Chillies

Autumn leapt directly into winter this year and the first hard freeze of the year came up with a howling wind. Per my habit, that meant a frigid evening of harvesting the remaining chiles from the plants.

All the colors of the rainbow - Santaka and Habanero chiles

As always with the final harvest, many of the chiles are still green with some in transition. Capsicum is basically a tropical perennial plant from Central America that doesn't know that ice and snow are coming to kill them. So they go about their business as though summer will continue forever. The last picking is consequently a snapshot of the plants which contain fruit at virtually all stages of development from flowering through red, ripeness. The Habaneros are particularly prismatic this year as I grew a red variety which transitions from green through an orangy-yellow stage to the final crimson colorway.

In addition to the mandatory Habaneros that make up the backbone of each year's crop, I planted two Japanese varieties and one Bolivian. The Japanese are the Santaka which I have not tried before and the Takanotsume, which I have grown before with great success. Back in 1996 when I was just getting started growing hot peppers in earnest, I was living in northwest Ohio in an apartment with access to about an acre of rich, black garden. Among the first batches of Picante sauce I ever made was a batch of Takanotsume, and to this day it is remembered by some of the very few, very lucky recipients. The Santaka is a similar chile, so I am hoping for similar results.

The Bolivian peppers are actually mongrels. They sprouted from saved Bolivian Rainbow seed, but as I am not a disciplined saver of seed, they are likely mixed with genes from nearby plants. They certainly did not display the lovely purple commonly associated with this particular cultivar. But they're packed with seeds, have nice heat and should make a good sauce. 

"Bolivian Rainbow" in X-mas colors!

So production of this year's picante sauce is well underway, with the early ripe Habanero already in the bottles. There will be just enough green chiles to get out a run of picante verde in each variety and probably a couple of bottles of field blend. Just a little something to warm a body through the winter...

Ripe, red organic Habanero, distilled vinegar and a squirt of lime juice. Nothing else. 

The Rut

The autumn has come and soon it will be hunting season. Okay, it's already hunting season, but I can't go yet on account'a I got this job and all. So, following the emerging pattern over the last two years, I'll take to the mountain during the week of Thanksgiving. It's becoming a family tradition, heading to the mountain with my uncle and whatever other family members are willing to come up and spend time tramping around the frozen forest from predawn to post-dusk.

This is what it looks like at my parents' house at Thanksgiving. How 'bout yours?

Of course successful hunting trips don't just happen. Like everything else in life (delightful Thanksgiving meals, for instance or securing the right to an adequate standard of living) they take planning and preparation. This year I got a non-resident lifetime Virginia Hunting License and bought the requisite Bear/Dear/Turkey tags early, so I'm legal. The paperwork is in order and I'm all set should Game Warden Timmy inquire about my bona fides.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

So, with my '42 Swedish Mauser I'm all set for deer. With the proper planning this year I should get five full days in. Many of the hunters up at Paddy Mountain extend their season by going out for the late muzzle-loader season, which could add another couple of weeks of opportunity, and my uncle offered to lend me a spare muzzle. But that would require an additional license and the season goes from December 13 - January 3, during which I'd probably have a hard time getting away from work and family obligations.

So this year I figured I would go out for Fall Turkey in addition to deer, which will extend the season at least as long as black powder would, and probably more. Plus my license runs through the Spring Turkey season so I can potentially go out again in April. Last year while I was ostensibly deer hunting, I heard what could only have been turkey up the hollow overlooking which I had established my stand. And this year while scouting around I found two turkey feathers quite close to the hunt club. So I've kind of got turkey fever. With that in mind, I turned my attention to my tools. I have a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun left to me by my uncle, but it had a 28 inch barrel with a fixed modified choke; good for deer, but not so much for turkey which require a very narrow choke to keep the shot in a tight pattern. So I picked up a 24 inch turkey-specific replacement barrel and an XX-full choke tube - the narrowest I could find.

A proper turkey gun. Mossberg 500A, with a 24" vent rib bead sight blued finish barrel 90135

...and an XX-Full choke tube.

A few weeks ago I went up to the range to figure out what ammo to use. I've settled on Winchester Long Beard XR. I also tried Remington Turkey Loads, but the Winchester held a much tighter pattern much farther out. The description of their revolutionary polymer technology seems a bit gimmicky, and I worry that I am filling the woods with tons of plastic, but in my highly unscientific survey, they really did perform far better than the competition. For the moment I'm sold.

So now the ol' Mossberg is a proper turkey gun. Maybe not a perfect turkey gun, but good enough. And shortening the barrel by 4 inches makes the gun feel infinitely less cumbersome for a little guy like your faithful author. By contemporary standards a turkey gun should probably be all camo'd out. Apparently turkeys have good eyesight, and the conventional wisdom is that you need to be completely invisible. I've been advised to wear the equivalent of a camo burqa, and to paint my face in festive RealTree™. Turkeys are known to have very good hearing too, which is why, when hunting them you need to be vewy, vewy qwiet. Since this is my first foray into the quest to get a gobbler, I'm not quite ready to go full Rambo. I reckon the pilgrims managed to kill turkey with blunderbusses while wearing buckled shoes. So I should be fine in my LL Bean camo and Mossberg 500a.

Historically valid proof that the Pilgrims used blunderbusses to hunt turkeys - Gobble gobble BANG!

Speaking of shoes, that's another preparation I've made for the season. I got the old Chippewa Arctic 50s out of the closet and put a coat of beeswax on them, the better to keep the tootsies toasty and dry. I used the Justin boots beeswax-based waterproofing they gave me up to the Alvin Stokes General Store when I bought the boots last year. I am of the opinion that beeswax is by far the best treatment for waterproofing, and the fact that this was free from the manufacturer pretty much sealed the deal. And sealed the boots! The treatment darkened the leather a bit, which I like a lot. The Arctic 50 only comes in a colorway known as Bay Apache, a pleasant medium brown, but if I had my druthers I would have preferred a darker color in the first place. So form follows function and I couldn't be happier.

Newly waxed Chippewa Arctic 50's

During the summer The Managing Partner and I made a scouting trip up to Paddy Mountain to do some maintenance on my blind. It was always a kind of ramshackle affair to begin with; well situated with long sight lines in several directions, but with no more cover than a hastily assembled brush pile. We spent a couple of hours gathering up branches and leaves to construct a serviceable camouflage barrier which should obscure my presence. By the time I'm sitting in it, the blind will have been there for several months, so hopefully the wildlife will have come to take its presence for granted and won't notice the little man now sitting in it. 

So I got my gun set up, my boots are waxed and the blind is in tip top shape. The leave slip has been turned into the boss, and the plan is to spend the entire week up at the Twin Spurs Hunt Club. We will come down from the mountain long enough to make our way to Chester Gap for the Thanksgiving feast with family. Then it will be back to the mountain for the last couple of days of the deer season. Judging from the impending polar vortex, I'm sure going to be glad to have those fleece lined boots.