Newly-planted beans

It’s a year since we first started to grow our own food in the plot, and so we’re finding ourselves repeating some of the things we did around about now 12 months ago. This time we have more idea of what we should and shouldn’t be doing, which I hope will be reflected in the weight of the crops we produce.

And so in the last few days we have been busy starting off the beans and tomatoes.

As last year, we are growing three different types of tomato: gardeners’ delight, moneymaker and golden sunrise. All are easy to grow and generally crop well as they have been carefully bred and cross-bred over time to produce a more refined variant. Moneymaker is the most conventional. It’s a medium-size, juicy tomato of the type you might buy in a pack of six from a supermarket. This, and golden sunrise, which is a sweet yellow variety delicious in sandwiches, formed the bulk of our tomato chutney ingredients.

The final variety - gardeners’ delight - are cherry tomatoes, absolutely bursting with flavour and great in salads.

We’ve started them all off in an unheated propagator in the greenhouse to keep them cosy in the first few unpredictable weeks of spring. This has two vents, one of which we’ve closed, and the other left open. We’ll be giving it a good squirt of water from a water spray every couple of days.

At the same time we’re expanding on the beans we grew last year. Back then we only did runner beans and French beans, all of which were grown in pots as we didn’t have the plot ready in time. They suffered as a result, for while the crop was generally good while it lasted, it didn’t run for as long as those grown in the ground in the allotments over the back fence.

So this year we’ve planted the same runner and French beans and added broad beans to the mix, and although we’re starting them off in pots (see the picture above) we plan on moving them into the plot proper once the frosts have definitely finished and the shoots are big enough to handle. With some sun, rain, sufficient support and a little good fortune we’re hoping that between them all they’ll produce enough to see us through the summer, with plenty left over to freeze for winter consumption.

Plant a tree and you get a wonderful sense of achievement. Perhaps it’s because we have it drummed into us from an early age that trees are the world’s lungs and we won’t survive without them, or maybe it’s because when you’re done you can already see the results, and they’re usually four feet high (you don’t get that with seeds). I don’t know. But either way it makes you feel good about yourself, and that’s half the fun of gardening.

So today we were planting four trees around the plot and borders. Dwarf Cherry Stella and Apricot Flavorcot in pots, and two apple trees in soil: a crab apple in the back for making jelly, and an eating apple in the front.

In an ideal world, the two potted trees needed 60cm tubs in which to grow, but they are still small and so we settled on a couple of 55cm terracotta pots at £11 each from the local DIY store. They already look good, and will look even better when they’ve started to age. That should give them plenty of years’ growth before things start to get tight.

We put pieces of broken crock in the bottom for drainage and to stop the soil coming straight out of the bottom, and then shovelled in compost up to the half way mark. Creating a small hollow in this, we lowered in the trees’ roots and topped up to the rim, then pressed down firmly.

Whenever you plant a new plant, or transplant one as we’re doing here, it’s important to make sure the root system is well embedded in the soil, and the easiest way to do that is to give them a good drink. This is doubly important with trees, as they are often shipped with a plastic bag tied around an almost naked root ball, which will have started to dry out in transit. So, we gave each one a can-full from the water butt and then moved on to the trees destined for the borders.

These were both cheaper to plant and far easier. Making sure we kept them away from the house or any other walls, we dug a hole around twice the depth of the roots and dropped them in. These trees will take their nutrients from the soil, so we didn’t use any compost, but we will water them from time to time with fruit fertiliser to give them a helping hand. This means that the growing costs, once the trees had been bought, are effectively nil, as we didn’t have to pay for any pots either.

Now all we need do is wait. The crab apple already has blossom at the end of each branch, and there is a single bud on both the cherry and apricot trees, but we’re not expecting any great crops this year. The rest of 2008 will probably be spent with them bedding in, strengthening up, and getting used to their new homes. Next year, perhaps, we can expect to eat our first fruit.

Our first batch of beer. We made 29 pints.

After two weeks in the fermenter, it was finally time to bottle the beer this weekend. The cat will be glad, as it means he won’t have a big bubbling tub next to his food bowls; he’s been suspicious about it since the whole enterprise began.

So we lifted the 40-pint fermenter onto the worktop - no mean feat in itself - and carefully lifted the lid. As expected, there was a ring of scum around the edge, but the beer itself was clear and unclouded, and smelt exactly as you’d expect. So, things were looking good.

Opening the beer fermenter

Before you can bottle it, you have to be sure it’s ready. After all, you don’t really want it reacting inside the bottles, as that could change the pressure and present a danger. You have two options: either you keep a close eye on it for the bubbles to stop rising, or you use a hydrometer. This is a glass device with a weight in one end and a scale up the side that you drop into a sample of your brew. It measures the so-called ‘gravity’ of your beer and tells you both when it’s ready for bottling, and what the alcohol content is.

The measurement is relative to water’s gravity at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and beer’s measurement should be just slightly higher than this, at around 1.06 (water is 1.00).

Testing the beer using a hydrometer

We had some difficulty here. Although our measurement was very close to the required 1.06, it wasn’t quite there, so we had some doubts as to whether it was ready for bottling. However, at the same time, it had been in the fermenter for two weeks, and the instructions on our starter kit clearly stated that it should need only four to six days.

We looked carefully at the brew itself and could only see a very occasional bubble floating to the surface so decided, after some discussion, that it was probably ready for bottling.

This is a quite exciting and rather fast-moving process. We laid out a large bath towel on the kitchen floor and put a washing up bowl onto it. Next, we fed half a teaspoon of sugar into each bottle (all of which had been thoroughly sterilised in advance) and put them into the bowl.

The kit came with a syphoning tube that clips onto the rim of the fermenter. Onto the end of this you attach a sediment trap, which is a small cup that forces the beer to travel down before it rises into the syphon, and you then lower the whole arrangement into the liquid, about half way down the fermenter.

What happens next can get quite messy. Because your fermenter is on a worktop and your bottles are on the floor, gravity can make it flow out rather quickly. You start it off by sucking the end of the syphon until the beer comes down the tube to a point lower than the sediment trap and then quickly transfer the end of the syphon to the neck of your first bottle. The full weight of the first 20 pints of your beer will be pressing down on the flowing liquid, which will come out faster than you can cope with on your own. It took two of us working very quickly to keep swapping out the bottles as they filled, and we still managed to get plenty of it into the bowl and onto the towel.

In fact, so quickly did we have to work that we didn’t even have time for a picture.

There will be sediment at the bottom of your fermenter barrel

We got 29 pints out of the fermenter, all told, but didn’t go any further as we didn’t want to risk getting sediment into the last few bottles. This is bitter and not at all nice to drink, so we washed it away, and were surprised that it came out as a creamy sand, rather than a thick black Marmite-like gloop, like the malt we had poured in, along with the sugar, at the start of the process.

Of course, stopping after 29 pints rather than the 40 we had budgeted for does change the cost per pint calculation slightly, upping it to 17p per pint from our original estimation of 12p.

Using the capping device

After clearing up the kitchen floor, we were left only with the task of capping the bottles. This is quick, easy and fun - so long as you have a capping device. It looks like a large pair or nutcrackers, and has a small recessed magnet in the top. You slip in the cap, and let the magnet hold it in place, then position it over the neck of each bottle and pull down the arms to crimp the rim of the cap onto the bottle’s mouth. It should now be airtight and able to withstand pressure.

But the beer still isn’t ready to drink just yet. It has to sit in the bottles for another couple of weeks, although we may well leave ours for a month. Our initial tests proved it to have a very bitter aftertaste, which we’re hoping the sugar in the bottles will do something to tame.

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beer, brewing, home+brewing

Chilis not only taste great - when used appropriately and in moderation - they look good, too. Growing as colourful fruits on small bushes, they make an attractive addition to a windowsill or conservatory or, if you have a suitably sunny spot outside, a pot in the garden or greenhouse.

They’re also the perfect crop for the self-sufficientist without a garden of their own, as they take up very little space, and there are many handy ways of sowing and growing your seeds.

Our two favourites are seed matches, and the Pocket Garden. The seed matches (above) were bought back from Wahaca by a friend. Wahaca is a London restaurant specialising in Mexican market eating. They’re free to pick up at the end of your meal, and are a neat alternative to calling cards.

Although we’ve seen this idea used before for tomato seeds, it’s the first time we’ve come across it for spices, and it’s brilliantly simple. You simply poke the stick into a pot of fresh compost, water it and wait for your plant to grow. The black line half way up the stick marks the depth to which you should take it for perfect germination.

However, this year we’re growing our chilis using a Pocket Garden (below), which is the simplest method ever for getting your herbs and spices under way.

Pocket Gardens are foiled plastic packets about the size of the front pocket of a pair of jeans, ready-filled with rich soil and fertiliser. Tear open the top and remove a little of the soil, then shake in the seeds that you’ll find inside. Replace the soil and put it in a sunny spot on a windowsill, keeping it damp but not waterlogged.

In a couple of weeks you’ll get your first shoots, which you can then thin out, moving the weaker ones into pots of their own if you want to keep them going, and giving those that remain space to breathe. Let them continue growing until they reach maturity and start producing fruit.

Obviously with chilis the usual precautions about washing your hands whenever you’ve handled the fruit applies, and all the moreso when you’ve been touching their seeds. Whatever you do, don’t get them near your eyes.

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garden, gardening, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, vegetables, chili

Onions are a staple in pretty much any country’s cooking. They can be the main part of a meal, as in onion soup, or a constituent part of a salad, risotto or casserole, so it makes sense to grow your own wherever you can.

This can be done from either seed or onion sets, which are small onion bulbs that have already been started off, which you then re-plant in your own plot to mature. This is certainly the simplest way to get your crop underway, and they cost little more than seeds. We bought two nets of bulbs - one red and one white - with 60 bulbs in each net for £1.99 apiece.

Onions appreciate a rich soil, so we chose an area of the plot where we knew we had dug in compost last year. Here, we dug a 5cm (2in) deep trench, which we lined with well-rotted manure before dropping in the sets.

Each bulb should be at least 7.5cm from its neighbour to leave room for growth, and our two rows were 22cm apart. To avoid confusion at harvest time, we kept each type separate, with white bulbs to the back of the plot, and red in a row slightly forward. Each must be gently pressed into the ground before you cover them with earth, which should then be firmed down with the back of the spade. Avoid hammering it so flat that the bulbs have no chance of sprouting.

The bulbs will start to shoot in the next few weeks, growing in breadth as their tops get taller, and will be ready to harvest in mid- to late-summer.

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garden, gardening, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, vegetables