Plants Outbound

 We're sending Allie and Adam some greenhouse plants. Allie is not a huge fan of Hoyas, but we got some barely rooted so she can try them out. Bilbergia nutans 'Domingo Marten' is a nice one, we hope she likes it. 

Adam gets 20# of goodies, including Musa 'Dwarf Namwah', the Bilbergia, Alocasia 'California', and large divisions of Heliconia 'Fire and Ice'. 

At home, the spring pruning is complete, including the grapes. Help is on the way next weekend, we're spreading twelve scoops of mulch. 

Costa Rica 2019

The blog is generally about our free time at home in Missouri, but there is precedent for publishing vacation posts. The family went to Costa Rica to ring in the new year. We had a terrific time in Guanacaste, but really, I'm just here to brag about the fish.

View from our villa

Dinner. Adam looking more serious than necessary.

We caught 16 of these, had to release most of them

Mahi mahi ceviche

Spring Fishing

Not every post can be about central Missouri gardening and grapes. Our winter just broke last week and so everything here in Fulton is 2-3 weeks behind. Gardening posts are on the way, but in the meantime, there is fishing.

Jake, Adam, David and I scheduled a trip to Florida to do some bass fishing. The idea was Jake's; he wanted to celebrate completion of his Step 1 exam, and what started as a camping trip morphed into fishing in Florida. I did a farm pond shake-down the weekend before.

I circled the 2 acre pond 8 or 10 times in under 3 hours. Cloudy water and sky prompted me to go with dark spinnerbaits and shallow crankbaits. The fish were shallow, possibly still spawning, and the bite was very good.

I ended with about 25 fish, and as a result ironed out some of my baitcasting reel issues.

On Wednesday we flew into Orlando. Miraculously, all of the flights were on time, and Adam picked us up.

We fished the Harris chain of lakes with guides Mark and Gary from Lakeside Bait and Tackle.

We think Adam got the big fish but we're certain that each of us lost a bigger one. Great weather, great time! Thanks guys!

Cooling Off (the wine, silly)

I've been thinking about ways to keep my white wine fermentations cool and slow. So far my solution has been to put the fermentation bucket in a tub, fill the tub with water, and drop ice packs in the water to keep it cool. The temps (and resulting wine) have been variable.

A thread by Sean on the WMT wine forum prompted me to get moving on this. I will need the help of my engineer son Adam. We started spec'ing it out today. We'll use a different model than Sean did. He pumped the wine itself through the cooler. I plan on only pumping the tub water through the cooler, using the water as a coolant.

I'm trying hard to contribute. I had never heard of peltier coolers, but after doing some research I found one on Amazon that seems to meet Adam's requirements. In response Adam texted,

"I checked out the specs on that TEC, it's max current is 15A but it has the various DT curves down to 3A. If we design the control loop right I bet we can get away with a 3-6A current."

Right.

Anyway, we're tentatively planning to use an Arduino unit as the controller. I'd never heard of that either until today. Stay tuned.

In the meantime today we smoked some salmon for dinner.