preserving a boozey weekend

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It’s quiet, too quiet.

There’s not much to do on the allotment, and I am letting the sunshine do it’s thing, and being a little bit lazy I decided to not do much this week. Well I can’t really see much return for what I put in now, it’s starting to get towards a caretaker role, just making sure that it’s ticking over. I don’t need to go at the plot hammer and tongs, so life is quite relaxed.

So that’s what I did. On the allotment I went and dug up a number of the sweetcorn plants. They’ve produced their ears of corn and now they are not doing much really. Bizarrely they are starting to put out new growth, but I know that there will be no chance of sweetcorn being ready before they start to suffer in the cold. You can see the gap in the corn…

I dug up the 2 round courgette plants. They have stopped producing and just had 4 very large courgettes on that I’ll use around Hallowe’en. The plants themselves were quite brittle and the foliage was going, so time for them to come up.

I spread around lots of manure (and I still don’t know if it’s mine or not). So that can now be left for a few months and then dug in to the soil when it’s rotted down a bit.It looks like this …

I did a bit of harvesting, runner beans, kale, sweetcorn and raspberries for the main part. The runner beans have suffered in the wind, probably because they are so dense and heavy they have snapped a few of the poles. I think I’ll have to get some metal poles for next year. I remember a friend used to grow runner beans up an old swing frame. Here you can see that the beans are leaning a bit …

Saturday afternoon was a completely different prospect. I found myself either glued to the cooker or with a bottle in my hand. Some people might think that wasn’t a bad thing to do.

I’d gone to Asda and bought 12 own-brand Kilner jars (at a grand price of £1 each), and decided to make a start on the Christmas presents.

So I’ve made a start on sloe gin, blackberry brandy, chilli vodka and rhubarb schnapps. All of them are now sat nicely on the shelf and will get a shake every now and then.

While that was being merrily prepared I had some beetroot on to cook, and I after cooking and skinning and cooling I sliced them and put them in to jars with warmed up vinegar. So I have a few more jars of pickled beetroot.

I was going to make beetroot chutney and store a lot of beetroot in sand in the garage but I ran out of time to do that, so I’ll have that to do another weekend.

Well you can’t do everything in one go …

• 10 Sep, 2009
• 5 likes

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