Arte De Timo

Tag: garden

  • First Racking

    I took a wild guess, and racked my one gallon of Viozinho this morning. As you can see it isn’t very clear at this point, but the smaller jug was very clear before I messed with it. It’s a little on the brown side, too but I’m not too concerned with that right now. All in all the wine itself looks to be proceded in a predictable way… well not predictable to me, but what I imagine would be to a professional. The process on the other hand, as usual has not been wonderful.

    About a week ago, I was reaching for a book neer the bottle, and as you might guess it fell it the weirdest and most Murphyesque way, bouncing two feet around a chair right on top of the the air locks. One shattered, and the other went flying across the room. The bottles and wine were safe, fortunately.

    After checking two local brew shops, who “for some strange reason” were completely sold out of the cheapest most abundant part of home brewing, I finally found one at a crazy price in a wine makers shop. Not a good sign for Timo’s home brew wine.

    Flash forward to this morning and Murphy was still dictating the direction of things. Starting the siphon on such a small container was much less than smooth. I had practiced with water for about 20 minutes and thought I had it down pat, but alas there were a lot cuss words flying as my precious wine spilled all over the place and my hand came in contact with all the equipment. I even had an extra set of hands, but it didn’t help. I seem to have an aversion to smoothness when it comes to making fermented beverages (Don’t ask about the other night of beer bottling! I must have said, “That’s never happened before” about ten times.)

    Anyway, I did pull off a little for a taste. I was expecting something horrid, akin to the plum wine I made a couple of years ago. That wine had so much acid in it, and so little sugar entering fermentation (I miss calculated the recipe) that the bottle I opened last month didn’t even pass as a good vinegar. This true wine was not vinegar, though. It actually had a pretty good feel considering I’ve never tried Viozinho, nor have any idea what a wine at the first racking is supposed to taste like. It wasn’t even a struggle to swallow.

    I kept the stems with the berries when I crushed it, which isn’t normal for a white wine, but as I have mentioned before, I have no idea what I am doing. Some of that carried through as a sour tannic note. It actually tasted like a young intense Chardonay in a lot of ways. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t very good, but if it ages well, it will pass as wine.

    I have been thinking of adding 3 or 4 more vines in the back yard. My first choice was a classic red, like Cabernet, or Syrah. Maybe even a Durif, After tasting the potential of what I already have, though, now am I am considering upping the anti. I may make this whole project even more complicated (the way I like it,) and try my hand at cloning the Viozinho onto a resistant rootstock, so I would have 5 vines all with the same varietal.

    Of course I haven’t found a source of rootstock, and have never grafted vines before. But, I watched a couple of videos on Youtube, so how hard could it be, right?

  • My First Try at Making Real Wine


    I have very little idea how to make wine, but it is something that has always interested me, and living in California, it is something that’s just part of life. Anywhere you travel in this state you are bound to come across vineyards and wine tasting rooms. Go south from the Bay Area on US 101, and you will literally be driving through vineyards within an hour or two. Another hour more, and you will be in the heart of the Central Coast wine region with wineries and tasting rooms at every exist.

    Go to the North Bay, and well, I don’t have to tell you where you are, but you will be in some of the most picturesque viticultural districts in the world, if not the best producing ones. Head east, or in just about any direction, down any road and you will likely find a vineyard of some sort. All my memories are filled with grape vines, from visiting my aunt’s house in the South Bay hills, to heading to Monterey, or to the mountains to fish. Everywhere, there is a vineyard in central Califa.

    Even later, I couldn’t get away from the vines. Not that I wanted to. I did my undergrad at “The” wine university. You know, the one that now produces the worlds premier viticulturists and enologist, who go on to head up every major winery around the world. When I went there, though, the school celar wasn’t open to the public, and Mondovi hadn’t turned it into a wine tourist trap, so we only heard rumors of the vintages that got dumped down the drain instead of being drunk each year. Now they get sold off to the public, and the wine culture descends on the campus in hords to visit the Mondovi wine complex, celars, and wine shops etc..

    One of the things Davis used to do, and still does, I think, is give away vines to the first few hundred people who get in line at the viticulture booth on Picnic Day. They are the vines that students practice their grafting techniques on, so they often aren’t wonderful, but they are free. In the past, before the world knew of this little give-away they gave away interesting varieties, and it was easier to get them.

    Six years ago, my wife (also an Aggie) and I went to Picnic Day and got two of the last scrony vines they were giving away that year. I think it was the fact that they were small that let is in on something cool. No one else wanted the runts, but they were just a small slow growing varietal. The variety was called Viozinho, a white wine grape. (More on that in a bit.) We’ve been to Picnic Day since, and have gotten other vines, but these were the only ones that resulted in a producing vine.

    Funny enough, at the time I had no where to plant them, so I potted them up and put them on the balcony of our place. For a couple of years they languished, putting out a few leaves each spring. One eventually died, but in the third year the survivor showed some good growth, so I was happy to keep it on board. In that same year we bought our house, and I found a good place for it in the ground. Having little idea what type of grape vine it really was, or its characteristics, I just put it where there was room. It had more sentimental value than anything at that point.

    In its new home it didn’t do a whole lot except grow. Last year it produced some grapes but the squirrels (I hate squirrels!) ate every last berry, so I had no idea what the grapes where finally going to be like.

    This year was different. I netted the whole thing as soon as they were forming sugar, and they grew and grew. So many and so well in fact, that my poorly made trellis partially collapsed.

    With a whole crop to deal with, I finally looked up what they where, and thought about what I was going to do with them. They are a grape used in making Porto, a fortified wine from Portugal. They are supposed to have great character, but are little grown because of the slow growth and low yield. In fact they seem to only be grown commercially in the Douro Valley in very low quantities. The guy at my local brew/wine store had never heard of them.

    So what do you do when you have something little heard of, and considered a treasure? Of course, try to learn how to use it for what it is meant for. I only have enough for about a gallon of finished wine, but it will be a good first trial. Also, since this variety is rarely ever made into a varietal wine, and is usually blended, the low volume works in my favor. My guess, is that it will be very acidic and complex, so I will have something good to use in blends with future years (maybe going the Porto route,) or with my plum wines, which have little complexity.

    Who knows where it will go, but so far it’s been fun starting down another path of learning. I already had the vine and the equipment, so I have little to lose, and wine to gain. Should be fun.

  • October is a Good Month


    This is a pumpkin from my garden. It’s one of the best I’ve grown.

    October is a great and odd time of year in California. It is a time when some of the trees drop their leaves as is traditional in the Fall, but others are just getting geared up to produce their crops. It’s a time to harvest everything thats been growing all summer, or clear out the old plants, but it is also the time to plant and nurish the second round of crops for the year.

    The weather is hot, then cold. The daylight is fading, but the skies are ablaze with light. Oktoberfest is a good celebration for this area, and I understand why it is so popular. Enjoy the beer and pumpkins everyone, because this is a special time of year around here.

  • Compost – Part 1

    Compost is a great topic with all sorts of room for discussion and investigation, so I am going to take on the topic in parts.

    It is also a BIG topic. Understanding compost requires a few layers of biology, a layer of agriculture, a layer of physics, and some thrown in construction, environmentalism, gardening, and spirituality. Well OK, its not that complicated of an idea, but it touches on a lot of important issues.

    First and foremost, composting is the rotting of organic material (Not the little green label on food, but things made of molecules that contain carbon) into humus (Not the yummy tan colored food, that’s hummus. Humus is the part of the soil that is organic). Composting happens pretty much everywhere that organic materials occur; forests, oceans, gardens, the dump, behind your refrigerator. You might say that composting is the biological version of entropy; if there is something that can be broken down in nature, it will.

    Once the maintaining properties of life leave an object, the doors are opened to a range of organisms that want to recapture any stored energy from that object. In nature, things just keep on rolling, so any creatures whose biological defenses fail become, quite literally, dirt; and that is a good thing. It can happen fast or slow, and through a whole range of processes. Sometimes there are feathered or furry creatures involved, but at a certain point, almost assuredly, some ants come into play. If there is enough chemical energy left in the object for it to become food, then some ants will find it, and eat it. This goes for a piece chocolate you drop, to a damaged flower seed. Eventually though, in all the dark quiet places of the world the more important processes take over .

    Fungi and bacteria are the heart of the composting process. They are always in a battle to find food, so living things develop strategies to defend against their onslaught. We, humans shed our skin and hair, we have kamikaze immune white blood cells, acidic stomachs, oils, saliva, you name it, all in an attempt to keep fungi and bacteria away from our energy, i.e. cells and tissues. When those things fail, I think we know of some of the things that can happen; infections, stomach problems, and disease. It’s pretty ugly stuff.

    Finally, once things settle down and a little moisture is mixed in, the real work begins; active microbial decomposition. All those brilliant fiber structures, cell membranes, complex molecules, and energetic chemical bonds that make up our beautiful living world are cracked open, broken down over and over again, and become raw materials and energy for a host of microbes.

    In the garden, it is the compost’s job to take advantage of this process and turn all the left over organic material back into something that can be used in the garden. It can be as simple as piling up leaves in the Fall, to carefully layering “brown” material with “green” material to build a hot “heap.” Striking a balance can be tough sometimes, when things like, speed, space, smell, and output are considered.

    When I first started composting, I was living in a townhouse with a small patio, and I didn’t get the balance right in many ways. Space was limited, I didn’t have access to enough “brown” material, and my inputs were too high. I’ll confess, the outcome was not pleasant for anyone within nose-shot. Not only that, I had good humus mixed in with fresh food material, making deployment of the compost impossible. Here’s some pics of the experiment:

    The ideas were sound, but my execution was not so great. The most important thing was that I learned about how a biological composting system functions, and how that sort of composter might work. When building something from scratch, its always good to have some hands-on knowledge to go along with the ideas. I did go on building fortunately, and I now have a good functional 2 yer old system up.

    In Compost – Part 2, I will post about the composter I have now, along with my techniques, and what I gain from the activity. Part 3 will be about the ramifications of composting on several levels, and why I do it. Oh, and I have a video to stick in somewhere, too!

  • The Urban Orchard


    The urban orchard isn’t one of my ideas of course, but it is one of those secret little treasures that people discover when they have a bit of land, and have an interest growing food. Besides the fact that I inherited the beginning (or maybe the end) of an orchard with our house, I have read about it in the different organic gardening books I have. I have also come across the concept in various ways, and under different names when talking to people about their “gardens” and watching videos, or movies about urban sustainability.

    An urban orchard is a group of fruit trees that are crammed into a space that is typically considered too small for even just one tree. If you do an investigation of fruit tree culture, invariably the bulk of info you will find is about trees out in the field with ample space. What most urban gardeners don’t realize is all that info is about optimal growing and harvesting (i.e. farming) conditions. It comes from industrial growing interests, whose job it is to grow lots of fruit for commercial harvest.

    The reality is many older heirloom tree varieties have a wide range of characteristics allowing them to grow in highly variable conditions. Not only that, contemporary trees are grafted onto a choice of rootstocks, which not only are pest hardy, but can be dwarfed. If you stay away from the commercial supermarket varieties, usually you can cram fruit trees into every nook and cranny of a yard and they will be OK. They will produce small amounts of fruit, and maintain a slow and steady growth pattern, which is perfect for the family garden.

    In our back yard, which is only about 2500sf, we have a 40 foot avocado tree that produced several HUNDRED pounds of avocados the year we moved in (they have multi-year cycles, so that was a peak year,) a 15 foot Nispero/Loquat tree, a 15 ft plum tree, orange tree, lemon tree, grapefruit, apple tree, and several hedge Avocados. To that I have added two pear trees, grapes and berries.

    Despite the small size of our yard and presence of all of these trees, we have plenty of space for a large garden, roses, flowers, and grass to run around. Our yard was a big part of why we bought this house, actually. With such a small interior, we wanted a space that could provide us with a wonderful outdoor lifestyle right away.

    Obviously, the yard wasn’t quite right in some ways, but the trees were spot on in their placement and size, and the layout was very good. The shade is great, and the temperature gradients they produce beat any heating/cooling system. Plus, using a phrase from dear relative, the fruit is out of this world.

    So far, the trees haven’t added much “work” to the yard care duties. The greatest effort each year is picking fruit, particularly from the 40 foot avocado tree. Collecting dropped fruit is also a chore, but nothing more than raking leaves, really. We have had issues that are on going, though. The main problem we have run into is pests. The apple tree gets wiped out each year by weevils and codling moths. and the avocado tree is a favorite of the squirrels. We also get opossums and racoons, but I think those are caused by neighborhood-wide fruit tree neglect, and are endemic. I am working on our fruit tree problems, and hopefully with the little bit of extra time I have being out of school I should come to some solutions. Inexpensive, safe and eco-healthy solutions are hard to come by, but I have some ideas.

    The only other expenses so far besides time and water (a complicated issue I’ll touch on as I go along), has been an arborist and fertilizer. The tree trimmer was pretty expensive, but that really is a cost of home ownership, with a little previous neglect thrown in. The bags of Dr. Earth fertilizer aren’t cheap either, but when purchased in bulk, they pay for themselves in added productivity. I think I’ve added 50-100% to the orange crop, just with the application of a few dollars worth of fertilizer.

    Urban fruit trees are fairly common in California, but taking them to that next orchard level is often overlooked, yet very doable. It was quite common in the years of old, and hearkens back to another era when people put a lot of time into food and home life. Now it provokes a lot of questions about maintenance and time requirements; priorities have shifted. So far, for us having an urban orchard is proving to be lost treasures we never knew about, and one we intend to add to.

  • The economics of a rain barrel

    My water company charges $2.99 for a unit of water, which is defined as 100 cubic feet, or 748.5 gallons. This breaks down to just under 4 tenths of one cent per gallon of water that comes through the pipes. So what do we get for that 0.4 cents? We get water from a local well, possibly mixed with some surface water from a nearby reservoir, some chlorine, some dissolved minerals, and a little bit of organic matter.

    A rain barrel is typically about 50-60 gallons, so every time it fills up you are accumulating about 20-23 cents worth of water at the water utility rate. What do you get?

    If a rain barrel costs about $80+ to make or buy you would have to fill it up and empty it 400 times to break even. And, if you get around 20-40 chances a year to fill it up, we are talking 10 to 20 years ROI for a rain barrel. Yikes! That is not a good investment!

    So why do it? Why spend the money and time? Is it that feeling of freedom and independence of “going off the grid?” Maybe a bit of nostalgia for how our farming forefathers and foremothers used to do things? I would say it is a little of all of this, and a little more.

    Setting up a rain barrel has a bit of that DIY feeling that gardening, canning, sewing, etc. have. There is no immediate need to do any of it, but there are enough little good reasons, and enough little pleasures in doing it, that it is worth it. A wine barrel just looks neat around the house, particularly one from France.

    A big part of this sort of project for most people is a sense of connection. Like growing a tomato out in the yard, there is something wonderful about being a part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for one’s family. I would say the majority of people never get a chance (nor are interested) in seeing how their water gets to them. Turn on the faucet and water comes out. Harvesting some rain water lets us see and feel where our water is coming from. It is a reattachment to the seasons, and to the nature of rain. We are so sheltered from the atmosphere and weather, this sort of project is a way to get us thinking about how the seasons affect us again. Rain harvesting is a lesson on what the rainy season used to mean. Is it a green season, or a white season? Will it have an impact on you this year? How should I plan for the coming months?

    A rain barrel is a sort of slow motion alarm clock that is controlled by nature, and can’t be set by our hands. It will fill according to some other system that we have all too often forgotten and disconnected from. In that relationship, the ROI has already been met.

    I now have 50 gallons of murky water in this thing to use, and return to nature. It sits there to be used before the next rain. It sits there outside waiting for use. It is also waiting in my mind as a reminder that the Green season is approaching, and that the grasses are growing; that the natural cycle still affects us even if we often choose not to see it.