Mike got sick again. Mature leaves turned red, new leaves turned black. Bit of a disaster really, and fearing fungus I decided that a windowsill was no place for a tree. I moved him to an outdoor pot and as I took him out of the existing pot I was met with an almighty reek. The compost in his pot was rotting around the roots! Aaaargh! So I scraped as much away as I dared and binned it. I took off some diseased roots, patted the rootball dry with a towel and applied mycorrhizal fungus. He's been potted in fresh compost in a bigger pot with a bed of stones and a topdressing of further stones. I've pruned all affected leaves and moved Mike out front, where he looks thoroughly forlorn.
I've mentioned previously that George is in the habit of climbing into the Strawbrary while he barks into the dark. Well, I think I've got him foiled:
If he gets through a trellis with a bush behind it then he's some kind of Houdini dog!
Lastly then, the lawn has been reseeded. This is it now, and fingers crossed it'll be thicker than thick in a month's time.
Feels like for the past few days I've done little but grafting, eating and sleeping. With emphasis on the eating and sleeping. I've even set Skyrim aside! Tonight then I'm going to get squared away and make some time for me. I'll knock together a Baileys hot chocolate, colonise the couch and put a game on. I haven't played Dragon Age in a while...
Last night I moved the composter from the dark side of the patio to its final home by the strawbrary.
Fiddliest and smelliest job I've ever had to do in that garden, and I've done poop patrol!
The baseplate for the composter arrived, finally, after one lost delivery and one delivered broken. I could not get that thing to fit on. Nope. No fitting on for that baseplate. I chalked it up to the fact that it was cold outside, the composter body was at 0ºC while the baseplate was at room temperature, and so Physics has a thing to say. In reality, this was my excuse for saying "sod it, it's 0º out here and this smelly thing is making my hands wet in 0º!" I ended up laying the baseplate on the ground and standing the composter over it. The weight of proto-compost should hold it all together.
Sliding the body of the composter up over the contents was a bit tense - would it stay together like a putrid blancmange or would it go everywhere? It stayed! The rest was work for a fork, a shovel, and eventually a hose. The contents were somewhere below half the height, but as the thing is slightly conical I reckon it's full to about half the volume, or 165 litres. Whilst I was forking out compost I took the opportunity to study the strata within. Some bits seem to decompose faster than others. Things that are watery (like cucumber) or mushy (like banana) seem to go first. Things with a hard shell (like the pumpkin from Halloween) appear to take a lot longer. Eggshells break down surprisingly readily. Any leaves that get in there seem to turn slimy.
I've taken a photo of some of the strata, laid out on one of my favourite childhood building materials: the knackered, rusty sheet of wriggly tin (of dubious acquisition). For the sake of your breakfast I've left out the bits where putrefying is actively taking place. Upper layers on the left, lower layers in the right. Rightmost is damn near compost!
I've made the cider, I've racked the cider, and today I've tested the cider. To do this I arranged some time in a lab, but you can do this at home if you have the parts:
Hotplate,
Pyrex beaker,
Mercury thermometer,
100cc cylinder, graduated by 1cc increments,
Clamp stand
Measure out 100cc of the cider using the cylinder, transfer it into the beaker, pop that onto the hotplate. Stand the thermometer in the cider, using the clamp stand to ensure that the bulb of the thermometer is near to the bottom of the beaker but not quite touching it. Heat it to 72ºC for a couple minutes until it's steaming nicely then take it off the heat and wait for the steam to stop. You wait for the steam to stop in order to get an accurate measurement. Once it isn't steaming any more, put it back into the measuring cylinder and read the volume. We will call this new measurement X.
100 minus X = your percent ABV
100 - 92 (my X value) = 8% ABV
I also tested it at a lower temperature to gauge the methanol content and judged it to be less than half a percent. I used Benedict's solution to test for aldehydes (formed when ethanol goes off) and found none of the characteristic orange sludge which appears in a positive test.
It tasted largely of rhubarb. Very sharp, but not too sharp. I think next week we'll be good to go!
In other news: that arum has grown since it moved to its new home. It seems to have settled in quite nicely :)
"Once they figure a way to work a dead horse, we'll be next. Likely I'll be the first too. 'Edd,' they'll say, 'dying's no excuse for laying down no more, so get on up and take this spear, you've got first watch tonight.' Well, I shouldn't be so gloomy. Might be I'll die before they work it out."
– Eddison 'Dolorous Edd' Tollett
Well, my part in the Christmas Clean is drawing fast to a close, Gods be praised. My black dog, Shuck, tends to make an appearance around this time. Two generations of Atheists (though half of us were still part-raised as Taigs) and still we gotta get festive. My cynical nature reckons that the season isn't in full swing until I've called the tree a c**t to its face. I hate Christmas, so the little acts of cynical pseudo-rebellion (like insisting that being Christmas no.1 makes Killing In The Name a Christmas song) keep the black dog from swallowing me whole. I never take it too far though, on account of the fact that the rest of my family seem to like this ever-repurposed holiday, and that it is bizarrely easy to spoil it.
Gardening then. I've had to change my plans for the beds. It turns out that a person can't work a bed of 5'x5' without stepping into it, which defeats the object. Better than having six of those is having ten beds of 3'x5'. Either way it covers the same amount of ground, but this way I get to grow more solanaceae and alliums, fewer beans and apiaceae, plus I can include things that weren't in the six bed rotation such as peas, wheat and gourds. Here's the new plan; it's to be read clockwise in terms of a given bed, which actually means that the whole thing'll rotate anti-clockwise.
More tatties overall, but in a rotation that sees each bed growing legumes once every five years rather than once every six. The beds won't reach all the way to the Eastern fence. Instead, there'll be a strip of land a foot wide, from which I'll grow fruiting bushes and vines up trellis against the fence. This is also where I'll grow borage, as any area of soil that has fruit growing in it has a heavy drain on potassium.
Other than that, the garden's ticking over. Got some manure coming soon. Got the baseplate to the composter coming soon. Once Commercemas is over I can start building for the coming year. I'll get a tool cabinet and a couple of bat boxes built. The beds will be built in January. I'm thinking railway sleepers for the beds, but you've got to be careful in buying them. For beds, the law says I need timber not treated with creosote. The shed likely January or February. Once the shed is in situ I can work on trellis plus further bird houses, bat boxes and other things. BirdCam will follow the shed. The greenhouse tent will go up in March and the first seedlings will go into the garden shortly afterward. With luck I'll be getting in the first of the early Harvest in June.
Lastly then, the post Why Biology? has attracted enough interest (second most viewed post on the blog) that I reckon it's appropriate to go further back. Science for me started when I was a tiny kid. I had a microscope before I could write, but I'd document my methods and findings pictorially. At 4 I used to sit and watch that cartoon variously known as Once Upon A Time... Life, and How My Body Works. Mam got me a chemistry set when I was about 5 and I grew crystals of copper (II) sulphate. The big thing though was Lego. I had Lego throughout my childhood, starting from the day I was able to play with things without trying to eat them or fit them into the orifices of the head. Physics, mechanics, timing, all can be explored with enough Lego.
I don't think I was raised toward Science though, I think it's better to say that I wasn't raised away from it. I had the tools because I asked for them and showed genuine interest. The kids who grow up to consider Science are not those who were told to be curious, but those who weren't told not to be curious. If that makes sense? I dunno. ROLL VT!
First a gripe about the state of humanity. Me and mine went to the Xmas thing in Hampton like we do every year. Lovely as ever. Someone got hurt up by the Uxbridge Road and an ambulance was coming up from Fulwell. It ended up slowed to a crawl behind a shuffling crowd outside the bakers' who were not so dense that they'd be harmed or even greatly inconvenienced by getting out of the way. So I shouted "ambulance!", which should have caused some reaction, but nobody moved. I shouted again "AMBULANCE!", and a few people moved. So I took a fortifying glug of hot wine and yelled "There is an ambulance behind you with blue lights on! Move into the right hand lane or onto the pavement! This is no longer a request!" That shifted them.
I recall a similar set of circumstances five years ago in Heiligendamm, only there the whole crowd took up the cry of "rettungswagen!" and immediately parted like the Red Sea from where I was to the horizon and beyond my sight. They were so good that the krankenwagen never had to go slower than 10 mph. THAT is how people are meant to behave! I despair of my compatriots.
Okay, on with the cider!
If you haven't yet read the start of this keg of cider then you'll find it here. Racking is the practice of transferring your unfinished wort from one vessel to another whilst fermentation is still ongoing. You do this after the first 1-2 months or whenever your sediment starts to look a bit dense. A little sediment is a good thing, it gives it a complexity of flavour. Too much sediment impairs the flavour. When you rack cider (or beer, or wine, or mead) into a new keg you leave the bulk of the sediment behind in the old keg.
The keg is meant to spend as much time sealed as possible; so if you wish to add ingredients that weren't in season or were too impractical or expensive when you laid down the cider, or top up with sugar or yeast or nutrient, then you wait until racking time to do this. Today I've added rhubarb and enough yeast and nutrient to begin a secondary fermentation.
It smelled as it should, which is not to say it smelled good. This stuff is not cider, but a half-fermented apple wort. Essentially it's a tub of rotten apples. It'll be another month's maturation before I dare call it a cider. Still, it had the beginnings of the right overtones and undertones. I reckon it'll be alright.
Proper rhubarb cider is hard to get in London. The commercial stuff is pale and crap, and the decent stuff from Kent and Somerset seldom leaves Kent and Somerset. If you want good cider in London then you have to either go five miles to find a niche pub that gets it in, or you have to brew it yourself.
As you can see, the sediment has gotten deep.
1) Sterilise the second keg and equipment in hot water and chlorine, as per the original.
2) Add any supplementary fruit (such as the rhubarb) to the second keg with a little nutrient before the wort is racked. Be sure to whiz the new fruit through the blender with some water and sugar to extract the maximum flavour from it.
3) Pour the wort from the old keg to the new keg via a towel in a sieve.
4) When it gets to the point that you're pouring as much sediment as product, and the liquid itself is thick, opaque orange, this is the time to stop. Tip the rest down the toilet.
5) Finally, add any supplementary yeast (made up the same way as the starting yeast) and seal the keg. If you use the same type of airlocks as I do then you can tell when the keg is airtight because twisting the keg lid any tighter causes the airlock cap to jump high enough into the air that it clears the chamber and pops off.
6) Leave it in the bath and run the hot tap to a quarter full. Let the revised wort warm up to between 25ºC and 30ºC in order to give the yeast a favourable starting point. Then remove the keg from the bath, dry it off and put it back where it normally lives.
Easy peasy. This lot'll be racked one last time, about a week before it's due to be drunk. The final racking is done to clear any scum from the top (resulting from the stringy bits in rhubarb, which are indigestible to yeast), and to introduce Campden tablets which halt further fermentation. Overbrewed cider is even worse than underbrewed cider. I'll then stash it away somewhere cold so that it tastes lovely and fresh when it's needed. The final rack is also when I'll draw some off for lab testing.
The composter is attracting flies, even as we are fast approaching the Winter. This must mean the composter is generating a certain amount of warmth, which is nice. Getting rid of the flies is something of a must, however. I don't mind flies, they do their jobs in the ecosystem and the world keeps turning; but they encourage spiders, which I personally quite like but which my sisters get freaked out over. It's bad to put house spiders out in Winter as they won't last the night, so I resist doing that, but I don't want to swell their numbers by letting a fly explosion run unchecked. The solution is to assert a biological control over the flies. More spiders are out of the question. Frogs are crap. Wasps scare the living shit out of me. Birds can be great, but there's quite a spread with birds and you don't know when putting in a bird box whether you'll attract the sort of bird that likes flies or the sort of bird that likes your crops.
I've decided on bats. London has many species of bat, and Strawberry Hill comes alive at dusk with the tiny, leathery sound of pipistrelles in flight. I'm picking up a pair of bat boxes tomorrow which I'll fit high up in the big Maple just as soon as I can get ten minutes use of an extension ladder. Eventually I'll set up BatCam as part of the BirdCam project, but for now the priority is pest control. It's also nice to be able to offer shelter to an endangered species.
I'll need to stain the bat boxes so as to protect the wood from the elements. Should I stain them a blending colour like green or brown? Red like the fences? Something like purple or blue to be bold yet stylish? Something that really sticks out like a neon pink? Or should I stain them black and then paint a little batman symbol on the front? Decisions decisions...
Mike's doing well. The beans are doing well. The strawbs are doing well. The lawn has a hole in it. Those Thymus are doing well, though I still never figured out that 'lilac' business. The brambles seem to be doing alright, to the point that two of them have shown overt growth while a third is budding.
I'm getting a budget from the household in January to make improvements to the garden, which should be sufficient to finance a shed, the beds, and a greenhouse tent. This is awesome! I mentioned before that the ramp out front is bridging the DPC and needs to be replaced, well so too does the patio out back. This'll put the shed, beds and greenhouse on hold until it's done, but it should be done fairly quickly. I think I'll stain the shed blue an paint the trim (corners, door frame, window frame) white. I think that'd be bold, but look nice.
In other news: there was some kind of magpie turf war going on in the Buddleia earlier today. It was quite intense, more so when a shitload of parakeets and a raven got involved. Bill stayed indoors for that one, and of his own volition too, which I guess means he's smart enough to value his eyeballs.
I need more tea. Down the bar last night... Okay, it's a bit of a long story. Jesse disappears for donkeys' at a time because of work. When we see him again; he, Liam and myself have a thing of sitting about the bar in our boxers and drinking. I don't normally have more than two pints on a night out, three at most, so now my head feels like it's been carpeted.
On the other hand, it isn't every day that one's arse gets a round of applause.
Someone changed the boiler recently. The new one has a narrower flue and exhaust than the old one, which means the hole in the wall needed mortaring to a narrower gauge so as to be snug to the new pipe. Fair enough, but they didn't put a tarpaulin down before they started mortaring, so the stuff went everywhere!
It left indelible streaks on the patio.
It discoloured a chunk of my bench, which'll mean an afternoon spent sanding and revarnishing.
It gummed up the head of my leaf rake.
It got on the lawn, shot the pH up through the roof and killed a square metre.
Grass likes a pH of between 5 and 7.5. At 7.5 it gets sick, at 8.5 it dies. I'm treating the area with citrate over the Winter so that I can try and reseed in the Spring. Balls!
Things aren't all bad though. I need some manure and Nathan (the mate with the horse) has offered to drive some round in the boot of his car. This comes as a relief, because trying to cart a barrowload of poo on and off the train might raise a few eyebrows at the very least. He drives up from Redhill to visit his partner in Boston Manor, so Strawberry Hill is about 50p's worth of petrol as a deviation from the normal route. Easy peasy.
So I've laid down the Winter cider in preparation for a party I'm having the night before New Years'. Cider is basic enough to make; you need a minimum of kit and no fear of a small amount of graft. This can get messy so do it in the bathroom.
You'll need a rubber bucket and some manner of fermentation vessel. Start by scrubbing and sterilising your kit. Do this in a bath full of hot water with a chlorine-based steriliser. Always be sure to rinse the chlorine away with plenty of water before you use it.
You'll need a tool for smashing apples. I like the old MOE favourite; the 7Lb sledgehammer. It can't be adequately sterilised, so instead you clean it thoroughly before wrapping the head and top half of the haft with shitloads of cling film.
Line your now sterilised rubber bucket with a clean bedsheet. I've chosen one of Squeaky's spares, which she won't know about until she wakes up one morning reeking of apples.
That's about £20 worth of apples. Most of them are dessert apples for the sweetness, and because what's being fermented is sugar, but I've included a dozen bramleys for the tartness. You'll want three or four different varieties of apple in there for a more complex flavour. I may yet add some rhubarb or brambles or something.
The next bit can be safely summarised by HULK SMASH!!!
Keep going with this until somebody complains about the noise, then switch to the blender. Once you've got a rough mush - kinda like apple sauce - then it's time to strain off the liquid. Bunch up the sheet and twist it hard.
It's gone brown, but don't worry about that. You aren't making apple pies here, you're fermenting; and whether you're using fermentation to make cider, cheese, or any number of useful and delicious things, what you're essentially doing is seeing that the raw material goes off under controlled circumstances. By this point the bathroom stank of apples. Tip all the liquid into the fermenter.
The next thing to do is make up the yeast in a jug. You'll need brewer's yeast (1 tsp/gallon plus one for luck), citric acid (1 tsp/gallon into the fermenter with the juice, minus 1 tsp which goes into the jug), yeast nutrient (same as for the citrate), and a couple of dessert spoons of brown sugar in the jug to give the yeast an easy start. Fill it up with water that is neither lukewarm nor hot hot, but blood hot. Stir vigorously.
Yeast nutrient is a mixture of ammonium sulphate and ammonium phosphate. Sounds nasty and you sure wouldn't want to eat it neat, but it all gets used up by the yeast. We talk of terrestrial life as being carbon-based, but our cells revolve around six basic elements - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus - which I tend to refer to collectively as "sponch". Yeast nutrient dissociates in water into free-floating sponch (minus the carbon), and the yeast takes it straight up for use in protein synthesis and ATP synthesis. I'll stop now, because not everybody shares my interest in cellular biology.
The remaining apple mush, having lost much of its liquid content, should be firm and somewhat tacky, like a burger patty. There are stems and seeds and all sorts in there, so it's useless for crumble. Shove it in the composter and any fruits and flowers you grow in it will get a kick up the arse.
Prepare the lid of your fermenter by running some vaseline around the threads of the lid with your fingertip to ensure a good seal.
Then seal it up, taking care to put a reasonable amount of water in the airlock.
You'll know it's working if after an hour or so you see bubbles in the airlock. Yeast takes a little while to set up, so if nothing's happened after a few hours then check all your seals and wait until the following morning. If you're still getting no bubbles then make up a fresh jug of yeast. Pull out the bung and tip the yeast mixture in via funnel, then replace the bung.
This video was taken about an hour after I sealed the fermenter:
This'll take a couple of months to brew, but my brewing tends to end up at about 10% ABV when it's done, so it'll be worth the wait. To test ABV, take 100ml of your grog, heat it to 75ºC for a minute then measure the final volume, which we'll call n. 100-n=ABV.
Looking forward to this! If a certain someone can lab test it when it's finished then there'll be a gallon in it for her...
So it's Autumn, for the originators my 62 British pageviews this past month. 30 might call it Fall while 152 would call it Herbst (according to Google, at any rate). It's bloody cold after what weather reporters called "Freezing Friday", which to me just conjures an epic yet PG-rated quest being undertaken by a polar bear, a puffin, and one very lost penguin. All of them singing jaunty songs about snow and things that rhyme with snow, which thirty years later prompts heated (but largely esoteric and thus widely ignored) debates as to whether the word "Eskimo" is racist.
But I digress...
The big maple growing through the roof of the Strawbrary is having its annual shed. I've not yet managed to get a photo which includes the entire tree - Google Earth notwithstanding - so suffice it to say the thing puts down enough leaves each Autumn that the garden becomes effectively cushioned. Any deeper and I'd have the cast of Jackass wanting to fling Wee Man off the roof in a Superman cape. Ordinarily I'd just leave them to rot over the Winter, but this year is different: this year I'm getting a brew on!
The fallen leaves thus far - and it's only the start of the shedding - are scraped up into a plastic bin.
Once it's filled, pressed down and filled again (because leaves trap a lot of air!) I poured three litres of water over the top of the leaves, replaced the lid and weighted it on with a stone.
That'll rot down over the coming year. The resultant liquid - known as leaf tea - can be diluted to one cup of the tea into a watering can of water for use as a high nitrogen feed for the lawn and other nitrogen-hungry plants. The leaves which wouldn't fit into the bin can be mulched directly onto the lawn.
In other decomposition news, the compost is coming along nicely. Some berk put bread in it though, which is doing nothing so much as turn blue. I must remember to pop round to Nathan's house for some horse manure.
And I found this leaf in my bean patch. It's not the Vicia faba that I planted, and nor is it anything that I've seen in this garden before. It's of a firm, rubbery texture. My hand is in the shot, and for scale I wear size 7 gloves.
If anybody knows what in Earth that is, please comment below. Ta muchly :)
