The Elderflower tasted like it might be quite good, The Marrow Rum has got a long way to go (okay so far it’s pretty awful) but is starting to clear now and the dandelion…. well, it’s not going well.  What I don’t understand is that I made two batches of the dandelion wine at the same time this one (Batch A) just won’t clear (Batch B got bottled a while back and is still looking good, I’m waiting at least another month before I try it though.), I even resorted to using some finings in it which so far doesn’t seem to have done very much (yet, we’ll see in a week or so!).

Marrow Rum! now one book I have says don’t bother with this it never works, another says, you must try it, but it needs a long time to age. I also checked out the Internet a bit and mostly came up with the same recipe.

Get large marrow, hollow out, fill with demerara sugar, squeeze in the juices of an orange then add activated yeast. leave hanging in a muslin bag for 3 weeks with the tops sellotaped back on. Decant juices to a fermentation jar and ferment for a while longer, then rack and bottle and leave for ages to mature.

The only alternative I’ve seen says to pack the marrow with sugar but no yeast, then after 3 weeks pour the resulting liquid into a fermentation jar and start the fermenting then.

I followed the top recipe but I used 3 large courgette things rather than a massive marrow and they are now sat in a bucket covered with a couple of tea towels, so I’m hoping this doesn’t collapse!

We’ll let you know how it goes but this one does say to leave for a while!

So we bottled that up (5 bottles of wine) and racked the still cloudy batch into a new fermentation jar, and topped that up with the clear wine.

Problem is…. it doesn’t taste too good!
It’s still very sweet, so I’m not sure if it should ferment more? It has a sort of desert wine sweetness but not the same thickness as that. I guess if it stays sweet then we can make deserts with it…. it is supposed to get better with age, and not be drunk until December so it still has a chance!
Lets just hope the ones I’ve bottled don’t ferment any more!

Initially it looked a little cloudy in the new bottles but it think that was just some sediment that got stirred up when i was siphoning and that seems to have cleared out now, but the other jar (Batch A) doesn’t appear to be clearing.

So after perusing a few recipes and seeing what we had in the garden and cupboards we made…. Batch 1 of Marrow and Ginger pickle. (I’m not sure what the difference is to me pickle is anything pickled and this is full of vinegar… so that’s close, and a chutney is smooth more like a jam, ours is lumpy… so this is probably a pickle?).
I’ve said exactly what we used, feel free to change it, this is just what we had in the cupboard!

900g Marrow (overgrown courgette)
900g Tomatoes (a mix of ripe and unripe)
500g Apples (Royal Gala)
500g onion
200g Dark Muscavado Suagr
300g Demerera Suagr
475ml White Wine Vinegar
125ml Red Wine Vinegar
500g Sultanas
Thumb sized chunk of Ginger
1/2 tsp chili power (not sure if this is ground chillies or if its a mix…)

A bag of spices (all these tied up in a piece of cheese cloth).
1 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp black pepper corns
1 tsp cloves

What we did:
Put a large pan on a low heat with a bit of butter or oil
peel and slice the onions and put in the pan and stir.
Drop the tomatoes in boiling water, drain and peel (do a few at a time) (we used cherry tomatoes as it’s what we had available, we started peeling them but then gave up and picked the skins out later on while it was simmering), put them in the pan and stir (we turned it up a bit now too).
Chop the marrow into chunks about 1cm square(ish we had so larger ones, if it’s to put in sandwiches then maybe cut it a bit finer), put it in the pan and stir.
Peel and core the apples, chop into chunks and drop in the pan and stir.
Put in the sugar and the vinegar and give it another good stir.
Peel and chop the ginger into small chunks (ours were half cm squares or smaller) drop that in the pan, add the bag of spice and stir again.
Bring it all to a good simmer and let it simmer for a good couple of hours or so.
Stir it frequently and when it’s dried a bit so when you draw a spoon through it the mixture is thick and you can see the bottom of the pan then it’s ready to bottle (in your pre-sterilised jars).

At this stirring stage we went and watched TV and popped out in the adverts to give it a stir…. then we switched over to the BBC and forgot to pop out and stir it! so ours burnt to the bottom of the pan.
To rescue this we poured the contents into another pan, but didn’t try and stir or scrape any of the contents out, just took what came easily.
We have put that into our jars and is sitting in a cool dark cupboard for a few weeks before we give it a try.
Some people say to leave it for at least a couple of weeks, some say a couple of months! we’ll let you know how ours goes… probably slightly caramelised but hopefully not too bad!

For me I did:
Broad beans (I did about half a cereal bowl of beans, it was about two big handfuls of pods)
Boiling
Bacon (cooked)
Olive oil
Mint
Chives

This is how I actually did it!
Picked the beans and podded them into a bowl, poured over water (just boiled the kettle whilst podding). thought oh mint would be nice and popped outside to find some, ripped it up and stirred it in.
Left the beans in the minty water for a couple of minutes then drained it all and put it in a bowl, with a pair of scissors cut chives over the top, the put some oil on, then with the same scissors cut up the bacon over the top.
Stir again, eat… tasty

My big worry was that the beans were so varied in size that some might not be ‘cooked’ but as they were all really fresh it didn’t really seem to matter.

Basically you get a pot and fill it with Rum, fruit and sugar over the course of the summer when there is plenty of fruit about, then eat it over the winter when there isn’t.

Last time we did it we used the pot out of our slow cooker (which we never used) but we’ve passed that on to someone who wanted to use it! and we saw a proper German Rumpot pot in a local charity shop, so we’re using that.

I started ours off with some plums that were starting to go bad. I cut out the bad bits and put the rest in the pot, covered it with sugar and left it for a little while so the sugar absorbed some of the juice. I then poured in rum to cover the fruit. Job done… as we go along we’ll just add whatever fruit we have left over or if we see something cheap (when it comes into season) then we’ll get some fruit specially.

Anyway I’ve got a couple of books, the one with the most detail is C.J.J. Berry’s First Steps in Wine Making so I started out using that, but again there were some bits that perhaps weren’t fully explained for the novice, so I did a google search too and there are loads of recipies, mine ended up as a bit of a mish mash, but there were sooo many recipies and they were all so similar.
Basically:
1.5 kilos of sugar
4.5 litres of water (1 gallon)
4 citrus fruits (Oranges or lemons, seem to be able to use whatever you have to hand, I used Oranges)
2-3 Litres Dandelion Flowers (I used 2)
Yeast (as per packet for the quantity your doing)
yeast nutrient.

First off pick the flower heads (St Georges Day in full sun so the flowers are open is the recommended time), no stalks or leaves but mine still had the green bits from around the bottom of the flowers. I was surprised at how many you need, but that it doesn’t take too long to get them, I avoided getting them from too close to the road or path! (yeah okay so most of them were from the garden).

Put all the flower heads into a bucket, and pour over your boiling water, cover it (I used a tea towel tied over the top of a bucket) for 2 days (this varies from 2-3 days depending on the recipie I did 2 days).

After that reboil the mixture (You need a big pan! I got a 10 litre ’365′ one from Ikea) with the peel of your chosen citrus fruits. (recipies vary here from 10 – 20 minutes, I did 10 minutes).

Clean out the bucket you used to step the flower heads and put the sugar in it.
Strain the hot dandelion mixture into the bucket.
When the liquid has cooled ( to room temp.) add the yeast (some recipies also add the citrus juices at this point too I think it’s either the juice or the nutrient… I used the yeast nutrient).
Fill up your fermentation vessel and leave it to ferment.
When it’s done fermenting let it clear in a cool place and bottle.
All the recipies say it’s best left for a while!

Well after a short brew stop we decided to use some stakes (round) we had in the shed (I think we were supposed to put those in when we did the apple trees! ooops!) as rollers… hurray, it didn’t matter much that the rollers were different sizes as the garden isn’t exactly a bowling green!
After a bit of pushing and shoving and some careful direction we finally got the shed in place…

We thought we were done! but oh no, still to go… but that’s for another day, just moving the shed was enough effort for today! remember to think about the positioning and perhaps don’t go for the furthest point away from where the shed is now!

I feel a bit guilty putting this under the ‘food related’ heading…. we’re going to eat the eggs!

Outside we planted two types of pea (a podding pea and a mange tout) and loads of broad beans. We just raked over the bed, then pushed the seeds down into the moist soil, we put everything a bit closer than it said on the packet, some of the seeds were past their ‘use by’ date so we thought they might not all come up (I guess this is where planting indoors and then transplanting comes in handy as you know what is growing and can lay them out accordingly).

Inside meanwhile, we sowed some mixed salad leaves, courgettes (2 varieties both F1′s a yellow and a green) , Squash ( Crown Prince?) and 3 types of tomato (Tumbler, San Marzano, Tiny Tom). our seeds were from a mixture of Edwin Tuckers seeds (My mum likes them), B&Q, Suttons and Thompson & Morgan and 1 packet of ‘heritage’ seeds from The Lost Gardens of Heligan so basically anywhere.

These are all now in our ‘conservatory’ as we don’t have a green house and well we don’t use the conservatory really as it’s bloomin’ freezing (warmer than outside though!) you could of course just use a windowsill, I think an east or west facing is probably best as plants won’t get scorched in a full on sun (later in the year) but will get plenty of daylight.

We also have a Mushroom log (Shitake, I think it was from wiggly wigglers but it was a Christmas present so that’s a guess) that’s now been put in the shade of the fence.

I spent a while looking online at Keepers Nursery (in Kent) who had really good detail about the different varieties what pollinates what and when they will fruit. In the end we bought a 1 year St Edmunds Pippin from Crown Nursery in Ufford and a Discovery ( we think this is a couple of years old) and a Damson from Kiln Farm Nursey (whilst the Internet is great for research, I still like to see plants before I get them.

So The Damson got planted out the front, in the hedge with next-door rather than facing onto the road (you don’t want to put your fruit trees next to the road if you can help it as they’ll get fumigated by passing cars) and the two apple trees got planted out in the back.

UPDATE
The St Edmunds Pippin hasn’t fruited this year but the Discovery has, they are still tiny, we’ll have to wait and see how big they get!