Making Pomegranate Meade

As soon as I got to La Mesa, I walked around my mom's neighborhood. I was delighted to find that pomegranates were still ripe. I found a tree in the neighborhood that was full of pomegranates, all of which were widely cracked open. I asked the woman who lived there and she said I could pick as many as I wanted.

Well, there was no way I could hope to eat all of them, as they were cracked and at peak ripeness, some starting to mold. To preserve this abundance I decided to make pomegranate meade, or honey wine.

With the help of my brother, we picked a good amount of fruits, avoiding moldy ones. I took the fruits home and separated the juicy seeds from the skins, inner membranes, etc so I had a container full of juicy seeds. I ran them through the blender, straining out the really course stuff, and was left with a thick, frothy juice, some of which we drank fresh. In two plastic pitchers I mixed the right amounts of honey, pomegranate juice, and water, and then mixed in a champagne yeast I had bought. The honey was local through People's Co op. I was hoping to use honey from my own bees but hadn't harvested it yet.

Here's the meade in its 'primary' fermentation in the plastic pitchers.


I've done wild ferments with just honey and water before but with this one, adding the champagne yeast made a big difference. The fermentation really took off, and within 4 days I transferred the meade to a gallon airlocked jug.



Now, a month or so later, the fermentation has really slowed. I sampled the meade and it's pretty good. It definitely has a bite to it from the pomegranates, though.

Landscaping

Wow, it has been a whole month since I last updated this page. A lot has been happening since my last post. The big project for me now has been landscaping my Mom's front yard. Before I started on it, it consisted of a 20 ft. tall pine tree, dead grass, and a hedge along the front of the house. The pine tree I actually planted maybe 10 years ago; it was a small christmas tree of ours one year.

The first thing I did was take out the hedge with loppers and then uprooted its many trunks with a cutter mattock and pick mattock. The cutter mattock was indispensible. This was probably the hardest part of the whole job. I then did a general cleanup of the site, removing the brick planter around the pine, chopping up the hedge trunks, etc.

The next phase consisted of design. Coming up with a good design for the front yard that will meet the needs of the client (my mom) and the needs of the local ecosystem. So what I came up with is a landscape that is low maintenance, that uses native and drought tolerant plants, will need very little irrigation, and the irrigation it does need will be suplied by an easy to use drip system, and that the plants will provide forage for birds and butterflies. It will also be aesthetically pleasing, as this is important to my Mom.

So I came up with a list of possible plants and their growth habits and needs, narrowed it down to what would work for the space, and did a layout of the planting plan, along with a dry streambed and mulched areas. I bought most of the plants at the Cuyamaca Water Conservation Garden Nursery.

Currently I am working on the irrigation system. Luckily, we already have a sprinkler system in place, and I've discovered that the existing PVC pipes will serve all the drip irrigation needs. All I have to do is add in a pressure regulator and hook into the existing system. That makes it much easier.

Now that I have the irrigation system figured out, today I will start on the earthworks: digging the dry streambed and using that earth to build a mound around the pine tree. Wish me luck!