Better late than never

The title is supposed to refer to gardening, but it could just as well refer to the blog post itself. I've made a very slow start on gardening this year. It started with, I wish I'd cleaned out the greenhouse in the autumn, when proper gardeners do it, and progressed through, Those brambles are getting out of hand, to, If the weather's going to muck around like this, what's the point?

Somehow, though, I did manage to get the greenhouse clean and ready to use, and started clearing beds ready for planting. In the second week in May - rather later than just about anyone else - I got potatoes in the ground...

I couldn't bring myself to dig up that flowering broccoli, and the comfrey is a permanent fixture.

... shortly followed by peas.

The raspberry cane in the middle of this bed was also left, obviously. The comfrey in the far corner is a recent development, but is becoming a permanent fixture.

Both of these are just starting to show their first leaves, which lifts the spirits greatly. My friend Maggs gave me some plants - brassicas and curcubits - which also lifted the spirits. She offered them before asking whether I had any evening primrose going spare. I probably shouldn't have confessed to composting them - they grow like weeds in my garden - but I was glad to have a bucketful to give her in exchange. Today I finished clearing the bed for brassicas and other, so I should be getting those in tomorrow. Maybe I will have a veg garden this year.

About time

This morning (or yesterday evening, for the organised), clocks across Britain were set forward one hour. This is something that has always irritated me. Why do we need to do this? If we want to make the most of light mornings, why can't we just get up earlier? Why do we need to fool ourselves into thinking that the time is an hour later than it really is?

Here's the thing that irritates me: British Summer Time is not real. The position of the hands on a clock face are a measurement, and as such, should aim to measure as accurately as possible. But what are they measuring, exactly? Well... it gets a little more complicated than you might expect when you try to answer this question. Roughly, it's the position of the sun in the sky, but not relying on actually being able to see the sun, and extended through the hours of darkness, too. It's a measure of the Earth's rotation. As such, Noon should mean the time when the sun reaches its highest elevation in the sky.

There are two things which make this an approximation. The first is the use of time zones. Here on the west coast of Wales, the sun sets fifteen minutes later than it does in London and similarly, noon - meaning the highest elevation of the sun - is fifteen minutes later as well. It used to be the case that every town operated to its own local time, but the coming of the railways made it necessary to keep the same time across the whole country. Imagine trying to devise a train timetable with a different time zone for each stop!

I can see the sense in having the same time across the country, so the time is accurate to within about half an hour. For that purpose we all use Greenwich time (the political choice of a location right at the east of the country is also a little irritating - somewhere in the middle would be better), but what about the mean part of GMT? This is mean in the sense of average and derives from the fact that noon-to-noon is not exactly 24 hours, most of the time. On some days it takes a little more and on other days a little less than 24 hours for the sun to return to its highest elevation in the sky.

The reason for this variation is the eliptical shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. I was going to give you a brief explanation there, but then I looked it up and it got complicated. If you're interested, Wikepedia has a lengthy article on the subject. The upshot is that some of the time, a sundial is fast relative to a clock, and some of the time it is slow. When clocks were new, the sundial was taken to be correct and an adjustment was applied to the new-fangled clocks to calculate the correct, sundial time. Nowadays, if you are so inclined, you can apply the adjustment (in reverse) to sundial-time to get the correct time as per a clock.

This leaves me in a quandry. I share the modern instinct that the regular clock, with exactly 24 hours each day, is the more correct measure of passing time, but if the sundial, which reliably reports the position of the sun, is inaccurate, what are we measuring with the clock? The concept time of day has become abstracted away from the position of the sun, and that abstraction opens the door to people mucking around with it, with time zones and daylight saving. This feels wrong, as if we've somehow become separated from a fundamental aspect of the natural world. I am very tempted to set up a sundial in my garden and use only that for timekeeping. If only we had more sunlight.

Further adventures with wild yeast: Heather ale

After starting off my home brew in the kitchen, I move it downstairs to the store room, which is rather cooler. The lower temperature seems to have been a problem for the wine yeast I used last year, and I have a dozen demijohns full of half-fermented wine. I'm hoping it will get going again when the weather warms up, but I'd prefer yeast that doesn't need much warmth to ferment.

I'd been thinking of buying lager yeast, as that works at lower temperatures than most, but then I had another idea: The wild yeast that I'm using as a sourdough starter seems quite happy in cool temperatures (i.e. winter kitchen temperatures) and I've heard of people getting yeast from sourdough for cider; maybe I could do the same for beer.

I added extra water and left the starter until it separated out, then drained off the cloudy liquid, leaving as much of the floury gloop behind as possible. I don't really want starch in my beer. I added this to my usual heather ale recipe and left it to see what would happen. The quantity of yeast cells in that bit of liquid was probably pretty small, so I gave it longer than I usually would to check for signs of life. That is, I checked for bubbles frequently, but gave it three days before giving up.

Last autumn, I chucked a couple of crab apples in a jar of sugary water in the hope of cultivating wild yeast from the apple skins. The jar was still sitting on the kitchen counter, smelling... possibly alcoholic, possibly just appley - certainly not foul. I poured that in. A day later, I added some more of the sourdough starter, this time being less fussy about the starch. Eventually, I saw tiny which flecks on the surface - little bubbles? I monitored further until it became obvious that the white fleck were not bubbles, but some kind of growth. Oh, *&#%! That is not the kind of life I was hoping to see.

Two day-old pellicle

However, before throwing it all out, I did a bit of research, and learned a new word: Pellicle. This is a layer that forms on top of wort during the brewing of beer. It's the same kind of thing as the scoby that forms in kombucha brewing, but not the same micro-organisms.

While the cultivated brewing yeast doesn't form a pellicle, other strains of the same species can do, so it's entirely possible that wild yeast might do so. My pellicle smelled a little musty, but not too strong or foul. I also poked a dropper through the surface to take a sample of the wort, and that tasted fine, so I left it to see what would happen. A day later, I saw bubbles under the surface.

Bubbles trapped under the pellicle

Bubbles indicate fermentation, so there's definitely something going on, though of course, I don't know what kind of fermentation. It still smells OK, so I'm going to wait and see what develops. At worst, I'll get something that smells and tastes horrible, and I'll have to throw the whole lot away. Alternatively, it might taste of nothing, which is also not worth keeping. Another possibility is that mainly acids are forming, in which case I might have two gallons of vinegar, which is not ideal, but worth something. There's also a chance that I might end up with a delicious and unique beer. I'll just have to wait and see.

Kombucha - getting started

I enjoy a drink of beer or wine, but often as not, it's for the taste rather than the alcohol content. I don't really like sweet drinks with food and, apart from plain water, there aren't many savoury alternatives. My interest in fermented foods led to me hearing about fermented drinks, including kombucha, and wondering whether they might be a good alternative. The first step, then, was to try some and see what it tasted like.

Kombucha bottle now containing home brewed version,
but it looks much the same, I think.

I found a bottle of kombucha in the whole food shop that I buy malt extract from. On trying it, well... it was sweet and fizzy, which wasn't exactly what I was after, but it should be possible to tweak both. The underlying flavour was nice, so I pressed on to Step 2.

Because it is alive, a new culture will form in the bottle

Step 2 was cultivating a mother of kombucha, or SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). I checked before buying that the drink wasn't pasteurized, which would kill the yeast and bacteria. I saved a little of the drink to breed a new SCOBY from, and put it in a pint of sweet tea (normal black tea - one teabag in one pint* of boiling water, leave to cool then remove teabag and add two tablespoons of sugar). I covered the jar with cloth, put it in a warm-ish place and waited.

A light, white film formed within a few days, but then nothing seemed to happen for ages. It was about a month before I had something resembling a kombucha mother. I'm sorry I didn't take a photo at this stage, but then again, perhaps best not - they're not pretty. Now I had a mother and starter tea (a lot of the yeast cells are in the liquid, apparently, so you need both) I moved on to a larger batch: three and half pints or two litres of water, which is about the capacity of my larger saucepans, three teabags and 100g sugar. This time I used two green teabags with one black one - I have some rather old green tea with mint that needs using up, so I ignored the advice about not using flavoured teas at this stage (apparently the oils can inhibit the bacteria) and chucked a couple in.

This went into a half-gallon jar that once held pickled eggs, scavenged from the local pub. It took a while to get rid of the pickled egg smell, but it's OK now. This being rather heavy, I decided against the top of the cooker as the warm place. The adjacent cupboard gets quite warm, too, as it's against the chimney. I say quite warm - I put a thermometer in there and it read 18°C. It's all relative.

Two jugs were evicted and egg cups were rearranged to make room for this.

In theory, having the jar tucked away at the back of the cupboard should stop me moving it all the time to have a look and see how it's doing, but it didn't quite work like that. In spite of my interference, a new scoby formed within a week, albeit a thin one. I tasted the drink at seven days and liked it, though it's still a bit on the sweet side, if nowhere near as sweet as the commercial one.

I took some photos this time, so you can see what the scoby looks like:

The misty film on the top develops into a cellulose mat. The old one floated up underneath the new one, which is what the beige patches are. The edge is bent down where I poked a dropper through to sample a bit before deciding whether to bottle it.

From the side, you can see bits hanging down from the floating mat. It's supposed to look like this. Apparently this is a good thing.

At this stage, people often add flavourings and a little extra sugar when bottling, for a second fermentation, to produce a little fizz. It's very much like making beer. Since the drink's already a bit sweet, I'm not adding any more sugar this time. Also, at this stage, I'm sticking with the natural flavour, though I'll probably experiment with flavourings at some point.

The main change I'm planning to make is to replace the tea with something that doesn't have caffeine. Apparently it's the tannin that's important, so oak leaves are an obvious choice. I think beech leaves have tannin, too, and also blackberry leaves, which I may try if I don't get round to hacking back the brambles before they put out new leaves in the spring.

I'm hoping that with a bit of playing around, I'll end up with something that's (virtually) non-alcoholic, has no caffeine, almost no sugar, but still tastes good. It sounds like a pretty tall order, when I put it like that, but I think it might be possible. It's got to be worth a try, anyway.

---

* I knew that American gallons are smaller than British ones, but it only recently occurred to me to check pints - yes, American pints are smaller too. I'm using British pints.

Dydd gŵyl Dewi hapus

Happy St David's Day! (That's what the post title means, by the way.) To mark the occasion, I'm going to attempt a bit of Welsh:

Es i i dosbarth Cymraeg heddiw. Yn ystod amser cinio, aethon ni i'r caffe yn y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru. Clywon ni cerdd telyn a bwyton ni picer y mân

I went to Welsh class today. During lunch time, we went to the café in the National Library of Wales. We heard harp music and ate welsh cakes.

Even in that little bit, I'm sure there are mistakes. It's very frustrating having just a little bit of a language, so that you can start to say something, then get stuck for words almost immediately. I'll keep trying, though. Corrections welcome!

Image pinched from our local chocolatier.

Fermented veg: Not just sauerkraut

After my early enthusiasm for fermenting all of the vegetables, I settled down to just sauerkraut. However, seeing that carrots were going cheap in the supermarket recently, I bought a second bag and had a go at fermenting those.

Roughly following a recipe that someone shared in a facebook group, I added small quantities of onion and celery as well as a couple of pieces of crystallized stem ginger (the recipe had root ginger, but I had a jar of the sweet kind in the cupboard). There was something else in the recipe, too - I forget what it was, but I didn't have any.

I wanted to be sure that the ginger (grated, and rather sticky) was evenly mixed with the carrot so, instead of my usual method of adding ingredients in turn to a jar and pressing down as I go, I sprinkled salt over the grated carrots in a bowl first, then mixed the ginger through, and added the other vegetables last, and mixed it all up with my hands. Finally, I packed the mixture into a jar and pressed down. It released enough liquid to submerge everything when it was well squashed.

Fermented carrot salad. The stones are used to keep it under the liquid.

After about a week I tried some and really liked it. I'd wondered whether fermenting the sugar out would lose an essential feature of carrotiness and leave it dull and possibly bitter, but not at all. It just tastes like a tangy grated carrot salad, as if I'd added a good vinegar dressing. It's nice on its own, with cheese or cold meat in a sandwich or, less obviously, as a substitute for chopped tomatoes in cheesy pasta. In fact, I'd say this makes a pretty good alternative to tomatoes in salad, which is great, since I've had no success in growing tomatoes. Unfortunately, I haven't done very well growing carrots, either, but at least they're cheap to buy.

A sunshine and bara brith sort of a day

There are bad days and there are good days. Today is a day of sunshine without the icy north wind that came with it at the weekend.Today is a day for seeing the first crocus buds in the garden.

Today is a day of the steam train going past, and the driver waving while I'm hanging the washing out on the line. Today is a day of a firewood delivery in weather that's quite pleasant to be out it (but only because Ian deferred it from yesterday, when it was chucking it down).

Today is the kind of day when some firewood is just too pretty to burn.

Today is a day of home made bara brith (literally 'speckled bread', this is half way between bread and fruit cake).

Today is a day when I might feel able to face the greenhouse, which is in dire need of a clear-out.

I'm not promising anything, though. I have a cup of tea and a slice of bara brith, and a cat who's just started kneading my arm.

Signs of spring

This week, I have been mostly studying Welsh and proofreading, which don't make for the most interesting blog posts. Outdoors, however, it has finally stopped raining and looks almost like spring, which is very exciting. It's also cold enough that I don't mind too much not being able to get out in it. Of course, this year the weather has been so mixed up that early signs of spring are more a cause for concern than celebration, but these are not daffodils flowering in January...

I might have had snowdrop flowers if the slugs hadn't chewed them off.

The willow I planted last year has pussy willows! When I was five, I put one of these up my nose. A bigger kid told me to.

Pebble's elder tree has leaves coming out.

What really tells us that winter is over, though, is the first train of the year!

George came to watch the second one.

Not a sign of spring, but the moon was rather beautiful this evening.

End of the post a day challenge

Well, that fizzled out a bit, didn't it? I was doing fine for a couple of weeks, but even before we went away, I was getting a bit fed up with this challenge. I found myself posting things just for the sake of getting something posted before the end of the day, and not taking time to write more thoughtful posts. Blogging started to feel like a bit of a bind, so when we got home, I hadn't really got the heart to get back into the challenge.

On the plus side, it did get me back into the habit of blogging, which was the point of it. I also posted a few things that had been lurking in drafts, or in the photo file having not even got to drafts, for far too long. Now I don't have so many unwritten posts hanging over me, I feel a little less guilty about neglecting the blog. This doesn't mean I'll neglect it more - guilt has the opposite effect on me; when I feel guilty about something I tend to avoid it. How counterproductive is that? I feel guilty about not doing enough of something, so I run away and do even less of it! Is this just me?

Anyway, I'm going to stop pretending I'm writing a post a day, but I will try to write about things as and when I have something vaguely interesting to say, or a nice photo to show you. In the meantime, here are some pictures of George:

Outdoors, last summer. I'm looking forward to some outdoors weather again.

On the sofa, where he spends most of his time at the moment.

Seed audit and planning

The first step in planning what seeds to buy was to find my seed pot. It was on the floor just there for ages, but then I tidied up... I found it eventually, and there are quite a lot of seeds in it.

Seeds, various. Very various.

A lot of these are old, but I think I'll take a chance on them and only buy what I haven't already got. I have:-

• Field beans, some old, some saved, possibly mouldy
• Dutch brown beans, saved
• Borlotto beans, old
• Peas, old-ish, Exzellenz, not enough
• Brocolli, some old, some masses of saved
• Red cabbage, old but masses of them
• Spring onions, two varieties, at least one of which is fresh
• Hokkaido squash, just four seeds
• Carrots, old
• Root parsley
• Parsnips, saved
• Leeks, saved (hopefully)
• Chard, two varieties
• Fennel, old but lots
• Purslane
• Basil
• Beetroot
• Borage
• Nasturtiums
• Sweet peas

To add to these, I now have anise hyssop and primroses - thank you Sara! This is a pretty good selection, before I've even bought anything. I've decided against growing tomatoes this year, as they need a lot of attention and I've yet to get a decent crop. Carrots would be off the list if I didn't already have seeds - I'm not sure whether to bother sowing them or not. Peas do well, so I'll get more of those. Similarly potatoes - I tried one of the blight resistant Sarpo varieties last year, and I'd like to grow those again. I'll also add courgettes and sweetcorn to the list.

The only other veg I'm wondering about is asparagus. My seed-grown plants have mostly failed, and I do like asparagus a lot. I wonder whether plants grown from crowns might be strong enough to withstand some slug-chewing? Or if not, whether I might be able to defend a few plants successfully? Given the otherwise short shopping list, it might be worth a go.