Sallygardens Smallholding

Bubble Bubble Without Too Much Toil Or Trouble

It's that time of year when various rooms in the household greet their occupants with a welcoming 'bloop, bloop, bloop' noise. A selection of homemade country wines are fermenting away. Good old glass gallon demijohns sit on available shelves or nestle in corners containing liquids of beautiful colours, ranging from gold to pink,  just doing their thing. It's really very easy to make country wine, in fact so easy I have found in the past that the biggest pitfall is to make too much so that the racking and bottling becomes a chore. So these days I make one demijohn each of my favourite flavours and that way it's all enjoyable and the wines are savoured.

 

Some favourites include elderflower, strawberry, blackberry, nettle leaf, birch sap wine and mead. The whole affair is very cheap, the only real expense being roughly 1.5kilos of sugar per gallon of liquid plus a good quality yeast and yeast nutriment powder. Even with the cost of the demijohns and other minor bits of equipment  in the first year the wine is easily less than half the price and in subsequent years probably under a euro per bottle. That's a significant saving on the weekly shop!

I've been meaning to write an ebooklet on this topic for some time and I finally found the inspiration I was looking for to get me going during the first racking of an elderflower and strawberry wine I'm making ... an unintended sampling was forced upon me during the syphoning process ... accidently on purpose, several times, eh, by me! When I first started out making the wine it took quite a bit of time gathering the information and sourcing the things I'd need, getting to grips with a bit of science, realising lots of information was not necessary and quite a few things tasted disgusting! So there is now a short ebooklet in the Paypal store (see top right column) with instructions on how to make our favourite country wines here at Sallygardens.

Slainte (cheers).

Anyone for Afternoon Tea?

Russian Comfrey tea is a wonderful free fertiliser for your vegetable or flower garden but not for human consumption! A harvest of leaves can be cut from your comfrey plants at least twice during summer, I get three or four harvests from our plants in the polytunnel. Simply bruise the foliage in a bucket and fill with water, preferably rainwater. Leave the broth to fester for a few weeks, this happens quicker if you keep it inside a polytunnel but you may find the smell repulsive! It soon turns to a black liquer which needs to be diluted 15:1 for use on flowering or fruiting plants. 

The comfrey plant has a very deep tap root which brings up many trace elements and minerals from deep below the soil where these nutrients often lie out of reach for mainstream plants. The leaves can also be thrown on the compost heap to boost its value or chopped and dug into vegetable beds.

I like Russian Comfrey as it does not set seed and so is less invasive, spreading via root cuttings instead.

Broody Hen At Work

It's very handy having a broody hen, she will sit on and try to hatch anything spherical. She'd even sit on golf balls, apples, anything vaguely round in shape! This little hen sat on nine fat Aylesbury duck eggs for us, laid by our own duck, and she hatched eight of them. She proudly escorted her flock of ducklings around the field, not once questioning why they had flat bills and webbed feet! After a few days we put a paddling pool out for them and the ducklings were thrilled however the broody hen was most alarmed by her babies insistence on swimming and diving!

The drake, however, was not at all impressed by the arrival of ducklings, even though they were his own offspring. He managed to kill one and new fencing had to be erected pronto to provide a safe area for the ducklings to forage.

New Arrivals on the Farm

Early summer is a busy busy time on a smallholding. One of the things that happens is the arrival of kids and over the course of  a few weeks we keep a check on the expectant mothers at regular intervals during the day. In previous years it's been easy to see when a goat is in labour, but I always missed the births by minutes, usually finding the kids as they were being licked clean. This year I was thrilled to witness the birth of Willows two kids and as usual she needed no intervention at all. She had a doe and then a big buck.

For some reason known only to herself she rejected the little doe. For the first few days we had to milk Willow and although we tried feeding the kid by bottle, she preferred to drink straight from the bucket. Once she was quick on her feet she fed straight from her Mum by employing some clever tactics. When the buck went to suckle she would run up between Mums hind legs and suckle too, in secret! I even saw her lie on her back once to wangle her way in. Its sad she has been rejected by her Mum, but she plays and sleeps with her brother and another adult doe has taken kindly to her too.

Home Cured Chorizo and Salami

The salami and chorizo are both cured and ready to eat. It took roughly three months for them to air dry sufficiently. Every so often, when out getting wood, I'd have a quick grope of the sausages hanging from the roof. Once they were no longer 'squishy' they were good to go.

It's at this point that most first timer air dried sausage adventurers begin to doubt themselves, or rather their sausages, because the final product ticks all the boxes in the 'do not eat this if you wish to live' category. It is after all raw meat, raw meat that's been hanging outside and not in a fridge, for months. Add to that the fact that the sausage is wrinkled and mouldy. The mouldy hillocks range in colour from white, to grey, to blue, brown and black. Of course all the previous preparations have been done under very clean and hygenic conditions and careful informed decisions made as to what, if any, preservatives are to be used.

To give you an idea of what to expect here is a picture of our latest chorizo. It was delecious ... only 6 more metre long sausages of various flavours to go!