Cider Time

Apologies for the long, blogless gap!

Today we have finally collected all our apples together (homegrown and scrumped) and have pressed them into juice, which we will then turn into cider!

Here are some pictures of the stages of the process that we have carried out today, and below these are some photos of the beautiful autumnal countryside behind our house, and my latest creation: what will hopefully turn out to be a Victorian-ish-style dress made from an old shirt and an old size 20 tartan dress. What you see there are the minute has been made simply from 2 sleeves. I'm making it up as I go along, pinning the fabric to the dummy and tacking it in place. Fingers crossed it turns out ok! Apologies for the quality of the photos, I took them on my phone.

Mega Update!

I don't seem to have blogged in ages, probably due to the fact that there has been loads going on recently, not least my starting at college! I'm studying English Lit and an art course that lets me try everything from painting to pottery to patchwork to photography. So far it's all going really well!

Anyway, here are some of the other things that have been going on lately:

^ Dad and Pops in the canoe, picking blackberries from the canal bank.

^ Poppy suddenly decided that she liked jam, so we made some Blackberry and Apple.

^ Blackberry wine and Blackberry and Apple jam.

^ Apple wine. The key difference between cider and apple wine is that with cider you crush the juice out of the apples and ferment that. With apple wine you crush the apples and soak them in water. Then when the apple flavour has permeated the water, you ferment that.

^ Dad beekeeping.

^ Worker bees eating up some spilled honey.

^ Some of my handspun yarns soaking in hand hot water to set the twist. The grey-brown stuff is my weaving teacher Carole's corriedale fibre from her own sheep! I spun it very slubby and textured, and it's a 2-ply. It came out at about 8 wraps per inch.

^ I knitted my Corriedale handspun into a nice slouchy hat! Here I am with my new hat and some of Mum's clay jewellery that she made me. Sorry for the poor picture quality! I finished the hat on August 31st so I had better think of something else to make for my September Style Challenge!

^ Honey bee on golden rod in the garden yesterday.

^ Brandywine tomatoes fattening up - can't wait to taste these beauties.

^ Today we planted pretty pansies in the garden for winter colour. They're really amazing plants - some that we planted two years ago were still going by last summer. They flowered the whole year except January! The name pansy comes from the French "pensee" which means "thought" (n)...so here are some very happy thoughts.

^ Pabi Bach digging up and rehoming strawberry runners.

^ My first (and as yet only) Blue Hubbard Squash! I harvested it yesterday and am now allowing the pale underside to cure.

^ Bear's Britches fading flower heads. Mum likes to dry these and have them in a vase. When the seeds are dry they go pinging all over our living room.

^ Apple blossom on the trees. If a fruit tree hasn't set (enough) fruit in the spring, sometimes it will try again in the autumn when the weather cools down again. Luckily we have a few apples to enjoy as well as the lovely blossom.

^ Purple verbena flowers - been going for months! - in front of Mum's pink rose.

^ The garden, with a purple cotinus and golden rod in the foreground.

So that's it. It's well and truly autumn now. Although we still have sunny days the Canada geese fly over our house every morning and evening and I'm already pining for hearty lamb casseroles and savoy cabbage fried with lovely streaky bacon.......shame I'm veggie really!

Blackberries

On Saturday Dad, Pabi Bach and I went blackberry picking. It was gloriously hot weather and luckily in the fields behind our estate there were already plenty of blackberries for the picking.

After just an hour of lazy picking we had 2.5kg of berries. 2kg of this went to wine, and the other 500g went into a blackberry and apple pie, made with some of our own windfall cooking apples too! Despite being diabetic-friendly (i.e. no sugar, even in the pastry) the pie was still deliciously sweet. I can assure you that it looked most impressive when it first came out of the oven but by the time I'd got to it with the camera there wasn't much left!

^ Pabi Bach drinking milk and stirring the wine

^ The foam on top of the wine

^ Pie!

And Sunday's supper was a barbecque, which included some rather delicious vegetable kebabs made with aubergine, mushrooms, red onion, green pepper, red pepper (Jim's* homegrown ones), and our homegrown tomatoes.

*Jim is my boss at the bamboo nursery. Last night he managed to randomly find the blog and all this morning was quoting the things I wrote about him. So I'm going to have to be terribly complimetary about him now, at the expense of The Awful Truth. Apologies. Although he did give me a hydrophobia unknownii to take home today (some kind of ginger, I dunno the name).

PS: I seem to be having some trouble with Blogger at the moment with putting the picutres in nicely, so sorry that all the gaps are a bit wonky. I'm working on making the blog pretty again.

The Best Shades of Purple...

A couple of weekends ago we all went on a walk together to see how the hedgerow fruit was doing. Nothing was quite perfect then, although Dad and I did taste a couple of damsons (small plums) that were close to ripeness. Well, this morning as we were on our way to work we passed the same damson tree and at its feet lay a small puddle of little indigo spheres. When we came back the same way this afternoon there were even more on the ground. So an hour ago we set off with a brewing bucket to go and pick some up!

We started off just picking the ones on the pavement, but soon had all the good ones. Dad went up the drive and asked the owner if it was alright for us to pick the windfalls on their (very long) drive, and they said yes! So in the end we came back with a 23 litre bucket 3/4 full of damsons - and those were just the windfalls we picked in 1/2 an hour!

We're going to put them down to wine. But the best thing is that as we were picking a couple of other people drove past and offered us their fruit - apples and what I think were possibly cherry plums! So there is more picking to be done! (And I think that after our allotment campaign has been successful I may start another one for a community allotment/forest garden...so hopefully there will be bountiful harvests well into the future!).

My next shade of purple is the purple of the cardoon flower. The cardoon is my Mum's pride and joy. It's a member of the artichoke family and in Italy they eat the blanched stems (we don't bother - Mum tried them when she lived there and says they are nothing to write home about). So we grow it purely because Mum likes it! Dad is always insulting it, though I can't think why as it's a terrific bee plant and the flowers when they arrive are truly magnificent. We're planning to enter some stuff in our beekeeping association's Honey Show this year. Dad tells me that there is a photographic category this year, so I've been trying to get some good snaps on bees on this unusual flower. Here are some of the not-so-good ones (I'm keeping the best ones under my hat for now...).

And to conclude, it's not a shade of purple but here is a pic of the fields behind our village when I went on a walk there yesterday afternoon.

Thinking About Autumn

I know it's only August but autumn will be upon us before we know it! Although I'll miss the summer weather (yes, who could do without rain, rain, and a bit more rain?!) the excitement of the harvest is already making me fidget with anticipation.


The first blackberries are just beginning to ripen, heralding the beginning of crumbles, pies and lovely warming puddings for the darkening evenings. Last year was an absolutely amazing year for apples and haws (hawthorn berries) - this year they aren't doing quite as well, but we'll still be scrumping away and making apple wine, cider, and endless apple sauce and puddings. I can't wait for our kitchen to be permeated with the smell of slowly disintergrating apples - yellow, green, pink-blushed, red...


It's a good prunus year this year though. There are sloes everywhere, so dense in places that the hedge appears blue. They're not quite ripe yet but it won't be long. Their big sisters the damsons are already ripening up - we all went on a walk at the weekend and found one bush where the damsons were already soft and sweet enough to eat raw...with these fruits we'll be making alcohol - damson wine, sloe gin and sloe sherry...these are my favourite drinks. The sloe concoctions are too sweet to drink in any great quantity but they make the perfect apperitif for a cold winter night...it's just a shame that they have to age for at least a year before they're drinkable!


I have my list of foraging spots ready to go, and am hoping to get out in the canoe soon to sample the wild raspberries that nestle in a very secret spot on the canal bank...if I told you where they are, I'd have to kill you.


My squashes are now really fattening up. They've still got plenty of little fruits left to form but the existing ones are really soaking up any sunshine that manages to peep through the cloud. The Delicata is now bigger than my fist and the Blue Hubbard is actually beginning to turn blue-grey. I can't wait to be eating my own recipe spicy squash soup with parmesan croutons, and the roasted spiced squash that we always eat with Christmas dinner!


The sweet corn is flowering, as are the sunflowers, both of whom will be setting seed as summer turns to autumn. Beetroot and parsnips are swelling under the ground. The late flowers, such as lavenders, dahlias, goldenrod and agapanthus are flowering too. White clover covers the fields like snow. It smells like honey!


As far as bees are concerned, the queen will begin to slow down laying through the autumn, perhaps even stopping completely in the depths of winter. At the moment however it is still all hands on deck; the girls are bringing in nectar, propylis, and pollen in preparation for the cold months ahead. It's been so interesting this year to see how the colony changes throughout the season. For example, earlier in the year when we allowed them to build some comb without foundation, they were putting drone brood everywhere. Now even the drone traps are bursting with worker brood.


This year we have expanded our number of hives by more than 300%. Next year however we will be focusing on maintaining our current numbers and encouraging them to produce honey. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it's now time to turn our attention to preparing the bees for winter. We'll be feeding them sugar and honey to increase their stores and to help them build out the new foundation that we've given them. It takes seven parts of honey/sugar for a bee to produce one part of wax, so giving them some extra food will allow them to build comb without depleting their stores before the winter even arrives. Getting the bees through the winter healthy and happy is now number one priority.


This autumn I'll be making a few changes to the garden. We have lots of room to plant new things. I want to cover our fence in Japanese Wineberry, rambling roses, passion flowers (and fruits!) and Clematis. I want to grow some Camassia quamash, Houttuynia cordata (orange bush, used for flavouring in Vietnamese food, aparently) and all sorts of other oddities. I also have my eye on zingibers (gingers) and musas (bananas) for inside the house...the zingibers at work are in flower and they smell like lilies, only better! The citruses are also in flower, their heavy neroli scent hangs like a cloud in the Old Glasshouse. That reminds me that in a few months the oranges and clementines will be in season, and we'll be studding them with cloves to make pomanders! And soon after that we'll be racking our brains to think of a way of making diabetic-friendly marmalade for Dad's delectation and delight! (This year we tried setting it with orange jelly...a complete disaster! But we might try gelatine again).


It's hard to believe that in a few short months I'll be gagging for spring to come so I can get planting stuff in the garden. Most of the plants I've grown this year are annuals so they'll all be gone, but next year I'll just start again and have an even better season than this one (I'll be sowing my peas direct!!!). I also have some new experiments I want to try next year - I want to try growing chickpeas and lentils, and some unusual chilli and tomato varieties too. And who knows, I may even have a brand new allotment for my late crops to colonise!

First Fruits

Today I picked some of the first fruits from our garden - the first gooseberries, white and black currants and some strawbs. We've been picking the strwabs for about a week now but there are still loads more to come. Our ones don't have that perfect balance of sharp and sweet that you get with the best strawberries, but they have such a flowery honey taste - they're just so fragrant, I can't believe that strawberries can actually taste like honey!

So far my phormium fruit net appears to be working! I don't think the blackbirds have had any yet so it's looking good. The strawberries are doing so well this year because although they're in the ground (lots of people prefer to grow them in containers) Poppy, whose plants they are, has tied them so that the plants are raised well above the ground. This stops all the creepy crawlies getting to them first and I think it helps them to ripen too.

The rest of the garden is looking good too. I'm fairly late planting out my tomatoes - the first couple of fruits have set now, with more flowers on the way, although the plants are pretty pot bound so I need to get a move on. The rest though is looking promising - the loofa has gone beserk, we're harvesting the first batch of turnips now, the peas are flowering and out the front...the sweetcorn is making good progress (it literally doubled in size with the rain last week), I've got the first couple of courgettes getting bigger every day and the beans are beginning to climb and even to flower!

Above: dwarf Lingua di Fuoco borlotti bean flowers.

Above: Dwarf beans (French & runner), sweetcorn and climbing beans (French, Italian & runner) growing with a couple of sunflowers, ppurple elder, foxgloves, snapdragons and other pretty things.

Above: First courgette!

The comfrey has more or less finished flowering now so I'll be chopping that back and making nice things with it - everything from liquid manure to luxurious hand cream with any luck! There is still plenty of stuff in flower though; take a look.

Over the past fortnight we've been doing a bit more alcohol too. We racked off our Damson Jam Wine - it's lovely, almost like a liqueur! Because it was made from jam however the sediment included solids that looked like this (below). This is what happens when your wine has pectin in it. When you make jam you need pectin to set the jam to the right consistency; in winemaking you try and kill the pectin off with an enzyme called pectolase. It looks like we didn't put in quite enough pectolase, but it was easy to rack the liquid off and we'll see what the wine's like when it's matured!

We also made some elderflower champagne a couple of weeks ago, and racked it off into demijohns earlier this week. We used Hugh F-W's recipe from River Cottage Spring...smells great, but at the moment it just tastes like sugar water. It's bubbling away now though so the magic will be happening. We'll be going out in the canoe this weekend (great for reaching all the wildfood that you can't reach from the bank!) and picking another batch, as well as looking out for other goodies...on a very small strecth of canal we can pick blackberries, hazelnuts, watermint and even wild raspberries...

Elderflower wine. See Hugh F-W's recipe at this link here: http://www.channel4.com/food/recipes/chefs/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall/elderflower-champagne-recipe_p_1.html

We were called out to a swarm yesterday and it turned out to be an entire wild colony living inside the cavity wall of a farm shed. So we have a major operation on our hands tonight. It's really important that we get this colony - a) it's nice for us to have more bees (and to get them for free) and b) wild colonies in the UK are very rare now, due to varroa, and they almost invariably die out over winter. So we need to save these honey bees and take them somewhere safe and warm.

There have been a lot of bee thefts in our area of late - a few up in Shropshire, I think, but most of them down here in Hampshire. So we're keeping the location of our apiary sites under our hats! The really sad thing about it is that it's definitely a beekeeper doing it - you can't steal bees without knowing how to move them safely! There are two theories: as bees are very expensive now, they may just be stealing them to make a bit of money, or, even sadder, it may be a bee farmer who has lost so much stock that they don't know what else to do.

Our bees are looking OK at the moment, apart from some new nucs we made up and gave new Carnolean queens. They were fairly small to begin with but a few are even smaller now. The queens have been released now though so soon their populations should start building up. We had to rescue one queen though when she was more or less abandoned by her colony and left to freeze to death. She's living on top of the stove at the moment with some workers to keep her warm, and this weekend we'll find a home for her, ASAP!

General Update

We have made some mead. We didn't use our own honey, as there isn't terribly much of it, so instead we bought some cheap summer honey from Lidl and used that. The mead is flavoured with some Twinings Raspberry, Strawberry and Loganberry tea - you can use all sorts of things to flavour mead, and in one of my favourite books, one about herbs, it mentions a bark container found in a Danish bog that had mead residue in it, from which scientists could establish that the mead had been flavoured with about 20 different things!

It is fermenting away furiously, is currently pretty cloudy and very frothy on top.

The garden is very spring like and we have eaten the first of the kale that we planted last year, as well as salads. Since the last post we have had one or two other salads. I really enjoy harvesting things from the garden, so I tend to go a bit overboard when Mum asks me to pop out to get a lettuce! The last salad I made contained:

• Little Gem lettuce
• Sugar Loaf chicory
  Lamb's lettuce
• Baby perpetual spinach leaves
• Lemon Balm
• Marjoram
• Fennel
• Chives
• Parsley
• Mint
  Wallflower petals
• Pansy flowers
• Young hawthorn leaves

all of which were picked from the garden!

Later on I hope to be including beetroot, young chard leaves (if the family can stand them), other lettuce varieties, nasturtium leaves, flowers and seeds, Lady's Mantle, young oak leaves, rose petals, tomatoes, onions, spring onions, and who knows what else.

I recently ordered a book from the library - "The Forest Garden" by Robert Hart, who pioneered forest gardening. It's a very thin little booklet, only about twenty pages or so, but it was really interesting to read about the first forest garden - even though forest gardening has moved on a bit since Hart made his, I think it's still good to get a sense of the evolution of an idea and go back to basics to really understand the underlying philosophy. One of the things that really struck me in the book is what he refers to as "Sallets" (salads to you and me). From what he says in the book is sounds as if Hart lived on a diet of entirely raw foods, which I can't say appeals to me, but as I am the official Provider of Salads I was interested in what he put in his - low maintenance herbs such as Good King Henry, for example, which we don't tend to eat nowadays, but which are highly nutritious and easy to grow.

I also have my eye on some other unusual plants, for this year or subsequent years. One of these is the "strawbini" as they call it on the Victoriana Nursery website (http://www.victoriananursery.co.uk/), Blitum capitatum, Chenepodium capitatum. This is a spinach-like plant that also produces red berries, which are meant to taste pretty good. It contains some odd stuff, that can cause health problems if you eat too much of it, but as this is exactly the same as spinach, comfrey, beans and pretty much any other veg you can think of, I'm not at all put off by this. As we don't have a huge amount of room to grow things in, plants that produce two crops in the space of one appeal to me!

We were meant to do our Spring Inspection today, but it is much too cold. We went down to one of our apiaries however to look at the outside of the hives, and top up the feed we're giving the nuc if necessary. A new beekeeper who Dad is mentoring came with us - a nice bloke, though he seemed a bit daunted! There certainly is a fair bit to get your head round when you start beekeeping, but I think the best thing is to get lots of help from more experienced beekeepers and just get down and do it.

The bees were not coming out at all, except for 5 minutes when the sun came out. Unfortunately what was our strongest hive last year looks barely there - if there are any bees, there are not very many. I doubt this is due to starvation, as we've been feeding them throughout the winter, or because of the weather (it was a pretty good winter this year - cold and rather dry, which the bees can cope with. It's wet weather that's really bad for them). I think varroa may have played a part in it - we treated them towards the end of last year, but when looking at the varroa counting board a while ago, varroa numbers were pretty bad. Oh well. We'll just have to be really vigilant this year, and do some more varroa trapping techniques this year.

Luckily, we've come through the two winters we've had bees pretty well. Dad's mentor had 50% losses this year - we lost one hive to starvation in the summer and perhaps one hive this year. I think ti's because we don't leave them alone in the winter like you're meant to - we can't keep away and we're always topping up their feed and generally being overprotective, although I don't doubt that there's some beginners' luck in there too.

Dad and I recently tried tapping one of the enormous ash trees that grow in our back garden - I carved a funnel type piece of wood, we drilled a hole in the tree and slid the funnel in. Nothing happened! No sap at all! It was supposed to be about the right time of year for tapping - when the sap's rising and the leaves haven't yet come out - but it hasn't worked at all! I suppose ash might have been a bit of an odd choice of tree - birch or a maple would probably have been better - but ash is edible, if bitter, and the trees are the perfect size and strength to withstand a bit of tapping. Oh well, it'll be back to the drawing board next spring! (Though I do plan to make some ash key pickle this year, so the trees won't be completely redundant for the rest of the year!).

Peak oil is an issue that interests me, i.e. how, in the future, am I going to be able to take foreign holidays in an eco-friendly way and totally without oil?! One oil-derived product that I use pretty frequently is acrylic paint, and recently I've been wondering what I'm going to do when there is no acrylic paint left. So today I have been trying out natural paints!

They're really easy to make and as you can see from the photos, make pretty nice colours! I found a page about it here :(http://www.bl.uk/learning/artimages/sacredbook/object/paint/makingpaint.html) which mentions using Gum Arabic - as I don't have any of that however I tried using normal cooking oil. It worked a treat! I just mixed some tiny amounts of turmeric, chilli powder and ash into the oil and this is how they turned out!

The chilli powder paint in particular had little grains all over it, but after leaving it to dry for a bit I was able to just brush these off. The oil did soak through the page a bit, but not nearly as much as I'd thought it would, and dries off in not too long a time. You can also use other pigments such as charcoal, ground up brick, and talcum powder to make other colours. As I do more of this I'll be experimenting with different pigments, mixing colours, using different oils and what effects water, salt and vinegar have, etc.

I have sown a first succession of beetroot today, directly in the ground, under cover of our polytunnel. The next things to plant, in April, will be sunflowers, beans, sweetcorn, squashes, cucumbers, courgettes, loofas...the autumn-ripening summer things will be going in next! The stuff I've started off already is looking pretty good, though I'm slightly concerned that the celery hasn't germinated yet!

I'm planning to plant a Three Sisters bed this year, in the front garden, as Carol Klein did on her series Grow Your Own Veg a while back. This system was used, apparently, by the Iriquois, and sees corn, beans and squashes growing together in a symbiotic relationship: the corn supports the beans, the beans put nitrogen in the soil, and the squashes block out all the weeds.

My other big project this year is to turn a little corner of garden into a miniature forest garden! It's south-west facing, sunny, and VERY poor soil - in fact it's probably more builder's rubble than soil! We already have a crab apple tree, violets, ox-eye daisies and a lavender bush there, which we don't want to get rid of, but around these I will be planting perennial and self-seeding edible and medicinal plants, on several layers. There isn't very much room, so I'll be omitting the shrub layer for one thing, and choosing plants that are easy to grow but not too vigorous. I'll grow a climbing fruit bush/cane/creeper up the wall, and then I plan to grow beans up the trunk of the crab apple tree - the tree will provide them all the support for two or three plants, but as the beans are annuals they won't be there long enough to strangle the tree.

The first thing I need to work on is improving the soil a bit, without digging up the things we want to keep. This calls for a small amount of digging, and a lot of mulching. Eventually I want to operate a no-dig policy in the garden anyway, so this could be the perfect little corner to experiment on: just how much can I improve the appalling soil with minimal digging?