February Video Diary

This is how we left the allotment on Sunday night.  The two big beds are weed-free, onions are planted, broad beans are planted, daffodils are in the ground and the shed has a new tar-felt roof.

VIDEO DIARY CLICK HERE

Onion Bed

February 2011, Onion Sets.
In trenches filled with multicompost in a very carefully de-weeded bed, we have sown the onion sets which we bought but didn't get round to planting last year. This is clearly not best-practice, but the tiny onions were sat in the shed, seemed hard, and are beginning to sprout, so we've given them a chance. There are about ten rows of "Troy" and "Radar".

Rhubarb Bed

The Rhubarb bed in February 2011.  It needs weeding, but this doesn't matter all that much. There are about twenty large crowns of rhubarb in this bed, which have sat undisturbed all winter.  No compost or manure has yet been added.  The tiny new growth is just peeking through the soil at this point, and this year we aren't forcing the growth at all.

Nothing was done to this bed on the first visit.

February Tasks

Allotment First Visit February 2011

As usual with a first trip of the year to the allotment, it appears rough, overgrown and unproductive, and yet the weeds have been killed back by the snows and frost, so it is more of a blank canvas.

This year, we arrived to see the main beds overgrown with the first weeds of the new year, and to see that the recent storms had not only blown the guttering from the house, but also the tar felt from the roof of the shed.  This was our first job.  A 10m roll of garden shed felt costing £18.99 from B&Q gives a quick and easy repair.  We stripped the remnants of the old tar off and tacked on the new in an hour or so on Sunday 27th.  On Saturday (photo above), Rosie dug over the small plot between the summer raspberries and the fruit bushes.

The raspberries are of two types. By the gate (picture) we have autumn fruiting raspberries which need to be cut down to the ground every year at this time.  In the far right hand corner are the Jerusalem artichokes, which also have tall dead canes which we remove at the same time. The summer fruiting raspberries are meant to fruit on last year's new growth, so we only cut out the dead canes and those which fruited in 2010. We didn't get time to do this at the weekend, so it'll have to wait until next visit.

At the same time as re-roofing the shed, we also cut out a few of the tall branches and trunks of blackthorn from the hedge, which are getting a bit tall and thick, and hard to get access to later on in the year.

Around the shed at the top of the garden, we have planted another big bag of Winston Churchill daffs and narcissi.

Re-roofing in the rain.

A general view of the allotment in late February.  The main beds are all visible, and all show signs of the weeds - creeping buttercup and dock - starting to grow.  We added 400 litres of compost to the nearer and smaller of the two beds in which we later planted onions and broad beans.

With both big beds weeded, we left it at that for a first visit.  The further bed is just turned over and major weeds removed.  The closer bed has been carefully weeded, and 400 litres of compost raked into the single dug ground.  To the right of the plank we have planted broad beans and to their right are rows of onion sets.  In the uncomposted bed, to the right-hand side as we look at it in the photo, Rosie has planted a small herb garden.

Cidermaking 2010 October 17th

After much too much prevarication, we've finally got round to some respectable cider-making. There is nothing to it whatsoever, honest.  We borrowed a small press from farming friends and with it a large plastic bucket and a fence post with a metal bar set cross-ways through one end.  Using the fence post, we mashed the apples to a fine pulp in the plastic bucket and loaded the mash into the net curtain, which forms an inner bag to the press.   

Next we squeezed the pulp into a jug until no more juice could come out of it, and poured the juice into a pressurised 40 litre plastic beer barrel (see below). We repeated this until the barrel was full, then screwed the cap down tight.  No sugar, no yeast, no ham, no rats.  It took a surprising number of apples, but a relatively short period of time to accomplish.

 Cider in its pressurised barrel, ready to drink by December.
(Note the sediment settled out at the base)

Having filled the barrel with pure cold-pressed apple juice, we sat the barrel on a windowsill in the cool larder and left it.  The pressure built up, the apple juice corrupted slowly, and fermented. With a little taste-testing along the way, we have found that fermentation ceased by the end of November (when the temperature fell).  The juice is no longer sugary at all, and what we have in the barrel is a dry apply cider of a moderate strength. No doubt we could increase the strength by adding wine-making yeast and sugar.  But it doesn't seem like we need to. The end result is very pleasing, but unlikely to last until Christmas for supply and demand reasons.  There was a lot of talk about secondary fermentation in May, when the larger warms up again, but since the cider is unlikely to survive that long, any questions on that theme are academic. Theoretically it would keep on improving until next summer.

(I) Apple Wine December 2010

December Apple Wine

Although it seems a bit late in the year to start the apple wine, its the first chance we've had.  We're using cooking apples which we picked in September/October from the orchard.  They seem fine and fresh, so we have followed these steps today:

1. Sliced the apples roughly and mashed them in a bag with a meat tenderiser.
2. Squeezed and halved two lemons
3. Added apples and lemons into a large sterilised wine barrel (60 litres).
4. Poured over several kettles of boiling water.
5. Stirred the apples.
6. Covered the apples with tap water (about 20 litres) - we used to use spring water from Malvern but the car isn't up to the trip today.
7. Stirred in 2kg of granulated sugar (all we have today).
8. Added two sachets of 'champagne' yeast to warm water, left it to start fermenting, then added to the barrel of apples, sugar and water.
9. Left the barrel in the outhouse with a clean cloth covering it. 

Mashing the apples

We need to: 

1. stir the apple barrel daily for a week.
2. add a further 10kg of sugar and one more sachet of yeast.
3. remove the apple pulp and top up the water at the end of the week.

Leave it for a week.

Elderberry Wine IV: Racking the Wine

The fourth instalment of the elderberry wine.  Its December 12th, and rather later than planned (it must be said), we racked off the elderberry from one PVA barrel to another identical one.

All we've done today is to sterilise a second barrel using crushed campden tablets, and to transfer the icor into it using a tube and some muslin. As you can see, the whole thing has the appearance of a nasty blood transfusion service or a particularly gory operation. Put the tube into the full barrel which is sitting on a stool above the height of the new clean empty barrel. Suck on the tube until the wine begins to flow, then all that is necessary is to ensure that the one end stays covered by liquid, and that the squirty end doesn't pour red wine all over your clothes and the floor. Its a question of aim. 
The purpose of racking off wine at this stage is to separate the useful liquid (the proto-wine) from the dead yeast cells, the bits of fruit which escape the previous filtration, and unwanted dead livestock, etc. Removing gunk from the wine is good. We should have done this three weeks ago though.

Wine transfusion.

In line with tips from my gardening diary, we have also added 14 crushed campden tablets, which should stop any further fermentation, and help to clear the wine, which at this stage is still cloudy (as expected).