Thursday, October 28, 2010

Life's Grape

I blame most of this on my mother, somehow she managed to pass on to me a love for the soil and anything that grows... maybe it has something to do with countless hours spent "weeding" the garden, or "picking rocks" out of the ground, so the plants would have a fighting chance at growing. Whatever the reason, it is in my blood now.

When we first moved to the Springs, I planted some grape vines... (that was 10 years ago) I imagined in my mind how nice it would be to make grape juice in the fall, and how nice it would be to have fresh grape juice thoughout the winter months. There are few things as comforting as a nice glass of fresh grape juice, (not "Welche's" from Wal Mart) but the real thing.

I knew that grape vines took a few years to get established, and you had to keep them pruned, and all of that, and I'm a pretty patient guy. My parent's and my wife's parents both had grape vines growing in their back yards in Utah, and they would have had to take an axe and flame torch to them to kill them off. Every year they would have grapes hanging in beautiful clusters all along the fence, with little to no effort on their part, so it couldn't be that hard to grow grapes could it.

Utah and Colorado....NOT THE SAME. I started out with 5 vines, now I have 2. Through freezing winters, hail the size of golf balls, wind storms, Ice storms, and rain that would make Noah envious, it is amazing I still have these 2 vines left.

So you can imagine my elation after 10 years of waiting to finaly have grapes on my vines this year. Ok there wasn't bushels of them, but there were a lot...Ok, maybe not alot but there were quite a few...well, at least 5 lbs, OK, Ok it was like 5 small clusters. But they were beautiful.

I convinced my wife that we couldn't let these beautiful grapes go to waste, and that it would be a good "Investment" for future bountiful crops to come, if we purchased a steam juicer.

The Juicer arrived via UPS a few days later, and I went out and picked my grapes, brought them into the house, got everything set up and 1 hour later had 1 quart of fresh grape juice, right from my own grape vines.

Yes, factoring in the cost of the juicer, that 1 quart cost me about $60.00, it somehow didn't matter. And next year....it's going to be a bumper crop.

To offset the cost of the Juicer it didn't take much convincing from my wife to make the 9 hour drive to Utah, to some more grapes from her parents...

We ended up with about 3 bushels of grapes, and we also got 3 boxes of apples from my parents. So now we are the proud owner of 34 quarts of Grape juice, fresh apple juice and some wonderful apple sauce...


So thanks Mom, I'll send you a bottle

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