The new garden

We have now spent the first few months in our new house and as I brought some plants with me, we have had some veg to pick from the garden.  We have got more runner beans than we can eat and so have been giving them away and also have 2kg in the freezer.  Next week I am going to be making chutney with the excess veg from the garden.

I have pulled up the tomatoes and dwarf french beans and the space has been filled with purple and white sprouting and cabbages that will hopefuly be ready some time around Christmas.

For some reason the sweetcorn did not do so well this year and i have not had many ripe tomatoes, mainly due to the late planting and the fact that none o them were under glass.  I had two different cucumber plants.  One got eaten by slugs soon after it was planted but the other survived the onslaught and has produced many large and tasty cucumbers.

The same happened with the two pumpkin plants, one got eaten and the other survived and has one large pumpkin on it.  I have given two loads of leaves and stalks to a girl from Malawi who says they are a prized vegtable.  She peels the spikey bits off the stalks, chops them up with the leaves and cooks them up with onions, tomatoes and groundnut flour. Next year we are going to try the recipe and may be she won’t get so many leaves!

The patch that I planted all the squashes in definatly needs a lot of soil improvement over the next few years as my butternut squashes are not much bigger than my fist!

AG 001 & AG 002

My first attempt at an ‘alll grain’ beer was on 04/05/09.  I had collected together enough equipment and, foolishly, made a beer with out doing a dry (or rather wet) run.  This resulted in the hose from the imersion cooler bursting off and water spraying all over the inside of the shed and also some into the beer, after the boil and before the ferment, so it may well end up being a disaster and all be infected.  Using Wheeler’s Beer Engine I devised a recipe using East Kent Goldings with a starting gravity of 45 and a bitternes count of 37 and gaining two thirds of the bitterness from the 90min hops and one third from the 15 min hops with a further 15g steeping when the wort had cooled to 80 c.  As for the grains I used 98% Marris Otter and 2% Crystal

I used a similar schedule for the second beer but used Bobek hops instead of the East Kent Goldings

grain_billgrains

5200g of Marris Otter & 110g Crystal – I choose not to use a varity of malts so that I mainly showcased the hops in the beers.  I added a small amount of crystal with the idea that it might add a small amount of colour.

mash_tun

Altered cool box into a mash tun – copper pipe manifold added to a cool box facilitated the draining of the wort into another bucket.

mash

Mash on – the grains are added to hot water so that the resulting mixture is at 67°C when the lid is shut on the mash tun and the 90 minuite mash starts.

first_runnings

First runnings of the wort – the sugary solution is drained out of the mash tunand then more hot water is added

bobek_hops

Hops

boil

The Boil

cooler

Cooler in to bring the wort down from boiling to a temperate that I can pitch the yeast.

All tucked up and fermenting

Allotment Disaster

I called in at the allotment on my way to work this afternoon only to find that most of my plants looked either dead or very sorry for themselves.  From the state of the leaves I believe that there may have been a bit of frost recently that I didn’t notice in my back garden.   The result is that all the tops of the potatoe plants are withered, the beans (runner and dwarf french) and squashes have either died completely or look half dead and I wil lbe surprised if they pick up.  The only things to survive were the onions, garlic, shallots, carrots, parsnips and beetroot.  Fortunatly the raspberries don’t appear to have suffered either.

I also had a good look at the asparagus bed and found that six plants have survived my lack of care last year and although i can’t harvest anything this yar ( it is only the first real year of growth) if I look after them well this year I may get an harvest next year.  I also plan to fill in the gaps where the plants died so that eventually I have a full bed and can feed the whole family asparagus.

things in the back garden are doing much better with baby apples and blueberries in the fruit bed and the squashes, tomatoes and other things that are in pots looking very healthy.  I am however, a bit reluctant to plant anything else out in tha allotment at the moment incase the frost makes another appearance and wipes out more plants.

Bananas

The banana plant that I thought that I had killed over winter has put up three new shoots around the dead central plant. and is doing very well.  Here are a couple of photos of the plant that I took a week ago.

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The new seeds that I bought have also started to sprout and they are in pots on the window ledge.  Incidently the bird of paradise seeds that I bought in 2006 have left me with one remaining plant that lives in our living room.