Beer, it turns out, is very easy to brew, and it’s one of the most cost-effective self-sufficiency moves you can make. You can quickly and easily set up a small brewery under your kitchen counter and, a week or two later, be snapping open your first few home-brewed pints.

We’ve been brewing our first batch of beer for the last week, with a fermenting barrel tucked away in a corner of the kitchen, two crates of bottles waiting to be filled out in the outhouse, and our first capping machine bought and tried out with a couple of the 100 caps we bought for plugging the bottles’ necks.

Once you’ve got your equipment, for an initial outlay of around £20, the beer itself works out at about 13p a pint, as you’ll only be buying supplies thereafter. Compare that to the £2.50 to £3 or more you’ll pay for a pint in a pub and you can see why it makes sense.

But before you can start brewing, you need some specific kit and ingredients. Chief among these is the fermenter, which if you buy a kit-based brewing system, will consist of a large barrel with a snap-on lid. Ours holds five gallons.

This must be scrupulously cleaned, and a quick scrub with some washing up liquid isn’t going to do the job. You can get special sterilisation powders that you mix with water and use to soak all of your kit, but bottle sterilising formulas used to clean babies’ bottles would probably do the job just as well. This is important, as the slightest impurity can contaminate your brew, and make it undrinkable, or simply not brew properly.

If you’re using a kit, you’ll get a can of malt and a packet of yeast. This malt is what determines the kind of beer you are making, and there are plenty to choose from. Each one, for a 40-pint batch, costs less than £5. You warm this gently in a pan to soften it up, and at the same time boil three pints of water. Once the malt has softened - you’ll have to use your judgement here as you can’t see inside it - you mix it with the water and 1kg of sugar in your fermenter and stir it using a sterilised spoon until the sugar has dissolved.

Now top up your fermenter to the five gallon mark with cold water and wait for it to reach room temperature. This could take some time, but when it does, you stir in the sachet of yeast and then snap on the lid. Let brewing commence.

Assuming your temperatures are fairly constant, and neither too hot nor too cold, the yeast will start to react with the sugar and malt, and the beer will start to brew. Pressure will build up in the fermenter and could cause the lid to bulge if you don’t have a release valve. Keep a close eye on this, as you don’t want to risk having it burst, and drenching your house in sticky, smelly, half-made beer.

Four days later, you start testing it, either with a hydrometer, which will tell you for certain whether or not it’s ready to bottle thanks to a gauge on its side, or by looking at how clear the liquid has become. Clear liquid is generally ready for bottling.

For us, that will probably happen next weekend, when it’s had another week in the fermenter to condition. And the best thing about that? By then it will be more or less ready to drink right away.

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beer, brewing, home+brewing

If you want to grow any fruit this year, then now’s the time to get your bushes planted. So this weekend we headed out into the plot and planted a new redcurrant tree for this year, and transplanted last year’s blackcurrant tree into a better, more suitable location than the edge of the cabbage patch.

The redcurrant tree was a £2 bargain, which arrived as two bare branches, close to budding, mummified in a black plastic wrap, to keep the soil in place. After taking off the plastic, you’re just five steps away from giving your new bush a happy home, from which to start bearing fruit.

The first step in planting a new bush is to give it a good drink. Once you have removed it from its plastic wrap, carefully knock off the soil around its roots, and then dunk it into a can of water. If you can, use rain water gathered from your gutters in a water butt. It’s free, and full of nutrients for your plants.

Dig a hole for your new bush. Make it a little deeper than the longest roots. Put the topsoil to one side and pick out any stones. You’ll be putting it back around your bush, and you don’t want them mangling its roots.

Put a good layer of manure in the bottom of the hole. We used dry manure, which we bought last summer and stored in the greenhouse over winter. It is organic and natural, and although it is horse droppings, it has no smell.

Remove your bush from the can of water and put it into the hole, gently shovelling the topsoil around its roots. When the topsoil is around two inches below the top of the hole, give it a good drenching, again using water drawn from a butt if available. You can use the same water in which you soaked the roots.

Finally, fill up the remainder of the hole with more topsoil, then then press it down with your boots, being careful not to damage the plant’s branches and trunk. This should compress your topsoil below the level of the edges of the hole again, so use any topsoil you have left to top it up, and press down one more time.

Your bush should now be comfortably rehomed, and ready to spread its roots and start working on the first of this year’s fruit. Feed it periodically using a dedicated fruit feed according to the instructions on the side of the feed bottle, and keep an eye on it in the summer to make sure it doesn’t completely dry out.

At the end of the season, fruit bushes often need some good pruning, but the kind and level of pruning called for will vary from fruit to fruit.

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garden, gardening, self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, fruit

Cornish pasties

Cornish pasties are very easy to make - much easier than you probably realise. If you can knock up a shortcrust pastry you’re half way there, end even if you can’t, you can always buy that part (although it would rub against the self-sufficiency ethos).

Once you have your pastry made, it’s up to you what you put inside. A traditional pasty would include beef and vegetables, but you can easily make vegetarian variations, one of which we’ll include here. As much as possible, you should use home-grown vegetables; onions, turnips and carrots work particularly well.

The following quantities will give you around 10 decent-sized pasties, any one of which would be enough for a lunch box or a lighter evening meal.

Ingredients

Equipment needed
Knives and peelers
Chopping board
Baking tray
Small plate
Rolling pin
Pastry brush
Cooling racks

Method
Wash and peel your vegetables and then slice then into very small pieces. Don’t shred or blend them but aim, if possible, for pieces around 5mm cubed. Mix these together and, if making meat pasties, roughly chop in the minced or ground beef.

Combine your ingredients in a large bowl and bind together with the gravy or white sauce. The gravy can be made using graules. For the white sauce, melt 25g of butter in a heavy-bottomed pan, mix in 25g of cornflour to make a smooth white paste, and then pour in three quarters of a pint of milk. Bring this to the boil, stirring all the time, until it forms a smooth white sauce. This will happen quite suddenly after several minutes’ stirring during which it will have seemed that nothing was happening. Don’t be tempted to stop stirring at any time, though, and don’t let the butter and flour burn on the bottom of the pan.

Roll out your pastry on a floured surface until it is around 5mm thick, and then cut out circles using a small tea plate. Lay a stripe of your filling across each one from edge to edge, passing through the middle.

Now use your pastry brush to lightly brush water around the edge of each circle, and gather it up into the familiar pasty shape, folding it in half along the line of the filling. Pinch the edges together and then lay them out on a greased baking tray. Cut a could of slits in the top of each one to allow it to vent in the oven, and then brush with the beaten egg. Not too much - that single egg should be enough for all 10 pasties.

Put them into a pre-heated oven at 230 degrees Celsius (450 degrees Fahrenheit) for 10 minutes, and then turn down to 190 degrees Celsius (375 degrees Fahrenheit) for a further 40 minutes. Once cooked, they can be eaten hot, or turned out onto wire racks to cool, then eaten cold.

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cooking, baking, cornish+pasty, cornish+pasties

There are many reasons to become self-sufficient. For some it’s the simple enjoyment of standing on your own two feet, while for others it’s a desire not to be beholden to the whims and manipulation of the big-chain supermarkets.

That second group would get a whole lot larger if everyone was forced to read Andrew Simms’ extraordinary Tescopoly. Bursting with stats and facts it documents the big four supermarket groups’ (and Tesco in general’s) exploitation of the market for groceries, and the harm they do to their customers, suppliers and the environment by strangling competition and forcing food producers into impossible deals.

More worryingly, though, it documents Tesco’s drive into ever more areas, wiping out whole high streets by providing everything from cabbages to cutlets, baps to bank accounts, and ready meals to medicine. Now, as it moves into providing phone services, broadband and even legal services, its power over our day to day lives gets ever stronger, and we only feed its ability to exercise this control by giving it more and more information about who we are, what we like and what we do.

There is so much in this book that is incredible, extraordinary and frightening that picking out just one quote is close to impossible, but Simms’ analysis of the supermarkets’ ability to gather such minute information on ourselves sticks in the mine, and should be enough to have us cutting up our Clubcards in droves.

With the power of Clubcard to analyse the lives of Tesco customers, this creates some fascinating opportunities for cross-selling. Remember, 60,000 different customised promotions go out with Clubcard mailings. Should the computer notice that Mr Smith is buying a lot of condoms when Mrs Smith seems to be away (indicated by a break in her regular shopping patterns), and Mr Smith appears to be buying flowers and lingere when it isn’t Mrs Smith’s birthday, it’s perfectly imaginable that Mr Smith’s next Clubcard mailing might include a money-off voucher for the Tesco Divorce Pack. This would, after all, be simple, customer driver marketing logic. From Baby Club to getting divorced to making your Last Will and Testament, Tesco will be there to take a slice of all of life’s (and death’s) key moments.

Is this feasible? Certainly.

There are around 25 million [Clubcards] in existence, representing 14 million households. Perhaps 10 million cards are in active use. This creates an extraordinary eventuality. Shortly before its fall, the German Democratic Republic - East Germany, one of the most famous police states in the world - only had a population of around 16 million. That means Tesco almost certainly holds more files on British citizens than the East German state ever held on its own people.

But of course the German Democratic Republic was very different to the UK, and it neither built up its records with overt help from the supermarkets, nor shared with them what it knew about their customers. In the UK, however, that may yet happen.

A darker twist to such surveillance technology emerged when the UK government let it be known that it planned to link proposed compulsory biometric identity cards, designed to help control immigration, to the data contained on supermakrt loyalty cards. The idea floated was to allow two-way data traffic between the government and major corporations like banks and supermarkets. Information contained on the national identity database, set up to underpin the ID card scheme, would be made available to companies for a price. In the other direction, the police could be alerted the moment someone who was the target of an inquiry made use of a loyalty card or cash machine.

You could discount a lot of what is said in this book as paranoia had Simms, who is policy director for the New Economics Foundation and coined the term Clone Towns, not backed up his facts with an impressive array of references and stats that add weight to his argument.

I’d have liked to have seen some direct response from Tesco, rather than mere reported quotes, and there is no indication whether or not the company was directly asked to contribute to the work, but this remains an important and compelling read, and one that will make you think twice, and perhaps three times before shopping at the famous red and blue store.

Self-sufficiency, then, could be about more than the simple satisfaction of eating your own produce throughout the year. It could be about preserving your own privacy, fighting for the rights of small producers and helping to save the environment.

There’s loads more about Tescopoly, and local campaigns about and against the store’s further expansion, at tescopoly.org.

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tescopoly

Scones are particularly versatile, and can be eaten any time of the day. They are just as good as a breakfast product as they are a mid-morning cake with a cup of tea, and open to variations. This recipe uses sultanas and cherries, but you can leave out the fruit entirely if you’d rather have them with jam, skip the cherries if you want something more traditional, or swap the fruit for cheese for a savoury treat.

However you choose to eat them, scones are best enjoyed slightly warmed, and buttered, so that the butter melts. Or, if you’re feeling particularly decadent, with clotted cream and either raspberry or strawberry jam.

Ingredients
680g (1.5lb) self raising flour
225g (8oz) lard
225g (8oz) granulated sugar
225g (8oz) sultanas
Handful of glace cherries (optional)
1 beaten egg
225g (8oz) of milk and water mix

Equipment needed
Large mixing bowl
Knife
Spoon (preferably wooden)
Pastry cutter
Oven
Baking trays
Cooling racks

Method
Place the flour into your largest mixing bowl, and cut in the lard. This should be sliced into small cubes to make it easier to combine with the flour.

Roll up your sleeves and use your fingers to rub the lard into the flour until you have a bowl full of what looks like fine breadcrumbs. You shouldn’t be able to see any of the lard itself by now. If you have a mixer, such as a Magimix (not a blender), you can use this on its pulse setting to combine the lard and flour.

Stir in the sugar and sultanas (and cherries if you’re using them) with a wooden spoon, avoiding the mixer if you used one in the last step, as you don’t want to overwork them and have them sliced up by the blades.

Once the sugar and fruit are fully combined into the mixture, you need to add your liquid. The precise amount you need will depends on the make-up of your dry ingredients. It will be around 225g of milk and water in roughly equal quantities, plus a beaten egg, but it is better to hold back a little of the liquid as you mix in the first batch to see how it all holds together, and add the rest if you need it.

What you are looking for as you stir in the liquid is for the mixture to form into a dense pastry, which you can then roll out on a floured surface, before cutting with a pastry cutter.

Lay the cut scones onto a lightly-greased baking tray, and cook for between 10 and 15 minutes at 190 degrees Celsius (375 degrees Fahrenheit). When cooked, turn them out onto wire racks to cool.

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baking, cooking