Jamming

Roses

The rosebushes around the garden are out of shape because they are overgrown, and will need some proper attention.

This one is under the evergreens that I chopped back a little recently.  The scent is not strong, but absolutely wonderful.

This a more old fashioned looking rose at the entrance to the main lawn.  This scent is beautiful too and stronger. 

This rose is almost lost as lemon balm grows up around it.

I've started harvesting the strawberries. Not expecting huge quantities. Two years ago we had more than five kilos, but I think the dry spring may have lined them this year.  Early days yet...

Replacement beans are in now.

A Shedding of Inhibitions

Cooler and wetter weather has kept us inside (excuse). I've been making plans to replace the garden shed, which is somewhat rickety.  Pippy painted it three years (it must be) ago, and I remember thinking then that it wouldn't last.

So.  Plans.

Currently, it is just a storage shed, but we could do with something a little larger to use as a potting shed - the space in the outhouses isn't very suitable.   We (Genie and I) like the idea of a rounded shed with a view over the garden.  So we messed about with some ideas.

For a while, I disappeared down a creative rabbit hole, looking into 'reciprocal' roofs. These are self-supporting structures with a central hole, but a little OTT for a garden shed.  Also, they don't lend themselves to an uncomplicated waterproof roof covering. And they have a hole in the middle!

Having dismissed the reciprocal roof idea, I tried a few others, including regular an irregular polygons.

I've settled on an octagonal base with windows on four sides. I made a little model on Friday, with sides 4 and 2 feet wide (in scale of 2ft = 1cm).  

I like the shape and the size of the windows but the shed would be a little too small.  Scaling up would make the windows too big, so I tried again. (Models are fun!).  Much as I delight in the theoretical elegance of the SI system of measurement, I'm not measuring the size of a shed in comparison to 1/299 792 458th of the speed of light in a vacuum, not the distance from the Equator to the North Pole (or a fraction thereof).  So feet and inches it is.  Here's a scale model 1:12.  The door (in scale) is 6ft high and it's 6'6" to the waves,. The pitch of the roof is 1:3, and gives an overall height of just over 8'1". Planning regs limit me to 2.5m height.

Thanks to the wonders of modern camera miniaturisation, we can see the view through the window. What fun!

Here's the (non-reciprocal) roof:

Next stage is to plan the materials and the carpentry.

The Bubble Twins

Put the rhubarb wine into demijohns on Monday, after six days starting in the brewing bucket.  Now they sit on the kitchen sideboard, having their little bubbly conversation.

I understand I killed the delicate pink colour with campden tablets, which are used to sterilise the 'must' before starting the fermentation with winemaker's yeast.   

Early tasting notes: yeasty, sweet, fizzy, boozy and acid.

Weed of the Week

This is Creeping Woodsorrel, Oxalis corniculata, a tiny plant that hugs the gaps in our walls, stone and concrete.  Just about uniquely, the leaves are heart-shaped.  It's edible, with a pleasant tip-of-the-tongue sharpness (I tried it this morning). And, I'm told by You Tube, it demands a high price in posh restaurants.  Special teams of OCD foragers, even as I write, are combing the cracks in London pavements.  Tread softly, because you tread on my lunch.

More Rhubarb!

Rhubarb wine.  Here goes!

3kg Rhubarb

2.6kg sugar

Left to soak for 3days

Strained to separate out the syrup. 

Smells deliciously fruity!

Then the remaining sugar is flushed out with cooled boiled water (hot water releases the pectin, which we don't want). The liquor is made up to 10 litres (and some more because the specific gravity was too high).

Camden tablets added to kill off any wild yeast.  Then, two days later (yesterday), I added the white wine yeast.

Now there is very little fruity smell. The last time I made this (probably 20 years ago), the liquor was a beautiful pink colour. Not this time. Still, let's hope the flavour will emerge from all of this pummeling and dilution. 

I'm supposed to leave it alone, apart from a daily stir, for five days while the yeast grows aerobically.  I might give it a little longer because this is double-quantity.

The airlock is there so I can see if anaerobic digestion has started - I don't think is necessary at this stage. Thank you to my neighbour, Rob for spurring me on with some old demijohns and bits & bobs.

Disclaimer: if you start following this recipe before we know the results, you're a bigger fool than me.

Less Honesty

I trimmed back the honesty bush at the weekend. Knocked out of shape by an overshadowing evergreen, I've pruned it to about half the size.  The evergreen is on borrowed time. For now, I've just removed some lower branches.