The very first elderflowers are just coming out in Leeds. They make the most delicious fizzy, alcoholic summer drink, and it's unbelievably easy. I'm making 20 litres in a huge plastic crate.
This makes 5 litres:
8.8 pints (5 litres) cold water
10 Elderflower heads (you can leave a bit of the stalk on)
1 and one fifth lbs sugar (2.4 Kilos)
2 and a half lemons (chop them up small, with rind and skins still on)
2 and a half tablespoons white wine vinegar
Mix all that together, and either put a loose lid on the container or make a lid by tying some cloth over the top.
Stand for 72 hours, stirring whenever you remember.
Then strain it into plastic bottles. Use screwcap plastic bottles designed to have pressurised fizzy drinks in them - other kinds can explode as the champagne becomes fizzy. Don't use glass bottles.
Leave for 2 weeks, releasing the fizz every 2 days (more at first).
There are hundreds of different products for getting limescale off toilets, sinks and kettles, and they all basically involve acid, which dissolves limescale if you leave it to soak for long enough.
There are also a lot of people, like me, growing hundreds of times more rhubarb than they can really handle because the plants get very very big and there's a limit to the amount of rhubarb crumble one can eat in a year.
Rhubarb is incredibly acidic.
Can anyone think of any reason I shouldn't boil up a load of rhubarb and use it as an organic, eco-friendly and incredibly cheap kettle, sink and toilet cleaner?
Everyone’s been clipping everything in sight since we’ve had some sunshine here. On Monday the council used a petrol ride-on mower for all the grassy paths, the neighbours had a gardener doing their lawn with an electric push-mower, all the housing associations sent their hedge-clipping-chainsaw-thing man round and almost everyone else I saw was laboriously hacking at hedges and undergrowth with blunt shears while sweating a lot. So it might be a bit late to tell you this.
It’ll all need doing again in about two weeks though, and the simple non-electrified garden shears that most of us use are about a hundred times easier and more effective to use if you maintain them properly, so here’s how to sort out a pair of shears:
First wipe them clean so you’re dealing with handles and blades rather than a layer of plant goo and grit. Little bits of grit will totally mess up the sharp edges and the pivot, so rinse them even if they don’t seem muddy, just in case.
Close the blades together, hold them up to the light, and look between the blades to see how well aligned they are. If the blades are bent away from each other even a tiny bit then at best they’ll only cut part-way through everything. If they meet at the pivot and the tip but there’s a chink of light in the middle then you’re holding a pair of self-blunting shears. Blades bent in towards each other will scrape their sharp edges together every time you close them, so they’ll be blunt in no time even if you just open and close them without cutting anything.
Bend the blades carefully back into shape until they pass each other very closely and lie flat against each other – you shouldn’t see any light between them sideways-on when they’re shut. I tend to do this by wedging one handle between my foot and the ground, putting a brick under the part of the blade I want to bend, another brick under the loose handle to stop the blades closing together, and then pushing with slow steady pressure on the blade until I can just feel it start to move. Don’t hammer blades or apply pressure too fast in case they snap, and check the chink of light between the blades every time you may have bent them even slightly – a little makes a lot of difference!
Once you’re sure they’re aligned properly, sort the pivot joint out. If they’re stiff you might have grit or gunk in the joint, which a scrub with an old toothbrush in warm soapy water will probably sort out. If it’s rusty then take as much rust off as you can with fine sandpaper and wipe clean with something dry. Then work some oil into the joint so it opens and closes easily. If they’re still stiff then it might be worth undoing the bolt to sand the parts you can’t otherwise reach, putting the bolt itself in Coca-Cola overnight before cleaning its screw thread with a toothbrush and soapy water, then drying and oiling the whole thing before putting it back together.
Finally, you need a sharpening stone. If you’ve ever chewed a piece of grass you’ll know that it’s very fibrous, and so are woody things like hedges. Clipping the stuff will blunt blades quite quickly, so they need sharpening up again every ten minutes or so to keep them cutting easily, otherwise you’ll spend lots of effort just bruising grass.
If they haven’t been sharpened for ages then it’ll take a bit longer first time, but once they’re done they’ll only need a few scrapes to get going again when they start to lose their edge. If they’re very blunt or if there are any nicks in the blades, take them to a locksmith-and-cobblers shop first and ask nicely if they’ll grind them on their machines before you use a sharpening stone for a smoother finish.
Get the sharpening stone wet, look at the blade to see where the tiny slope at the edge is, then drag that sloped bit across the stone – you don’t need to press very hard. If you then look again at the blade the part you’ve scraped will be shiny, so you’ll see easily if you’ve got the angle right and with a bit of trial and error you’ll soon work out how to get a decent sharp edge on a blade – ask a good chef to teach you how to sharpen a knife if you're struggling.
Go off and cut things, enjoy the nice clean slicey noise they’ll now be making, remember to sharpen again a little bit every ten minutes or so, and you’ll gradually stop thinking of shearing as really hard and difficult work.
No petrol, no battery, no mains lead, no fuel costs, no sweat.
We're without water on my allotment site again this spring because of a massive underground leak. My plot isn't looking as wacky as usual at the moment either, since the bender greenhouse has bitten the dust and I can't put the tipi greenhouse back up until I find new poles for it, so this weekend I've been ressurecting my solar still which should help on both scores.
Our water is metered and not as good for some things as rainwater, so I always collect the rain in loads of mismatched plastic containers I've pulled out of skips. But for the last couple of years we've had no rain for weeks at just the time I'm trying to plant my seedlings out, and with vandals wrecking our water supply I've had to carry water in from the carwash around the corner just to keep everything going.
So how to collect fresh water on site when it isn't raining and the taps don't work? "The Global Warming Survival Kit" by Brian Clegg had an idea I thought I'd try out.
I already had a big hole in the ground, about three metres square and 30cm or so deep, where the tipi greenhouse used to be. I dug a smaller, deeper hole in the middle to put a big plastic container in, and then stretched clear plastic sheeting over the top and held it down around the edges with bricks. The idea is that water evaporates out of the ground, condenses on the underside of the plastic sheet and runs into the middle, where small stones keep the lowest point directly above the container to catch it all.
I got a good few litres a day this way over the summer last year, and when it does rain the sheeting also collects lots of water in the top, so now I should end up with a decent supply of water whether it rains or shines between now and planting time.
Of course today has been cloudy and windy, just to annoy me.
At this time of year I feel as though anything I turn my back on for five minutes goes through some kind of time distortion effect where weeks of neglect happen to it in my short absence.
I spent two whole weekends recently doing nothing but weeding the allotment, and it now has dandelions in it that I couldn't possibly have missed only a couple of weeks ago - great big mature bloody trees have sprung up, with masses of seed heads crumbling gently into cracks in the soil all over the entire plot.
Slugs of course are well known for having the ability to warp time - this is why, for instance, courgette plants sometimes seem to disappear completely without leaving any remains at all. They apparently find it necessary to shred corn, so I'm growing a second batch of corn plants for them to eat when they've reduced the first ones to ribbons. At least the fox deli bar should prove cheaper this year, since a new plot-holder on my site works part time in a pub and can get us all beer dregs to use in the slug traps.
I have loads more seeds to sow, a strawberry patch full of buttercup, kit to repair before the festival season, a zillion things I'm supposed to have read by now and a flat that I can't even find the dirty laundry in any more. Socks, in particular, have been doing the time-distortion thing a lot recently. I've always found them to be prone to it.
I haven't posted here in over a month, and I have a huge backlog of things I wanted to ramble on about, some of which I'll try to get around to posting soon. In the meantime, you may like to amuse yourself with pie charts and Venn diagrams...
Back soon, perhaps with some more short and sweet ones until I've got RL a bit more under control.
Oh yuck. I've been really ill this weekend with a very nasty tummy bug thing which I'll spare you the gory details of. Suffice to say that my entire digestive system now contains only half a packet of bread sticks and five cups of chamomile tea.
I haven't been able to see any friends or go anywhere for fear of infecting people or falling over with dizzy weirdness, but I did manage to take a bag of fallen leaves to the allotment this afternoon to get myself a change of scenery. The last couple of years my plot has been pretty bare by November, but I've got quite a few things still growing this year which cheered me up a bit.
Although all my pumpkin plants died months ago in sheer disgust at the state of the weather and the slug population, all the onion sets that did nothing all summer are now visible under the frost bitten nasturtiums and have suddenly grown into proper onions, so they might just get me through the winter after all. The rainbow chard is bolting and I'm hoping to collect the seed, and I've got loads of huge purple sprouting broccoli that I'm already eating leaves from here and there.
I've also got my first really good crop of enormous leeks, and I brought a nice fat one home with me this afternoon. For some reason it turned out to be all wiggly on the inside:
I wonder why?
Hoping that by the time I've made leek and potato soup I'll actually be able to eat it...
All my neighbour’s apples were taken, from two three-year-old trees that had their first good crop this year which was almost ready to harvest.Her pumpkins were all taken, her peppers and chillis were thrown around the place, my pond was trampled and a couple of apples and a pumpkin thrown in it.
But what’s really weird and disturbing this time is that our bathroom sink has been un-plumbed and removed, as has the toilet cistern and one of the taps a couple of plots away.We hear there are gangs going around nicking stuff like that for the value of the copper in the pipes, which is apparently worth more than all the tools which were left in the shed and the bolt cutter that they left at the scene.Bizzare.
My allotment has been vandalised.The greenhouse tipi that used to look like this
Now looks like this with several bricks and a saw bench inside it
The bender greenhouse now has ventilation
The shed has been relocated to the middle of a flower bed and repositioned on its side, leaving the green roof in a pile on top of some strawberries
And I will never again be able to safely stick my fingers into my soil because it’s all completely covered with tiny shards of glass.There is also a layer of large and medium sized shards of glass which I spent two hours today picking up without seeming to make much difference.There are at least three whole greenhouses in there in little bits, which at least might set the slugs back a bit.
Got a message today about allotments in Guilford which are about to be built on. The message is copied below, and at this stage a petition is likely to be actually, practically useful. It's a legit "10 Downing Street" petition which asks for your name, e-mail and address, but this is only to verify that you're a real person and the only mail you'll get is notification of a government response if they issue one. Doesn't even involve getting cold and wet!
"We have been campaigning for many months to get our local council (Guildford Borough Council) to cancel housing plans on our local Allotment Site.
2 acres of woodland (some of it really ancient) and wildlife habitat are threatened by housing and being concreted over.
Oue message is that the part of Guildford where we live is already over-developed with Housing and we badly need to keep areas of open space to prevent our area becoming a concrete jungle.
And there are vast areas of brownfield land elsewhere in the town to build houses .. support us by signing our online petition today.
When you sign it you have to give your name and address but this will be kept confidential, all that visitors to the Petitions website can see is your name.
If you are keen on preserving the Environment, or saving Open Spaces, saving Wildflife habitats - or even Allotment Gardening - then take a look at our Allotment Self-Help Group's website and you'll see the site & read about the open space & everything we're fighting for. You can find it at:
Someone or something has pulled all the beer traps out of the ground and emptied them. I've met quite a few dogs who like beer so I think I'm going to blame the fox, who is probably right now telling all its mates about the nice new pickled slug deli just opened round the corner. It's some consolation that four cans of Double Dutch must have given it a pretty bad hangover, but I am a bit stumped for fox-proof beer trap designs. Maybe I should just make a very big one to catch the fox in?
I've also got a resident mouse which keeps making big holes in my no-dig bed and knocking all the onions over, but before I got too annoyed about that I noticed that the tadpoles are very fat now, they've all got big froggy eyes and a couple of them have even got tiny little back legs! First one to walk is going to be called Ralph. And is probably going to be eaten by a pissed fox.
It’s not fair!I’m right at the top of the food chain, I’ve got a spine and opposable thumbs and everything, and yet I still have to compete for my food with bloody SLUGS!I’ve just lost a second lot of courgette plants and something has got to be done.
I saw a friend’s lovely new veg patch and beer traps last weekend.I think I’ve tried beer traps before, but I seem to remember going about it a bit half-heartedly because I didn’t really expect it to work. Nothing really seems to work against slugs. Still, I was in the mood to see at least a few of the little bastards die so I thought I’d try it again.
Burying the pots was a bit of a faff, but not quite as difficult as finding a non-Muslim shop that would sell me lager around here - I ended up going all the way to Sainsbury’s and then spent ages persuading them to give me some Carling for 50p because the cans were so badly dented.By this time I was really starting to resent having to get the beer in for the slugs when they’ve already had at least ten marigolds, eight courgette plants, three broad bean plants, a dozen sunflowers and quite a few strawberries.I think my previous attempt at making beer traps might have ended with me just drinking all the beer at about this point, which probably at least made me feel better about all the slug eaten plants for a while.
However.
I persevered this time and I can’t believe it - they really do all obligingly drown themselves!Some of the pots were full to the brim with dead slugs the next day, and I actually had to empty them out to make room for any more.
I then started working out how much it would cost me to buy six cans of lager every time I went to the allotment and decided that it would be a good idea to sieve all the slugs out and re-use the beer instead.This bit is disgusting and if you’re eating then you shouldn’t scroll any further down the page…
Yuck.In a satisfying sort of way.I wonder whether they like elderflower champagne?
A friend suggested that I cut a door flap in the bender greenhouse and then open and close it using laces like on a marquee. At last I can visualise a bender greenhouse door solution that might actually work. I've got loads of gaffa tape (never leave home without it) to reinforce the cut edges and could probably lace with the washing line I found with bits of concrete on it - I KNEW that would come in handy for something!
When I learned finger knitting as a child I had no idea that it would actually prove to be a useful skill later in life...
It looks a bit strange but not ugly, it certainly gets warm inside and it hasn't fallen down yet, but I am now having quite serious bender greenhouse problems.
The first thing I did after stretching plastic over the frame and burying it carefully around the edges was to go on holiday for two weeks, and in a fortnight of high winds the whole thing filled with air like a massive balloon and loosened itself so much that I've had to tie it down with string around the outside. It now looks as though I've netted a giant jellyfish. Trouble is, I can't think of a way of making a decent door for it, so opening and closing it currently still involves folding up the loose plastic around the doorframe and piling half a ton of rocks on it to weigh it down.
The recent hot weather has made me realise I'm going to have to put vent holes in it sooner rather than later, but I'm scared to cut the plastic in the wrong place because it was so expensive, and to top it all a couple of the willow branches I made the frame from have started to grow, which I'm worried will result in big spikey bits making holes exactly where I don't want them.
Casually put some very early seed trays on the windowsill. Fill the remaining space with the first tomatoes, and shove all your lovely ornaments out of the way to fit everything else in. Then knock everything over every five minutes, as the spring gets underway in ernest and there’s not a horizontal space left in the house that doesn’t have some tender seedlings growing on it. Sound familiar?
I have accidentally cooked seedlings that I’d left on the top of the grill, I have carried a six-foot ladder around my flat to water things growing on top of the wardrobes, I have been unable to reach my windows for months at a time because of the precarious arrangements of vegetable racks I’ve used to layer seed trays in front of my windows. I’ve had enough now.
This year I’ve been trying to make better use of the vertical space in my high-celinged flat, and with spring just around the corner I want to double the amount of windowsill space I can grow things on this year. I have a cunning plan.
This is what my living room windows look like
And this is my bedroom window
My plan is to construct a shelf half way up each window where the panes are split. I’m hoping that this won’t block out too much of the natural light coming into the rooms, but for my next trick I’m going to make the shelves completely removable, so that I’m not stuck with a huge window obstruction all year round.
To make the supports as unobtrusive as possible I’m putting in small batons on either side of the frames. Here is me measuring one against the inside of the window frame
I’ll be needing four, two for each set of windows, and a support shelf for the middle of the wider living room window. I sawed the wood for these to the right length in the middle of my living room, on a science lab stool I found behind Leeds University and took home on the bus, topped with an old chopping board that I rescued from a bonfire. Just in case you are having trouble visualising this:
It works a treat.
The next thing to do is to help the fittings (which will not be removable) to blend in, by painting them to match the windows. I used gloss spray paint, but would have used normal gloss paint if I’d had any. I reckon they will get fairly grubby with bits of soil etc spilling on them all the time, so I want to be able to wipe them clean when I take the shelves down.
A couple of thin layers of spray paint is the way to go, it just drips if you try to put too much on at once and thin layers are also less likely to chip off later.
To fix them to the frame I used 40mm screws straight into the wooden window frame. Then I cut the shelves to length on my homemade saw bench and put them in position resting on the batons. This bit actually took some time because after I’d found woodworm in the reclaimed floorboards I was going to use, neither local skips nor Homebase could provide me with suitable wood. Eventually a neighbour gave me some wood left over from her own shelves, thus saving the whole project just in time. Here is the finished product with all my little seedlings waiting for the sun to shine:
And I can of course use the time they take to grow to hoover all the soil and sawdust out of the carpet…
Sorry to have kept you all waiting - no doubt with baited breath - for my next installment here. Excuses include being in Mexico, then being in Somerset, then having a massive list of garden and allotment related things I should have been doing when I was in Mexico and Somerset. Some of this I'd planned to write blogs about, but I've been too busy actually doing it all to maintain a cyber presence at the same time.
I'm now back, everything is planted and watered and I've even got tadpoles in the bathtub on my allotment. Time to sit back and look at it all for a minute, and ask everyone to tell me everything they ever knew about tadpoles...
...for instance, I know you can't move frogs to new ponds and you're supposed to start with frogspawn, but is it ok to move them as tadpoles? The water will be different (I know a bit about that from keeping goldfish in an aquarium) and I think mine will be alright because I've used about half rainwater and half tapwater, to which I added chlorine-neutralising stuff designed to make it safe for fish. The tap water tends to be quite acidic around here though, and I've no idea what PH rainwater is likely to be.
And what do they need to eat? Am I right to think I can feed them goldfish food, and how much/how often should I feed them? What should I feed them when they grow into frogs - I'm hoping they'll eat all my slugs, but should I deliberately plant slug-attracting plants near the pond, or will that just stop them hopping further away to eat the ones that are near my crops? Will they get drunk if I also put slug beer traps down?
Suggestions for names would also be very welcome 'cos I guess I need about fifty. They don't exactly have distinctive personality traits yet, but I'll keep you posted.
Now I've got my camera working again I can post pictures of the home-made polytunnel I've been working on. It's tiny, but any extra greenhouse space is going to be useful this year 'cos I've been digging over the patch of weeds that I've had under cover for a year, so this time I'll have twice the space for planting that I had last year. That means I'll need twice the number of seedlings, and my windowsills aren't any bigger than they were…
I found a small willow tree on a footpath near the allotment, with nice straight branches just right for building a bender. The number of suitable branches really limited the size of the bender, but it's still big enough to be worthwhile. I've never built a bender before, and had to take it all apart and start again a couple of times until it came out a good shape – having used a tee-pee shaped greenhouse last year I really wanted to make sure this one would have a good amount of headroom, so I kept rebuilding until I made the sides go more or less straight up instead of sloping inwards towards the top.
I ordered clear polythene (guaranteed for five years against deterioration in sunlight) off the internet from here http://www.polytheneone.com/polytunnel_polythene_super_strength_clear.htm and only realised when it arrived that I'd struggle to get it from my house to the allotment without a car. I managed by kind of folding my arms around the roll at its balancing point and stopping a few times for a rest. But I was glad after all that I hadn't saved up for a bigger roll which would have been cheaper but harder to move. It would have been harder to unroll, too. Luckily I'd measured up ok – I'd been worried because the bender's shape was so irregular that I wasn't sure I'd got the highest point, but 7m x 7m turned out to be just right. I dug a trench around the base of the bender and got help from another plot holder to unroll it over the frame, and then spent a whole afternoon folding it neatly to fit flat into the trenches and filling them back up with soil.
As you can see it was getting dark by the time I'd finished. I went back the next day just to admire it over a cup of tea. The next problem is what to do about the door. At the moment I've just folded the loose plastic at the front to one side and weighed it down with bricks, but it's a huge hassle to get in and out, in fact I haven't been inside since I filled the trench in case it disturbs the plastic before it's settled firmly into the ground. Here's a glimpse through the side:
It's only been up a few days so I don't know if it will withstand high winds, and I still lack a real plan for the door, which I'll be working on in the next few weeks, but I'm quite pleased with progress so far!
