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Village Squire, 1976-09, Page 16well tb get rid of the strings, and put it back in the casserole dish anyway only with a pie crust under it. Some people have said that cooked squash tastes remarkably like cooked pumpkin; not that I've tried it yet but may have to. The beets have been growing steadily all summer and are now the size of turnips but they are dutifully packed in sand. Some I have pushed into jars in an attempt to pass them • off as bit -size elegant pickles. These will be served at Christimas time. Likely. The carrots too are packed in sand. some of the roots are wrapped around each other in a lover-like embrace, but they are packed in sand and not kept aside for admiration. Some people leave their carrots in the garden and merely pile them over with leaves and stake the rows, and then have the urge for a carrot in a blizzard and have to go out and dig them up. Brave the wind and dig and stuff like that. I search for onions in the weeds and put them on a chicken wire rack to dry. It will likely rain every day for weeks before I take them in, so it won't be difficult to have soft onions before February. Then there are pears to pick, since the trees are heavily loaded. I let the riper ones stay on and pick the green ones later. The ones that ripen first are the wormy ones. I am up on a wobbly ladder and I hear footsteps and feel a furtive hand on my leg. "Here, let me straighten it for you." Jerk. Jerk. The concern is not appreciated. I am half-way up the ladder and it gives a crash downward into the tree, not to the ground by any means but far enought to rattle my co-ordination. "There," says the voice. "Now you have something. to lean against." Presumably meaning a thicker limb or a thatch of branches or something. Shrieking is all my mental faculties allow (I hear a laugh . but I'm too scared to look) besides trembling. So now my knees shake as I pick and more pears than necessary fall to the ground, due to the ladder, branches and tree reverberat- ing with my knees. We have so many pears from these trees 14, VILLAGE SQUIRE/SEPTEMBER 1976 that after eating and preserving we have to mash the rest for pear wine. This wine besides being sweet is unique. It's full of protein.I hate to see anything go to waste. So I make wine but my efforts do not run according to, the method put out by the Ministry of Agriclture or the recipes found in wine books. Mine is a hit or miss method. I mash the fruit, add an equal amount of Iikewarm water and as much sugar as I think it needs and wait. It has never failed to produce for me: 1) sparkling wine that was good. You will just have to believe this as there is none left to prove it. 2) some that did a good job of cleaning out my drain. 3) ,some that you could say was vinegar. 4) some other drinkable stuff (manufact- urer's opinion). If you don't have pears you could try: beets (the wine tastes beety), leftover fjuits and vegetables from the freezer all mashed and fermenting together. If this sounds unapetiz- ing you could try these -- recipes I found for cabbage wine, beetroot and pineapple wine, onion wine, green tomato wine -- unromantic stuff. Ply him with onion wine. Will you really want the results? After you have got the fruit and water and sugar thrown together, cover it tightly, because if you don't, flies get in and in a few days small things begin to crawl. That will put an end to your wine making. use a well -washed battery acid bottle with a fermentation lock in the opening or a hose leading from the opening to a water -filled beer battle. This makes a loud blurp, blurp sound, something to remember if your neigtjbours are within hearing distance. If ou bottle your wine too early, it will explode inside a cupboard and drip through the cracks. I am speaking from experieince of course, since more than one bottle of mine did this and on one occasion, the cork hit the ceiling. Sooner or later I have to quit making wine and get preserving; take last night's peach preserving binge. Plans were to do down a bushel. I sat trying to imagine what they were going to taste like in the winter. I had peach juice running down my arms, twitching nose, and itching eyes. I annihilated one peach that wasn't quite ripe enough trying to get the stone out. Nobody would eat the sloppy thing so I had to. My thumbs, impatient to get the peach halves apart, were impaled on every tenth pit. They have very nasty points. Maybe I'll quit prematurely, I thought, snuffling away. I tried to use less sugar than usual, a real dilemma because peaches frozen without sugar taste like wet cardboard. I decided to have yummt peaches once a month rather than wet cardboard every week. On with the sugar. I shoved my arm in the bag and sloped the peaches around to get them covered with the sticky syrup. No sense in having brown mush. Finally, with dehydrated and sore fingers and sticky arms to the elbows, I finished the last bag. My face felt as if it could move away. As I survey my efforts, I know I shouldn't pat myself on the back. The peaches are not quite the perfect halves they are supposed to be.. The dill pickles. One bottle is suspiciously cloudy. Probably all the salt is in one bottle 'and none in the others. Last year's were gritty. Tonight corn juice will be running down my arms. What will I do all winter? Taste my wine, test it, have my friends test it, to see if it's better or worse, or the same, even if I have to get my nose down to the hole in the battery acid bottle to savour the bouquet. Banana and fig wine, blackberry wine, elderberry wine, cherry wine, peach sauterne what a bouquet. There comes a time in the fall when I put an arbitrary end to the canning and all that (masculine wiles to -no avail). Either I run out of jars or out of persistence and hide the jars, whichever comes first. And the end, I think, is coming soon.