Homestead Happenings

This posts aims to answer the question: Would there be anything redeeming about August in East Texas if it weren’t for the watermelons?

I repeat this every year. But I can’t help repeating it again. When we first came here and I’d spent my first August, I was mostly without Hubby because he would often get stuck offshore in the Gulf for bad weather or working over for vacationing colleagues. I swore I would find a way to travel in August, just like the French.

The heat is brutal, the garden mostly gone. Actually, it amazes me anything can survive out there, and yet, plenty of plants are thriving.

And now I can’t imagine having a happy vacation when we’ve got bushels of grapes to harvest and after that bushels of pears, which then must all be processed.

Into wine! I know I shouldn’t whine. It’s not every year we get either good grapes or good pears, and this year we’ve got both.

Wine-making has proven to be a reasonable replacement for my sudden loss in cheese-making ability. That story has only gotten worse, so I’m going to avoid telling it, at least for now. Like I said, August is bad enough already.

While we have made hard cider from the pears and a bit of wine from grapes in past years, I really had no idea how versatile wine-making could be. Since last post I’ve added cantaloupe wine to the rows—joining Elderberry, Blackberry, Wild grape, and mead.

Cantaloupe wine? Who knew! But after giving these great big delicious 20- pounders to friends and eating them daily we still had so many and they were ripening so fast we had to do something. We forgot to keep track, but we had at least 15 of them, off only 3 plants.

Enough to make 3 gallons of wine. I plan to make cider from it as well. Imagine all the fun we’ll be having wine tasting in December! (That’s exactly what I’m doing, a lot of imagining, to keep my mind off the miserable sweltering reality.)

Now we’ve also got a couple buckets going of our cultivated grapes: white and red muscadines, sometimes also known as Scuppernongs.

If you’re not from the Southern US you’ve probably never heard of Scuppernongs because they don’t have a good reputation among wine connoisseurs and don’t grow north of the Mason-Dixon line, as far as I know.

And they aren’t really suitable for table grapes either, unless your table allows for a lot of spitting.

Good enough for country wines, they say. So, good enough for me!

In fact they are really delicious. Beyond bursting with juicy sweetness, the green ones especially have varied and complex notes, sharp and earthy. The red ones have such an huge pop of intense grape flavor I’m reminded of manufactured fake grape flavors from childhood, Jolly Ranchers and Bubbalicious gum. Sad, but true, since I never tasted such fruit as a kid.

Except, that these have a tough skin and big seeds. And they are really a pain to harvest. If the weather were nice it wouldn’t be so bad at all. But the thing about muscadine grapes is they don’t ripen in nice clusters like the fancy grapes of more civilized peoples. 😆

Every other day we’re out there gathering these plump gems from under their enormous vines, one by one, little jewels among the masses of deep green leaves. They’ve done remarkably well this year, after a dismal last year, and a meager crop the year before, and just when we were starting to worry all our hard work planting them was wasted.

I wish we knew the trick, Hubby tends the vines and he did nothing different this year from the previous.

We did have the big rain with a nice temperature drop, which also brought down another big tree, right through a fence, as per usual. It seems we lose a big tree with every rain event these days.

Too bad, because that oak has been providing a lot of acorn forage for the critters in autumn. There are several other nearby mature oaks looking like they are also about to keel over.

But, the pears have been spared and that will be our next big project in the blazing heat. Yay! 🤪

Three hard pear trees, two which were the only cultivated fruit trees here when we arrived, abandoned and still producing, bringing the feral hogs many happy meals. They produce prolifically when they produce, which is every 3 years on average. Plus one we planted in our still struggling orchard, it does really well most years, having gotten the regular run-off from our duck tub from it’s early years.

But the real pièce de résistance this year especially has been the watermelons.

They’ve not been as prolific as the cantaloupes, but they are some of the best I’ve ever eaten. Watermelons are Hubby’s preference, so he’s been in hog heaven every day, and the hogs are in a similar heaven with all the rinds they’ve been eating.

August has a few redeeming qualities after all. I don’t think I could make it through otherwise.

At sunset, within one hour they all open together while the bees get furiously busy. If you can’t catch the scent at just that initial pip of release, it’s instantly gone. Such an inimitable fragrance, enough to keep a woman longing, just long enough, that August might be gone again, and we’ll forget. It’s not so bad, right?

Until the next August.

Datura inoxia perhaps signaling the season of intoxia? Because we’re making lots of wine and it helps to get intoxicated to get through it? 😆

Thanks for stopping by!