Hill Allotments AGM

It was the AGM on Tuesday night, & what a well run, informative & entertaining evening it was too! Quite why only 26 out of 70 plot holders were present I do not know – even if you are not a 'joiner-in' you should attend, I think, if only for the useful information given out.

The main – & most welcome – difference this year was that the meeting was not held in the small back run of the clubhouse, but it the main bar.

This was an enormous improvement on last year as the number of plot holders, family, committee members & others crammed into the little room last year was extremely claustrophobic.

The meeting clipped along at a fair pace with entertaining & informative reports from neighbour Ted (in his role as deputy chairman), secretary Hayden, Scottish George as show secretary & treasurer Mike then committee members were elected or re-elected as appropriate.

Pride of place of the cups & awards was the cup awarded the Hill for the best allotment in Birmingham – so a collective pat on the back there. I was delighted that I was singled out for a mention in the show report, & Jane & I were proud to collect our ‘most improved plot’ cup.

We left after the buffet, reflecting how odd it was to see my fellow plot holders in ‘mufti’!

Solving Wine Problems & a Revelation...

I noticed a funny thing with the apple wine a couple of weeks ago - both apple mk II & mk III were looking decidedly cloudy. That's not 'cloudy' as in 'not clear, a bit foggy looking', but 'cloudy' as in 'fluffy cotton wool, spring lambs' cloudy.

Consulting CJJ Berry, I found that 'tiny jelly blobs which look rather like frogspawn' are the result of a pectin haze - the solution of which seems to involve a lot of complicated laboratory type chemical preparations & procedures, so I bunged a teaspoon of pectolase in each demijohn instead & gave them both a good shake.

I should have added the pectolase at the start of fermentation, it would seem, which would have destroyed the pectin & avoided this problem. Live & learn, eh?

After a couple of weeks, the effect is quite astonishing - both starting to become crystal clear from the top, the clouds sinking to the bottom - brilliant!

I racked the elderberry & apple off tonight - a taste reveals that it's lovely & fruity, although no where near clear yet so I bunged in a teaspoon of pectolase whilst I was at it for good measure.

Having tasted the apple III the other day, the elderberry & apple this evening and having a bottle of this year's parsnip on the go at the weekend, I'm coming to the - admittedly intuitive - conclusion that fruit wines are actually better tasting than vegetable wines...

P.S. I found out where the worst storm of the year went to this weekend - it was busy at my big sister Helen's house on the south coast making a nuisance of itself, so the weather forecasters redeem themselves a little...

Plans...

We were promised 'the worst storm of the year' by the weather forecasters earlier this week, & on Friday, yes, it was very rainy & on Saturday it was squally, but today has been lovely.

An example of weather warnings from the Met Office being rather over the top. Yes, it wasn't very nice weather, but as it is the middle of November, I wouldn't have expected to be able to have a picnic either.

The way the forecasters had it earlier in the week, we should all have been cowering under the bed praying that the roof didn't fall in.

In the event, although it was damp underfoot, & not the nicest of days, I did get to the Hill for an hour or so yesterday without any other mishap that to get caught in a shower as I was loading the car to come home.

I dug myself up a PARSNIP (guernsey), which was full of canker; a few LEEKS (mrs d), which were full of the little brown leek moth grubs; & a perfect SWEDE (virtue) before moving on to bed-shortening duties.

In order to bring bed d1 into line, I needed to move the blueberry bush across a few foot - rhubarb Brian had very kindly planted it out in the plot for me whilst I was away & he certainly earned himself a pot of mock lemon curd for that kindness, & next year a pot of blueberry jam too.

I made short work of whipping out the screws from the bed sides & end, then took the 4' lengths of 'side' & stakes away & refixed the 4' end to reduce the overall bed length from 20' to 16'.

I moved on to bed d2, hoofed up the COURGETTE (golden yellow) which has given up the ghost & tidied up the swiss chard. I'm going to have to move this - it's really in the way of shortening this bed, but I'm not sure how it will react to being moved. I guess it has two choices.

The final bed for shortening will be bed b2, which currently has about 30 leeks growing in it at the end I want to work on. I'll try moving these too, I think, by digging them up & heeling them into a trench.

Then I can get stuck into constructing the beds for the permanent crops. It looks like there is room for 5 beds which will be 8' by 4' (for strawberries, raspberries, redcurrant/blackcurrant, asparagus and A N Other which I haven't decided on yet) but I want to level the whole area before I start to put these in, as the ground is all over the place at the moment.

So plenty to be getting on with next weekend - if we don't have storms...

Grape Wine Making

By the time that I mashed the grapes (to which I'd added a crushed campden tablet & a tsp of pectolase per instructions on a homebrew web site), then squeezed them through an old stocking, I had 2.2l of wine juice - I made this up 4.75l & an SG of 1088 with water & 1lb 12oz of sugar.

Whilst I had the wine gubbins out, I racked the apple mk III into a spare demijohn.

Actually, I racked into the same demijohn once it was cleaned out due to the fact that when I was cleaning the spare one, I foolishly did the final rinse with water boiling from the kettle which resulted in a bloody great PING & it shattering.

On the plus side, once the apple wine was safely in an intact demijohn (SG 988), I had a taste & it is extremely promising...

First Take Your Squash...

...and work out how the devil to get into the damn thing in order to make the planned batch of Mock Lemon Curd.

This was very difficult indeed.

The good news is that I do still have the requisite number of fingers & the operation did give me a comprehensive upper body workout, although the air was turned quite blue.

Once the squash was chopped & steamed, I thinly peeled the lemon rind from 10 lemons (careful use of the potato peeler here), juiced the lemons & blitzed all this up in the food processor.

I put this into the maslin pan with the butter & sugar, simmered for half an hour & potting it up.

I ran out of pots when I got to 19 & the last bit had to go in a soup bowl to be eaten up first. That's a lot of mock lemon curd.

In fact, more than enough to eat at every single meal for the next twelve months, I think - even allowing for giving away as Christmas gifts to virtually everyone I know.

And that's not all.

As this was the smallest of the three olive squash, lovely as it is, I can't possibly make more - so what on earth shall I do with the others...?

Kind Deeds & Designs...

A sunny but cold day today, so I had to keep moving in order to keep the blood flowing - this not as easy as it sounds with Reg-next-plot & teacher Barry both at the plot to chat to when I arrived & John Badger from the bottom on the way past soon after.

By the shed, JB had very kindly left me a 5 gallon brew barrel containing a demijohn (fab - I have none spare at the moment), bungs, corks, filters & a number of other brewing bits & bobs - brilliant!

I set about taking down the bean poles - the bean structure has worked well, & I'll do this design again.

It was a right fiddle taking it down though - because the thin horizontal wires I used to help keep the canes in line were not robust enough, they snapped in a number of places & had to be repaired during the late summer, which made the whole thing a bit of a jumble. Lessons for next year, I think.

I persevered, & stacked the canes to bring home to store, unfastened the end supports, put the dead stems in the bean trench, rough dug the bed, then shortened the bed by 4' in line with the other beds, which will enable me to build permanent crop beds in the space left towards neighbour Ted.

This side still has three beds to be shortened - I need to eat the leeks in bed b2, the swiss chard in bed d2 before I can finish this job, & then level the ground and decide whether the new permanent beds will be 4' or 8' by 4'.

There's no rush - it's this year's Winter Job, and I enjoy the planning of it too.

Home to get 6lb of grapes out the freezer ready for wine making, now I have a demijohn to ferment it in...

Mock Lemon Curd Prep

Here's the smallest of my three olive squash which I'm going to cook up into mock lemon curd at the weekend.

I'm trying to work out just how many jars I'm going to need to pot it up, and thought that if I put the quantities down with the method, then some bright spark might be able to advise.

My squash weighs 11lb as it is, and according to Xanthe Clay's 'It's Raining Plums' (which my big sister Helen bought me for Christmas and is excellent) a squash yields two thirds of it's weight in usable flesh, so we'll call that 7½ lb, and to that I'll need just less than that weight of sugar, half as many again lemons as squash, and an eighth of the weight of squash in butter.

So with a bit of rounding up and down for convenience - and also adjusting after consulting Nic's blog, here's what I'll be making.

Mock Lemon Curd

7 lb 8oz peeled, seeded and cubed squash

6 lb sugar

1 lb butter

10 lemons - grated rind and juice

Steam the squash till tender (about an hour) then leave to drain overnight

Mash (or liquidise) the squash with rind grated from the lemons & lemon juice

Simmer squash, lemon rind & juice, sugar & butter for 20mins, stirring constantly

Pot up

All I've got to work out is how to chop the damn thing up!