair of heavy rubber gloves and work all the kernels off the cob to dry further in flat pans.   We will have to keep testing them by popping some to see if we have the kernels dry enough.  When we do, we will put the popcorn in glass jars.  The popcorn will keep for years this way.   In fact, we are still eating the last of the 2012 popcorn, and it still pops up nice and big.   I think 100 lbs of popcorn should almost be a lifetime supply, eh?
     Here is a typical ear of popcorn:

The ears are very long and filled with kernels.  As you can see, almost every ear is at least 10 inches long.

 Harold gathered the ears and shucked them right in the corn patch, and brought out the ears in baskets.

Harold the "cornhusker"

He brought the ears out in baskets, and I cleaned them off a little more and put them in boxes to dry in the house.

Harold had lots of "help" from the farm cats who thought it was great fun to wander underfoot in the discarded husks!

Nine boxes of popcorn ears drying in the bay window in the sun.  Each box is at least 5 inches high and several layers deep.

All this talk of popcorn reminds me of one of my favorite books as a child - A story called "Popcorn Party" by Trudy Boyles and Louise MacMartin.  This book is from 1952.  It is a story about an old woman who wanted to give a party for the kids in her neighborhood, and decided to pop 5 lbs of popcorn all at once.   It filled her house with popcorn according to the story.   I must have read this book dozens of times as a child or had it read to me.  Such a cute little story!  My copy of the book was completely worn out and the cover was missing.   My sister found another copy of this book at an antique store a while back and bought it for me as a gift.   It is now in my library for grandchildren to look at.

A favorite book from my childhood!

A couple pages from the inside of the book.  Back in 1952 children's stories were full of cute illustrations.

So - I guess someday we can have our own 'popcorn party'!  But I won't pop 5 lbs at once!  Harold and I do enjoy popcorn as a snack on those long winter evenings when we play a game of Scrabble or cards together.   It's nice to know that we can grow our own snacks, too!  This year I also put lots of apple slices in the dehydrator, so we have bags of dried apple snacks, too.   Healthy snacks!

A Killing Frost

We had our killing frost last night.  It came a little early this year.  So the garden is done for 2016.  Not sure how low the temps were, but the cars and the ground and all vegetation was covered in a thick frost.   Well, I still have a few things growing in the greenhouse, which had no problems with frost!

A heavy frost covers everything, including weeds!

A row of dill and herbs encased in frost.

Some things were still in the growing/developing stages, so we could at least cover those things.  We put a large tarp over our watermelon patch in the hopes that the 5 huge melons out there would finish ripening.

About half the watermelon patch is covered.   There are 5 or 6 melons still needing to grow a little.  They are all about a foot in diameter, so we hope they make it!  Behind the melon patch you can see the corn that was planted using that antique corn planter (I have an older post about this on my blog).  Unfortunately, the deer ate just about all the corn in spite of an electric fence and a radio in the corn. 

 

A close up of one of the big watermelons we hope ripen a little more!

When the sun came up this morning, my cats found a way to keep warm:

Nine of my farm cats basking in the sun trying to keep warm while waiting for breakfast (or a foolhardy mouse to attempt to cross the yard in front of these 9 hunters!)

The fall season officially starts in a little over a week.  But up here in the north country, I guess  fall is here already!  Here in Minnesota we are now in the "winter is coming" mode.............

Honey Extraction 2016

Today we are extracting what little honey we will have this year.  We ended up with a little over 100 lbs, which is very poor compared to the 400 lbs of last year.   All the area beekeepers are complaining about poor harvests this year, so we aren't the only ones.   The reasons are several.   First of all we had a late freeze, which killed many of the wildflowers in the spring.   What flowers did survive, had a tough summer.  We had many sunny mornings, but then the rains came in the afternoon along with gusty winds.   By that time the flowers were open fully, and the heavy rains washed away a lot of the nectar and pollen on the flowers.  So there wasn't much "bee food" for the bees this summer.  This, along with the terrible policy of our state of Minnesota to mow the roadsides constantly (because of 'noxious weeds' they say) made for very few wildflowers this summer.   Also the bees don't get out to work in the rains and heavy winds.  It was truly a very rainy summer.
     Well, we at least got something!   Honey will just be at a premium this year.   We will have lots of disappointed customers who are asking for our honey.   We bottle our honey in pint jars, which hold about 1 & 1/2 lbs of honey, so you know 100 lbs won't go far.   We also need to keep plenty for ourselves, as I cook with honey and put it in all my homemade breads.
     Perhaps next year will be better!  Beekeepers are always hopeful!
So here is what today's process looked like:

Harold cuts off the wax cappings to release the honey for extraction.  We use a hot knife for this purpose.

After cutting off the cappings, there are sometimes a few left that didn't fit under the knife.   We use a fork to break up the wax on them.

In order to keep the knife hot enough, it is always soaking in a pot of hot water.   The handle of this knife is stained with bee propolis from many years of honey extraction.

We end up with lots of wax in the cutting tray.

A tub of wax cappings still has a lot of honey mixed in.  We will filter this through a 600 micron filter, and keep the honey for ourselves.  The wax will be melted down into a block and sold or used for candle making.

The inside of the extractor has lots of honey on the bottom.

The extractor spins out the honey from the frames.  The honey comes out of the honey gate at the bottom.  You can see that we already have nearly 2 buckets filled.   We have honey gates on the buckets, too, to make it easy to fill up the jars after the honey settles out bubbles.

Taking my turn at the extractor.   It takes about 5 minutes of cranking to empty the frames of honey.  We didn't put a motor on the extractor this year, as it didn't seem worth it just for 100 lbs.   We figured we could just crank it by hand this year!

As you might guess, the kitchen floor gets very sticky after this process!  It usually takes me a couple times of floor washing to get things clean.   We usually have a "honey party" every year and invite folks to help extract, and also to enjoy a food buffet.  But with such a low harvest this year, we decided it wasn't worth a party.    Like I said earlier............"there's always next year"!

Laboring on Labor Day

It was a gorgeous late summer day today!  Plenty of breeze to keep the bugs away (the mosquitoes this year have been horrible!!!), low humidity, sunny, and certainly plenty to do!    With the weather folks predicting several days of rain in the future starting tonight, Harold and I decided to bring in our honey for the year.   This year's honey crop is not going to be very big.  Last year we harvested about 400 lbs, but this year we will be lucky to get 100 lbs.   It is great tasting, though, but scarce.   Not sure what the problem is exactly, but we believe it has something to do with the fact that there was just not an abundance of wildflowers this year, plus it was a very rainy and windy summer.   There wasn't the usual basswood blossom honey flow, and the typical clover crop was very scant this summer.  We usually have about 20 full supers of honey to extract, but this year there are only 10 boxes, and not all the frames are filled out.  Well, we shall take what we get, and hope for a better year.

The 3 boxes in front are practically empty, and there are only 10 supers to work with.   Honey will be at a premium this year unfortunately.

I also harvested my lima bean crop.   Lima beans are another one of those vegetables that people either love or hate.  Very few folks have ever tasted a truly fresh lima bean unless you grow them from your own garden.    Most everyone has eaten the typical frozen limas from the supermarket freezer.   One of my favorite late summer dishes is succotash:  freshly cut corn off the cob, limas, and plenty of butter with a little cream poured over all and mixed.    Really good succotash can only be made with absolutely fresh produce.

A big basket full of freshly picked lima beans.  They are a bother to pick (because they are hard to see as they look just like the leaves of the plant!) and even harder to pod out, but SO worth it!

The picture is a little blurry, but this shows the insides of the lima beans.

All podded out and ready to eat.  I grow enough lima beans to put some in the freezer to use for vegetable soups throughout the winter.

Besides podding out the fresh lima beans, we have been podding out our dry bean crop.  This year I grew pinto beans (a variety called Topaz) and also small red Mexican beans and Jacob's Cattle beans and navy beans.   In the evenings, Harold and I like to sit and pod them out while listening to our favorite radio programs.   We enjoy listening to an old time radio program called "When Radio Was" - old radio shows with some of the original commercials.   My favorite shows are the detective Johnny Dollar episodes, and the eerie shows of The Whistler.   It's an hour long show, sometimes it is comedy, sometimes westerns, sometimes drama. 

There are usually several baskets of dry beans around to pod out.  Always something to do!

I always have several trays of beans drying, and when they are completely dry, they will be stored in glass jars in the pantry. 

It's been a busy few weeks canning - applesauce, pears, and sauerkraut.  This year's kraut turned out so good!   There's only one more item to can up and that is red pepper relish.  I like to have jars of this on hand to stir into cooked beans or baked beans.   Often we will just eat a bowl of navy beans or pinto beans for supper with cornbread.  It is delicious to stir in a couple tablespoon fulls of red pepper relish into the bowl of beans - it gives just the right touch of flavor!
This year I grew very large red peppers in my greenhouse just for this purpose.   Check out the size of these beauties!

Just look at these beautiful red peppers grown in the greenhouse!  They are about 6 inches long or more, and about 5 inches wide.   A normal size green pepper is shown at the left for comparison.

In case you would like to make some red pepper relish yourself, here is the recipe I use:

SWEET RED PEPPER RELISH

About 8 cups of chopped red peppers, chopped in about 1/4 inch dice

1 1/2 c. chopped onions

2 cups cider vinegar

1 3/4 c. sugar

1 T. salt

1 tsp celery seed

     Combine the peppers and onions and add enough boiling water to cover the vegetables.  Let stand for 10 min.  Drain and repeat the boiling water process.   Drain well.  In a large pan, combine the vinegar and sugar and salt until the mixture is hot and the sugar and salt is dissolved.   Add the drained peppers and onions to the pan along with the celery seed and simmer on medium for 15minutes.  Stir frequently.   Ladle the hot relish into hot sterile jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace.   Put on lids and rings and process jars in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.   Makes about 4 pints, or 8 jelly jars.  (I usually put this relish in jelly jars)

You can use part green peppers if you don't have all red peppers.   Or use all green peppers if you want - that's good, too!  Sometimes I add a hot pepper or two to the pepper mix. 

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You can tell that fall is on the way very soon!   There are bits of fall colors in the trees now.   Pretty soon we will have peak colors in the trees, and by the end of the month, the leaves will be gone.   It's sad to see summer end, but it was a very hot summer.   I welcome the change of season!   It's so nice to have cooler weather! 

You can see a bit of yellow and orange in the trees now.   Fall is on the way!

Looking the other way down the road, you can just see another patch of orange in the trees.