Steel Kitten

More microwave lemon curd

 

I love the fact this takes so little time and uses up surplus eggs. We could eat lemon curd until the cows come home. 

All go with the preserving this afternoon

 

 

I have about a million plums on my trees at the moment and I'm down to my last three jars of plum jam, so this afternoon was dedicated to jam making.

 

This time I wanted to add a little twist to the plum jam and thought I'd have a go adding some leftover mulled wine, which I found while clearing out a cupboard. My recipe for plum jam is very simple and I usually make it in the microwave rather than cook it on the stove top. You can find my method for microwave jam here. This time instead of adding a 1/3 pint of water though I added 1/3 pint of mulled wine. In addition I popped a tablespoon of lemon juice in as I was unsure how the alcohol and spices would affect the set and I didn't want to spoil a batch finding out. All was well and I made several batches of heavenly smelling and tasting jam. It had a sparkly depth of flavour that my usual plum jam lacks. In fact, if I'm honest I find my jam a little too sweet and this seems to make it a little less so.

You'll notice in the above picture there is also a bottle of cheapo rum. It's been in the back of the cupboard for about three years now and we haven't had much off it so I decided to put it to better use. To a 1lb of plums I added about 10oz of sugar and 1 pint of gin, sealed it and gave it a shake, then put it back into the cupboard. 

 

 

With any luck, in about three months I'll strain off the plum liquor into a fresh bottle, then take the leftover plums and dip them in chocolate. A far more interesting use of rum I reckon.

During all this I was also making microwave lemon curd with some unwaxed lemons I found in the bargain section in the supermarket. I found lots of recipes for doing it on the stove top, all of which looked like a lot of faff and I'm working on being a faff-free zone at the moment. However, I found the following great easy recipe (and I just cannot remember where because I closed that window down before I remembered to copy the address bar).

Microwave lemon curd

50g butter

150g sugar

Zest and juice of two unwaxed lemons

Three whole eggs

One egg yolk

 

Put the butter, sugar, and zest and juice of the two unwaxed lemons into a microwaveable bowl and heat for 1-2 minutes until the butter has melted. Stir. Beat the whole eggs and egg yolk together very well and strain the mixture into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Stir and then heat for 3-4 minutes, stirring very well every 30 seconds to 60 seconds. Transfer to a warm 1lb jar and seal as you would jam. 

It's fabulous! And bags easier than most of the other recipes I've seen. 

I hardly know how to tell you this...

...but after everything I've blogged about and all the talking that's been done we have decided we are not doing the wall.

Unreal.

We lay on the bed on Sunday night, having come back from hosting a car event at an Essex airfield. Exhausted from six hours driving that day in an open top classic car, with sunburn and windburn, and sore from fibreglass molded seats that aren't covered and dig into your ribs, both of us were too tired to lie to each other any more.

We don't want to spend the money on doing a massive front wall. In the beginning we really did want it, but somehow it morphed into a massive expensive undertaking and I began to fear that when it did get done it wouldn't look very good. That if a mistake got made it could cost a fortune to put right. Then Martin confessed he was just doing it for me because I really wanted it. And that's when I realised how stupid it all was.

We worked out that for the money it would cost we could have:

• A nice fence with some hedging for the wildlife
• The drive properly laid to aggregate
• A replacement car
• A massive wildlife pond in the garden
• Several new trees and fruit shrubs
• Several new water butts and an irrigation system
• An arbour over the patio with a grape vine
• Tiling in the conservatory
• Plastering in the conservatory
• ....and there would still be money to spare

It is currently being carted round to the back of the garden to be stacked ready for garden projects. We need paths, bed edgings, and a pond and rockery with little caves and caverns for the wildlife next year so it won't go to waste.

Hedgehog corner

It's been such a long time since I updated you about the hedgehogs I hardly know where to begin!

Twinkle and Blossom are wild once more.

We soft-released Blossom in April who at 850g was a good healthy size and ready to go. Her original release back in November failed because she didn't seem capable of keeping herself warm in her box so we brought her in for the winter. We put her in a hay-filled hoggy box inside a pen with food and water, let her acclimatise to the outside for a couple of days. She is currently still in her box in a sheltered spot next to the shed and behind some fencing. 

Then it was Twinkle's turn and she too is still in the box we released her in. But things did not going to plan straight away with her. There were a considerable amount of bloody footprints in her pen and box the morning after her soft-release. We could not find any cuts on her feet, legs, tail, belly or face so we have no idea what has happened.

So one little hoggy had to have a run around in an inch of diluted Savlon in the bath to clean the mud off as many bits of her as possible and hopefully clean the cut at the same time. It was only when we pulled her out to dry her we noticed the cut on the side of her left front foot - it had been hidden by the mud on her paws. Anyway, she went from strength to strength after that and is now completely free and we sometimes see her scampering across the garden at dusk. Last night we spotted two of them racing across the garden to the feed stations. We found Filbert a few weeks ago - we thought it was Blossom emerging from her box but on closer inspection it turned out to be him. Slightly icky to think he may have been paying a visit to his sister for something other than a natter, but that is nature for you.

We found our first dead adult hedgehog in March. It was stretched out face down in one of our hog boxes, which we left out all winter in case one of them needed a safe spot for the night. It was badly decomposed and appeared to have been there months. The fact it was stretched out and not curled up suggests it did not die of cold during hibernation. It could have eaten poisoned cat food (some stupid people put this down as bait for rats) or water (again stupid people putting anti-freeze in ponds) or perhaps it was attacked by a weasel (we have them in the garden) or hit by car. Or maybe it was an older hog and it was just time to die so it did it somewhere quiet and cosy. I hope this was the case. Anyway, we couldn't be sure what it had died of and the box was in a terrible state with flies and other nasties so we burnt the whole lot.

We know it is not Gonzo or Fozzie, as we could not see a paint mark on its back (we paint a different colour mark on the back of each hedgehog before release). It could have been the little female I found one day last year tangled in bindweed because I stupidly did not mark her before releasing her. Or maybe it was Gonzo and Fozzie’s mother, although it didn’t look as large as I thought she was.

We will never know for sure.

What we do know is that our efforts, although small, are keeping the hedgehog population going in our tiny area of the village and hopefully will spread across the fields into the countryside at large.

Less work than you think

 
"Ok lady, put the camera down and hand over the blackberries."

Something Jenny at My life in Flip Flops said about my last post got me thinking. She said a garden redesign sounds like a lot of work. It's funny but compared to how much I would have to do if the garden stayed as it is, the redeisgn is actually less work because it is based on permaculture techniques!

In permaculture, everything in the garden has multiple purposes to conserve energy - including human energy tending to it - and you don't fight nature, you work with it and use it constructively. For example, I've spent five years battling with the dandelions, weeds and brambles at the bottom of the garden. After a couple of months of the chickens being on there and scratching around, I no longer have a problem. And the chickens provide me with eggs, manure for the garden, and kill off pests at the same time. I didn't consciously plan that - I just wanted the chickens contained so they stopped wrecking the garden and it seemed the most appropriate place. The penny only dropped a week ago about what had been achieved.

For a really lovely introduction to permaculture with some great illustrations, have a look at this by Graham Burnett:

http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permapdf/handout.pdf

As I've decided to go for a no-dig garden where possible, all the beds I plan on overhauling will have a layer of composted manured chicken straw and bedding, followed layers of wet cardboard, newspaper and wood chip, then compsost and soil plus a top layer of mulch, either hay or straw.I'm going to buy in 100 extra soil worms for each bed and they are going to do the digging work for me, burrowing through all the layers and dragging it all down to begin changing the substructure of the bed. Compared to what I would normally do (double digging, manuring etc) this will be a doddle! The hardest part will be finding the cardboard, although a trip to Wyevales this morning netted me enough for half of one bed.  

Yesterday I dug out the existing flowers and weeds in the bed nearest the patio.

 
The soil is poor with no organic substructure to it so all the plants were weak and had some kind of disease. Even the weeds were not doing well and all it took was a quick yank and everything came up. All I left behind was the buddleja which looks wonderful simply by virtue of its enormous tap root. As a treat, I let the chickens loose on there for the day to clear the site of pests and rake it over for me.

A couple of years ago we were given an old pond and I put that in yesterday to provide extra water down this end of the garden for the wildlife. The hedgehogs use the path past the bed to get round the house to the street and apart from the saucerfuls that we put out, they have no other real water source. The pond has stepped levels at one end so if one of them accidently falls in it can get out quite easily. I'll be adding some stone round the edges with crevices so newts and frogs can hide.

My intention is that this bed will be a herb spiral and salad crops, including cherry tomatoes, as they are shallow rooting. I don't yet know how the buddleja will affect the bed's water supply so until I do I don't want to plant anything deep rooting. I suspect I will need to think up a way of keeping this bed permanently irrigated using water from the roof of the conservatory about 10 feet to the left of it.

My hope is that I get three of the beds nearest the house done by Christmas ready for spring planting, and that the ground closest the rose arbour and pergola can be prepared in a similar way for growing climbing beans.

The view from the end of the path with the rose arch.

The pergola with a clematis dying of wilt. That will come out ready for climbing beans.

 
Martin putting the roof on the workshop.

I won't tell you what I'm thinking of doing to the outside of the workshop, but it involves growing food vertically and Martin should be very afraid.

Urban permaculture

I've spent some time over the last few days thinking about our garden.

I'm finding our third of an acre very stressful at the moment. Everything just seems wrong. In the wrong place, in the wrong soil. Things I would need every day are too far away and things I don't look at twice are too close. I spent hours cutting the grass, spiking, fertilising etc yet it is in a bad way, badly dehydrated with builder's rubble and metal appearing up through it. It's never used anyway so why am I expending the energy?

I've been flirting with the idea of completing redesigning the garden according to some of the principles of permaculture. It would make much more sense to have the veg beds near the house rather than down the end of the garden. If you want to pick something every day and keep an eye on pests so you don't have to spray, it's easier to keep an eye on it the closer it is. The things you rarely use or tend to should go further away until you have a wildlife area at the bottom of the garden.

So I've been doing a bit of searching and come up with some interesting videos on edible gardening and permaculture. The video above has three 15 minute documentaries - the first on forest gardening, the second on edible landscaping and the third urban permaculture. The third one caught my eye. They live in a 3-bed maisonette in the UK and have a 75ft garden which they grow a lot of their annual fruit and veg. They don't dig, only mulch, and spend about 2 hours a week out there. Quite inspiring and lots of food for thought.