Still at it...

Even though we've had a few frosts, and the garden is rather bare and sad-looking, we have plenty of food processing left at Seven Trees. Our hearth has been doing yeoma'am's duty, curing squash, ripening peppers (in paper bags with an apple for ethylene gas), drying beans and wet outerwear. The kitties will be happy when there's room for them to bask in the heat again.

Here's a new batch of kraut-chi in the works. We added some grated beets to this one, so it's now pink-chi.

We had to do a rush harvest of all the peppers left in the garden, thanks to the sub-freezing nights we've had lately. They weren't all fully ripened, but look at the color on those Jimmy Nardellos!

We put a light in the coop for the hens, to help them keep laying as the days get shorter. They get a couple hours, morning and night. At bedtime, they tend to go in & out like it was a poultry night club. Mornings, they get up in the dark and are looking for scratch while it's pitch black. I've never had hens who liked the dark, but as long as they're happy, we're happy....
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We have a few batches of homebrew in the works now - a spiced winter ale just bottled, an English bitter that will be bottled next week, and a cyser, made from fressed pressed apple juice and raw honey, still bubbling away in the carboy. If we can find enough cheap pears tomorrow, we'll press them for perry and try a batch of hard pear cider.