Cider, harvesting and patio news.

 We finally got round to bottling the 2011 cider last night.

Am slightly surprised I could find my Hydrometer straight away ( actually, am astonished!) , but pleasantly surprised by the strength the cider came out at - 6.5%, Tastes good as well :)

And I took 4 Kg of Damsons out of the freezer and set them off on the road to Damson wine ( in the white fermentation bucket)

When they have thawed I will add lots of boiling water to them, leave it to cool, add pectolase then leave them for four days, stirring now and then.

This freed up space to open freeze another 6 kg of Damsons, for use later in the year in another batch of wine or to make Jelly or Cordial. I have no time to make any more at the moment!

I have 80lb of Beth pears to process - will be using the steamer which fits on my pasteuriser to make pear and tayberry juice - and then some of the juice will be turned into pear jelly while the rest will be bottled immediately.

It is a bit of a drawn out process using the steamer/pasteuriser but it has the advantage that the juice comes out pasteurised, and just needs to go into hot bottles.

I will also cold press some of the pears and pasteurise the juice from cold - but that will be a job for the weekend, along with the first of the cider and apple juice making :)

Cheers!

Patio update :)

It's now finished, apart from the pointing, which needs a dry day and dry slabs to do. Which we did not have, yesterday or today.

I have not taken a photo of it as it has been too blooming wet!

Preserving the Harvest - dehydrating

I love my dehydrator! I have a Excalibur 5 tray dehydrator and oh how I wish I had bought a larger version.

I picked a load of Lavender and Sage for drying today - I gave them a quick rinse in water then dried them all gently on a tea towel. Then I laid them out on the dehydrator trays. Three trays of Sage and two of Lavender

It took two nights and a day for the herbs to dry to the point where I could crumble them into clean jars - our house smelt wonderful the whole time :-)

We have our own electricity supply from the pv's on the garage roof, so I use an electric dehydrator. Other people dry stuff  in the bottom oven of an Aga, or similar stove, and if we had sunshine we could use a solar dehydrator ( except of course there has been very little of that around here, this summer!). You can also dry herbs in bunches in an airing cupboard or hanging from the kitchen ceiling. I find stuff up in the rafters gets covered in cobwebs and fly poo, here so do not like doing it that way!

Because the dehydrator heater is on the very lowest setting it used about 2 Kw of electricity so cost about 30 p plus my time, of course - except, of course during the daytime, if we are not using electricity for other purposes we don't have to pay!

And this is what I had at the end - two very small jars of dried herbs. but home grown and organically produced :-) And they smelt terrific :-)

Thank you for dropping by xxx

Cider making 2011

A busy couple of hours

 

saw us turn a lot more apples

into 75 l of will-be-cider-next-year

 

and a lot of pomace for the hens to eat and the compost bins to "convert"

Apple juicing

We have had an amazing apple harvest here this year, so much so that we had to split the juicing into two sessions - the first for the apples which were destined for juice and the second session for the cider making apples.

 As usual we used The Little Cider Press Co for the juicing

 We got 35 l of juice from one pressing - thats VERY juicy apples!

So after I came home I spent the rest of a very hot afternoon filling up bottles and pasteurising them, 13 bottles at a time.

We ended up with 40 bottles of juice - should help us through the winter :-) The juice tastes wonderful - bottled sunshine!

Making cider 2010

Take 150 lbs of apples, carefully picked and placed in boxes in car boot.

Take them round to friends house where their wonderful equipment can do its stuff

Wash the apples

Feed the apples into the scratter ( to chop them up)



Chopped apples dropping into the tub, waiting to be loaded into the press.

Layers of chopped apples go into cloths ("hairs") inside frames, divided up by boards, until a stack ("cheese") has been built up, then the press gets to work and ....lots of apple juice comes out.

At the end I was left with this pommace (the remains of the chopped apples) wonderful on the compost heaps

and







30 l of cider. ( and another 25 l of pasturised juice waiting for me to go and collect it!)

Thank you Nige and Debs, another lovely session pressing apples!

Abundance

Guess what I have been doing recently?

View over the veg plot.

 

This is a busy, productive time of year, with the harvest season fast approaching. 

Time to get out the dehydrator, and clear out the freezers of the remains of last years fruit and veg. I shall make soup I think with the veg and fruit crumble or maybe wine with the old fruit!

I am now harvesting new potatoes, broad beans, chard, salads of all sorts, herbs, carrots, courgettes, peas and mange tout, the first of the french beans today and lots of cucumbers. The tomatoes outside ( left over plants , not sold or given away, which I could not bear to throw on the compost!) are also doing really well. Which is a first for me as outdoor toms have never done well, here.

The climbing beans have finally got going, the leeks , parsnips and onions are looking good and I should be lifting the garlic and shallots any day now.

Apples, pears and plum trees are all covered with fruit and we have just started picking the tayberries - yum!

All in all, it is looking good so far, so fingers crossed we have some rain ( but not too much) and sunshine!


How is it with you, all?

General catch up

Well it has been a bit manic here at Compost Mansions recently, hence the lack of posts since last weekend..(which was actually a post I did a week earlier but hadn't actually hit "post" on it....)

First, at the start of the last week I got ill...very ill....with a nasty flu-ey thing which I am only just recovering from now...I missed 2 days "outside" work ( grrr, but working with children, I couldn't either ethically contemplate dosing myself up and going, nor was I actually well enough to do so anyway...)

I was chilled, sweating, aching, sore throat, headache, sick, had the runs and generally felt like I had been hit all over by very angry, big people with very big sticks......( and NO, I have NOT been in contact with any one recently returned from anywhere overseas, or from areas where Mexican Flu had hit in the UK....I DID wonder about volunteering myself as a possible case BUT I didn't meet the NHS criteria , so I didn't...)

I have been ill for 10 days now and I only JUST feel vaguely human today....and have missed the last few days of the term and most of this half term....

Also, we have been so busy with growing and planting and sowing and mowing and scything etc...I dragged my self out of my sick bed at one point to prick out plants and had a lap tray on my knee whilst on the sofa, so I could pot on some tiny brassica seedlings......I have still been tending to the plants in the polytunnel and the hens, despite being ill....Compostman had so much to do.. so who will do it if *I* don't?

COMMENT

One of the downsides of an "idyllic" rural lifestyle is, unless you have pots of money and can afford to pay staff to do stuff for you, you have to keep going regardless of illness. I didn't do any stuff for 4 days when I was really ill, but once I was "sort of " ok, I had to get on with at least some of it...as Compostman has more than enough of his own work to do, without having to do *my work* as well..Compostgirl helped a lot, but at 8, she really can't just step into my jobs and do them like me....she can water stuff and collect eggs but she doesn't know what to do if anything more tricky presents itself...

People often don't consider this aspect of living "the rural dream of downshifting"...they think of a few hens, some pigs, a veg garden, a greenhouse and being more self sufficient in fruit , veg and eggs etc ...BUT its a 24/7 dedication, 365 days a year...regardless of illness, incapacity or inclination...YOU have to keep going....that is the reality if you keep any livestock.....or grow a lot of stuff to eat...if you want to eat it, you have to look after it!

END COMMENT

The hens have all mysteriously gone off lay...I am only getting 2 or 3 eggs from 6 laying hens..I think it is because the 2 cockerels are fighting and generally being a pain..and disturbing the hens...so MEASURES WILL BE TAKEN......(!)( use your imaginations..they have had a reprieve while I have been ill.....)

Various "work stuff" has also been going on for me, I finally got my Forest School Practitioner Certificate through in the post yesterday (hurrah!) AND I am about to start a regular programme of Eco Club sessions somewhere, for a fee...which is great....! (I could do with the money)

I have also been arranging a weekend of Master Composter activity (as in ALL the arranging, of the stand, the booking, the rota, the supplies, the session plans, the risk assessment etc...) at Hereford Earth Watch, which revolves around World Environment Day on the 5th June, and also carries over on the 6th June.

I am also organising (as in ALL the organising, the booking, the rota, the supplies, the session plans, the risk assessment etc...) the Master Composters presence at Hellens Manor, The Garden Festival in the 13th and 14th June.

AND I am doing some "Love Food Hate Waste" training this week.....

(To be honest, I feel tired just contemplating the next 2 weeks, and I haven't even started it yet.....)

BUT its all good stuff and will help to spread the word about living a more sustainable, frugal minded life...

Oh, did I mention the Transition Town Ledbury stuff?...no? ....more in a future post!

Do something on World Environment Day? Please? If only to make me feel my shattered-ness is having an effect?

I shall post some links tommorrow...........promise....but for now it is off to bed for me.....

Thank you...

:-)

Homegrown food - taking stock of what we still have and looking forward to new stuff

If you look on the right hand side of my blog you will see a list of the homegrown food we still have in stock and are eating now. I have been asked by a few people what we have left, so I thought I would make a list. Its getting less each day, but I was quite pleasantly surprised when I did a quick stock take! I am not sure we could live on it but it makes a welcome contribution to the diet.

The first of the new season salad, herbs and such like are coming through fast now, and when I see new bean and pea plants growing fast I know we are not far away from eating them, fresh, again! I have carrots growing in tubs inside the polytunnel and spuds in bags with haulms up the top of the bags! ( so new spuds will be on the menu in another month...) and the broad beans are doing well in the garden. I have turnips to succesionally sow, asn the usual salads, spring onions and radishes will go in as and when a bit of land becomes available throughout the summer, and in pots in the Polytunnel.




The plum trees are smothered with blossom and as long as we have no frosts in the next few days, should have a bumper crop of fruit this year. The soft fruit has lots of flower buds forming as well.





I have all my seed potatoes in the ground, now, and am actually ahead of myself thanks to the good weather! (shhh, don't tempt fate!) the parsnips are all in as well.

I just need to get the onion sets in the main garden, I have overwintered shallots and onions in some raised beds, but need to plant more, oh and carrots, in between the alliums. The garlic, planted in December, is going well.

I have peas and beans of all sorts shooting up, all the tomatoes, peppers, aubergines etc are now good sized plants and are out in the cold frames inside the polytunnel, where they keep nice and warm at night with a lid over them and get fresh warm air in the daytime without the lid.

I still need to put some melon and cucumber seeds in the heated propagator ( now I have some room!) then when they come up (in a day or two!) next will be the courgettes and then squashes of various sorts, which will go in during the next week or so.... I find these grow so fast that I tend to leave them until about this time in April, otherwise they grow into huge leggy plants when it is still too cold to pot them out in the Polytunnel.

This year I am going to try, yet again, to grow some Kale and Purple Sprouting, plus a few other brassicas...we will construct a METAL cage which, hopefully, will stop the squirrels from eating every last shred of them. So I have been planting various brassicas and they, too, are in the Polytunnel.

Looking at my "fresh food" list, I DO need some brassicas to fill that "hungry gap", about now....!

Phew! I hadn't realised quite how many plants I have growing, I am not surprised the house and porch and polytunnel all look like mini forests at the moment :-)

I do feel worryingly ahead of it all at the moment...but I probably shouldn't have said that ( she whispers) as we will now have non stop hail storms for the next month, or a plague of locusts......or something....I keep expecting to find a whole clutch of seeds I should have sown in January , but didn't ;-)


So...what do the rest of you have left over from last year? and will you be growing more, or less of anything in particular this year?

Tidying the Polytunnel

I have shamefully left tidying up my polytunnel until December this season...one of the many casualties of my being preoccupied with my Forest School portfolio evidence gathering and dissertation writing I am afraid!

I don't grow much in the polytunnel in winter, I have some herbs and a few different salad leaves on the go but we tend not to eat much salad stuff in winter! I DO use my poly tunnel to overwinter various pots of herbs and patio plants, and also as a sheltered place to put Fudge the Guinea Pig in his run though...

And of course, once I get my tomato, pepper, aubergine etc plants on the go in January they need to go into the polytunnel (inside cold frames to protect them from frost) to grow big and strong!



As you can see it is all a bit of a mess

THIS is the damage the cats have done to my roof!

I will have to wait for drier weather before I can use my magic polytunnel fixing tape to mend these holes as best I can as it is too wet at the moment!

As New Year rushed rapidly towards me last week I made a decision; I could NOT allow the New Year to enter my life with a messy polytunnel...the New Year means its the start of the growing season here, so how could I plant anything knowing my growing place was such a tip?

So despite it being an average of -3 all day here for the last week, and a cold -7 ( thats celsius, by the way!) at night, I spent the last few days of 2008 outside cleaning up my beloved polytunnel. I viewed the freezing hands and feet as suitable pennace for leaving it so long!

loo roll tubes, various plastic containers and coffee bags waiting to be used as planters for parsnips, seeds or to be turned into bird scarers


Milk or water bottles cut down to be used as water reservoirs in the summer, planted in the ground small hole first next to thirsty plants.

Sid the Cat having a snooze. (It was - 2 inside the PT when I took this shot!)

I have a mesh panel in the door which is great for air flow in the hot summer but needs covering in the cold winter....

So I covered it with an old compost bag split lengthways, to keep in what little warmth there was....

Tender herbs and patio pots sheltering from the cold...

covered with fleece to protect them from the very cold we are currently experiencing.

Me having a break from the cold...I brought out a flask of hot coffee each day for the 3 days I was clearing the polytunnel, I know I am only 30 secs from the house BUT it saved me an hour or probably more ( 2 coffee breaks, each one taking more than half an hour to go inside, take off my boots, boot socks, hat, outer gloves, inner gloves, x 2 fleeces etc, drink coffee made for me...then put all the out door gear back on)

and I actually enjoy drinking a hot drink outside whilst I am working....

Re-covering the floor needs doing here, a job to be done soon I think!

I get loads of strawberry plants growing everywhere all the time inside the polytunnel...I recycle them..but thats another post I think ( so watch this space....!)


As always, I have chicken helpers around, whatever I do....



Lots of stuff to cart away to add to my compost bins!



All done! I have a tidy polytunnel again!

I have all of January to get on with other stuff now, as I have completed an important, major, outdoor job and can cross it off my list knowing that WHEN I need to use the benches or the floor it is all there, ready and waiting for me....

It feels good....

:-))