Stockpiling Circles

I'm not completely sure why, but this week I did some bulk food shopping online and came away with 30 tins of chopped tomatoes, 30 tins of baked beans, 1kg of raisins, 10kg of sugar, 10kg of potatoes and 7.5kg of flour, for what turned out to the quite respectable sum of £42.70.

That's a lie; I do know why.  I was briefly inspired by this video from this channel about making a "potato wine" with the water left from boiling massive amounts of spuds.  Hence the 10kg of potatoes.  But of course I can't eat that many at once, so I decided I'd store the water accumulated from boiling several day's sustenance in my sterilised fermenting bucket, before adding the ingredients later.  I wasn't completely sure about this, so I sought some expert advice.  It's easy to forget that old-fashioned online forums exist these days; but they do, and they'll full of people who know what they're talking about.  (homebrewtalk.com seems to be thriving).

The experts, needless to say, were right.  Accumulating enough water for a batch of wine this size runs the risk of contamination, even in a nominally "sterile" environment.  So I've abandoned this plan for the time being.  Never mind.  Sugar, raisins, tinned food; all these things will keep, but looks like I'm on a potato-based diet for the next few weeks.  Which is fine; a man once lived on potatoes alone for a year and didn't die.

I feel like I've mentioned that before.  I feel like I've mentioned all this before.  It may have something to do with turning 37 yesterday.  Birthdays: days you find yourself reflecting on something called "your life" whether you really want to or not.  What is your life?  A narrative?  Hardly.

I feel I have strayed somewhat from my path.  This is fine, since some of my original ideas were pretty stupid anyway.  Living without money?  I wish.  Or maybe I don't.  I never really tried to find out.  I've found a kind of equilibrium; certainly not poverty, not really, but just as certainly, not anything else different or radical.  I had a glimpse of what it was like to have excess money, and now that excess is used up again, nothing has changed.  Absolutely nothing.  Money isn't the answer, but maybe it's not the problem either.  This will take some time to explain.

Related posts

Over the Edge of the Map
Stockpiling
Uncomfortable Questions



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Wining. Every Day.

Not ready yet.  Ignore.

The blackberry wine turned out OK.  By "OK", I suppose I mean "not terrible".  But that, I think is only because I tried to drink it much too soon.  It had a cloudiness to it that you're not supposed to see in wine, but which according to my research, dissipates if you're patient enough to leave it to do so.  So anyway, three bottles left, which I'm trying not to touch until at least...Christmas?  We'll see how that goes.

Now that's bottled away, anyway, and somewhat out of sight, I've turned my mind to the next batch.  This one: apple wine.

For whatever reason, this seems to be a popular Canadian/Nova Scotian wine, as seen in the videos I've been using for guidance here and here.

Why apples?  Well, because the orchard round back of the allotment has been shedding them like nobody's business.  In just two jaunts, only days apart, I easily accumulated over 6kg of windfalls, mostly from a single tree.  This was by no means all of them.  Abundance!

I've been taking video snaps as I've been going along, which I'll mesh into an informative and educational video on my YouTube channel once the process is complete, but here's a little sneak preview of the process.

Apples, chopped up; skins and pips and all, soaked in my new fermenting bucket for days and days.  Observant observers may observe a cinnamon stick in there.  Because apples, and because cinnamon.  Though I didn't leave it in there for long.  I just suggested it to the mixture.  If it feels like tasting mildly of cinnamon when all's ready and done, then you'll hear no complaints from me.

Here I add lemon juice to the must, to which I'd already added the sugar and raisins (actually, mixed fruit, but whatever) while talking about what I'm doing.  This, of course, will feature in the final instructional video.

Once the ingredients were all in, the sugar stirred around and dissolved over several days, I added the yeast, and performed my first "racking" into the two demijohns, which left me with this:

The airlocks were added to allow fermentation to take place undisturbed.  This is necessary.  I was concerned at first nothing would happen, but within 24 hours, this was happening:

The bubbles are the gas given off as yeast converts the sugar to alcohol.  I think the gas is carbon dioxide.  Something like that.  That's all the science we need for now.  As for me, I can't stop watching it blub.  There's something very relaxing about the sight and sound.  Two weeks in, and it's still blubbing away, with only very slight signs of slowing.  I have to wait until the blubbing dies down before racking off again, which allows the wine to clear as the residue sinking already to the bottom is left behind.  This is how things look today:

Cloudy, but lighter.  It's pleasing to note the change of colour as time passes.  All these things must be appreciated at their own pace.

Related posts

Fruits of the Forage
Home Grown Sandwiches
The Continuing Story of Bread
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Autumn on the Allotment, Part One: The Mushroom Invasion

I had a nice surprise on Saturday.  If you remember from a previous post and video, after clearing away some of the jungle that encroaches on one corner of my plot, I inadvertently brought this curiosity to life, pictured right:

I'm still not entirely sure what it is, though consensus seems to be forming that it's a "chicken of the woods", which would be fine by me.  Excellent name for a mushroom.  Just the other night I worked a shift with an amateur mycologist/photographer, who confirmed the hypothesis.  So that's that.  But then, there's this:

When I returned to the plot on Saturday for the first time since the beginning of the week, I was astonished to come across this:

What's that?  That's a colony of mushrooms, that is.  No previous indication that there would be any such thing, and suddenly, there they were.   Let's take a closer look.

Closer...

Closer...

Hundred of them.  Wonderful.  Remarkable.  There's a beauty to mushrooms quite unlike any other beauty, and indeed that of plants - in fact, they're not plants: they're more closely related to animals, but belong in their own kingdom.  They don't photosythensise.  They don't really play by the rules at all.  It's no wonder the late Prophet Mckenna speculated they might be aliens.  

Some of them anyway.  Nothing magical about the ones that appeared on my allotment, nothing but common "ink caps" - edible, perhaps, but not with alcohol, though I haven't tested this theory.  I prefer not be poisoned, generally speaking.

Today is Tuesday.  When I nipped over this evening, the mushroom patch looked like this:

...and also like this:

The mighty fungus, the chicken of the woods, whatever it is, remains, but the mushroom sons have dispersed.  Mushrooms don't stick around.  I respect that.  Meanwhile...



Jonathan Bradshaw 
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Related posts

The Mushroom Invasion (video)
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