Potted up The Chillies & Aubergines

The time has come to properly pot on the Chillies, Peppers and Aubergines and fill up the capillary system in the grow box.

Twenty one days from sowing the seeds they are all coming on great guns, now that they have been potted into the small pots with Westland John Innes No 2 Potting-On Compost the little seedlings should hopefully put on quite a bit of growth in the next few weeks.



I've got the following all potted up :

• Aubergine (Black Beauty) x 5


• Sweet Pepper (Telimena) x 3
  


• Sweet Pepper (Big Banana) x 4


• Chilli Pepper (Habenero Orange) x 4


• Chilli Pepper (Bulgarian Carrot) x 2

Did It Work?

After the issues we had recently with the digger and devastation, we were very interested to see what the allotment would look like after all the rain again this week.  What a surprise.  No difference at all.  It seems our allotment was mashed for no real reason and our thoughts were justified.  The flooding occurs due to surface water making its way down the hill.  It is nothing to do with the gulley or canal.  The gulley is no deeper and looks exactly the same behind the heightened bank.  We think the gap in the bank further up had previously helped to drain the surface water into the gulley and now that the digger has filled in the gap, the water has nowhere to go.  I think the flooding is worse now than it was before....



Luckily our plot is still a little higher even though it is at the bottom of the hill so the water pools just at our boundary and we suffered little damage, same as previous years.  Our onions and garlic are underwater but we knew that may happen so we werent surprised.  That corner has flooded before.



The only part of our site otherwise that has flooded is the area behind the shed and greenhouse (where the digger took out our compost heaps).  That area has never flooded before so in fact the work that was done to prevent flooding has made it worse!!!



So despite us explaining the mechanics of water movement and informing the site bods that the flooding has nothing to do with the bank heights or gulley depth, and despite a digger causing destruction and a mud pit, nothing has changed.  I feel a little smug.

Elsewhere on the site.... better off growing rice.

RACKED: Mutant Parsnip Wine

Well the parsnip wine has been 10 days fermenting in it's bucket and as the recipe says today's the day to transfer the wine into a demijohn. So it's all been strained through a sieve into a nice clean demijohn

Fermentation has slowed down quite a lot, but I'll keep it indoors for quite a while. Haven't taken a SG reading at this stage as I tend to let the wines ferment out, then shift it to a cooler place to let it clear.

This wine will need racking again in a few weeks so I'll have a quick taste test then, not that I'm looking forward to that much as I'm not a huge fan of parsnips. But I sure the wife will like it, well she better, as there will be 4-5 bottles that will need to be drunk.. lol

Bottled: Pumpkin Beer

Bottled up the second batch of Pumpkin beer today, SG ended at 1012, so an ABV of 3.5%. This is the second batch of Pumpkin beer that I have made now. This one had a bit more pumpkin in than the last one.. 1300g in this batch, so 400g more than last time. But still not used any "apple pie" spice as some recipes suggest, I have another home grown pumpkin for another batch so might add spices next time.

20 bottles all labeled up and warm conditioning inside the house. Each bottle primed with 1/2 tsp of brewing sugar. Had a quick taste when I took the final SG reading and it's another good beer. Even tho it sat in the no-chill cube for nearly a month before fermenting it.

RACKED: Mutant Parsnip Wine

Well the parsnip wine has been 10 days fermenting in it's bucket and as the recipe says today's the day to transfer the wine into a demijohn. So it's all been strained through a sieve into a nice clean demijohn

Fermentation has slowed down quite a lot, but I'll keep it indoors for quite a while. Haven't taken a SG reading at this stage as I tend to let the wines ferment out, then shift it to a cooler place to let it clear.

This wine will need racking again in a few weeks so I'll have a quick taste test then, not that I'm looking forward to that much as I'm not a huge fan of parsnips. But I sure the wife will like it, well she better, as there will be 4-5 bottles that will need to be drunk.. lol

Germination has begun.

18 days since sowing the chillies nearly all of them have now germinated, just 2 coir pellets have nothing as yet.

They have now all been moved under the grow lamp, the coir pellet just placed into the pots for now. I'll pot them up in a few days with some compost then they can sit on the capillarity sheet under the lamps where they can grow on nice and strong.

In with the chillies I also had sown the Black Beauty Aubergines, Jane had a go at growing these last year, but I have been put in charge of them this year.

 

 

Brewday : Townhouse Ale

After reading Country Wines by Mary Aylett (published 1953) that I received as a gift from my Amazon Wish list. I just had to give this simple beer recipe a go. I've called it Townhouse ale due to the fact that in the book it describes how malted barley was unavailable to town dweller, but they could get hold of pure extract of malt from a well-known (at the time) chemists, where it was sold strictly as a health food.

The recipe in the book is as follows:

For two gallons, take two pounds of malt, three handfuls of hops, or less if the beer is wanted mild, and one pound of sugar.

Bring one gallon of water to a temperature of about 60 deg. Fahrenheit and dissolve in it the malt. When it is well mixed put into it the sugar and stir the mixture until all is melted together, and pour the brew into a two-gallon stone jar. Put the hops into a saucepan with two pints of water and boil for about ten minutes, then strain into the cask. Repeat this twice more, using the same hops each time, to extract from them their full flavour. Make up the amount in the cask with cold water. When the wort is at the usual blood-heat add a teaspoonful of brewer's yeast, cover closely and stand in a warm kitchen. Fermentation will begin almost at once and the beer will be drinkable in forty-eight hours. In a week the beer will have a fine "head" and will be quite clear.

If it is necessary to keep the beer, it can be bottled off into ordinary beer bottles and the corks well screwed down. If a pound of honey is added to the wort the finished article will resemble strong ale.

I have tried to keep as true to the the text as possible by sourcing the malt extract from a health-food shop. However I do not own a two-gallon stone jar, so my plastic fermenting bin has taken it's place. The sugar used is Billington's Light Brown soft. Only because that is what I had in the cupboard at the time.

For the hops I should have used a traditional English hop like Fuggles or Goldings, but I have used Chinnook 12.5% AA only because I have loads of 2011 season leaf hops that need to be used in the bottom of the freezer, as they are quite high in Alpha Acid I used two large handfuls.

As the recipe states, if I add a pound of honey to the wort then I'd get a strong Ale so that's what I have done, just using a normal jar of supermarket honey.

For the yeast. I don't know how or where the brewers yeast would have been acquired. So I've used a Ale yeast that I had at hand. Mauribrew 514 Ale Yeast and used only half of the packet sprinkled direct onto the top of the wort. Not the yeast that is in the picture, that one's a Youngs Ale yeast.

The Gravity of this brew is starting out at 1064 and looks as though it'll make around about 18 x 500ml bottles worth and the yeast has already set to work, fizzing away lovely.