Home Brew

This is a subject closely related to self-sufficiency, but you might wonder what it has to do with growing your own veg. The answer is that it's a fantastic way to make use of any gluts you have (definitely more fun than making a load of jams and jellies). You can make alcohol (wine in particular) out of just about anything you can grow, fruit or vegetable. Personally, whenever I hear anything about home brewing, I immediately think of the infamous Peapod Burgandy from The Good Life, a must-see British comedy series about a couple trying their hand at self-sufficiency. The difference between Peapod Burgandy, and any home-made wines you might eventually make yourself, is that yours may (and will, eventually!) turn out to be a lot more pleasant.

Home brewing can be achieved with very little equipment (the bare minimum being a bucket, the ingredients, and yeast) but the more you use, the more successful you're likely to be. Wine making kits, whilst ranging in quality, tend to supply the basics at relatively little cost, and if you want to get the equipment cheaply, this could be the way to do it. The most likely cause of failure would probably be your wine turning into vinegar, a process easily stopped with a fermentation lock (a device to allow air to escape, but not enter, your brew) which is likely to be included in any wine-making kit. If you want to get more complicated, you'll also want specialist yeast, yeast nutrient, several glass demijohns, and perhaps even a hydrometer, to measure the sugar or alcohol content of your brew. Again, not all of this is strictly necessary, but it greatly improves your chances of making something not only drinkable, but pleasant.

Home Brewing can be an extremely satisfying process. As with growing your own food, the result will be something you can actually taste for yourself – it's a really tangible prize. Making your own wine, however, can be quite a long-term project, often requiring several months or more. Simple, home-made beer or cider, on the other hand, does not take long nor much equipment, and is something I think everyone should have a go at!

For anyone who wants to know more (or is looking for recipes), I highly recommend this book. It contains just about everything you could need to know about home brewing, even if it is a bit dated.

Why I can't work out how we even need to use a bin anymore...

Nowadays we recycle almost everything - we have the composter for most of our kitchen waste, and then the 'digester' for the bits the composter can't take (namely meat and bones). We put the glass, cardboard, paper, and tins out for recycling, and anything we can't get taken by the bin men, we take to recycle ourselves. Yet somehow our bins still fill up extremely quickly! The culprit, of course, is plastic. Although lots of plastic is in fact recyclable, very few councils in Britain actually have the means to recycle it. Plastic bottles are fine, but most food packaging is impossible to recycle here, and that's what ends up in the bin. We've managed to avoid throwing away all the plastic bags you get from supermarkets, either by using our own bags, or by giving the bags back to them the next week (I think most supermarkets let you do this now.) You have to wonder what they actually do with all those bags though; they may not end up in my bin, but I bet they end up in a bin somewhere. A young boy recently isolated bacteria capable of decomposing plastic bags (relatively) quickly, but until I cultivate a new composting bin with these bacteria, I'm afraid that's not much use to me. The article can be found here.

Some food is now available in biodegradable bags, which can be put in the composter. Our carrots come in these bags, but not much else unfortunately. The easiest answer may be to stop shopping at supermarkets, and buying food fresh (and not pre-packaged) from markets, butchers, grocers, and other individual businesses. Whilst this would eliminate the packaging problem, it's inefficient and costly, and not at all convenient. Growing your own veg means you need to buy less, of course, so get less packaging, but unless you're growing on a large scale (close to self-sufficiency, in fact), you're unlikely to escape the problem.

What can we do then? Not much, I'm afraid. Avoid supermarkets when we can, grow as much as we can ourselves, and try to go for products with little or no packaging. It seems the trend is towards using less plastic anyway, so hopefully in a few more years, we won't need to worry about supermarkets unloading all their plastic on us.

Becoming self-sufficient

For many people who grow their own vegetables, self-sufficiency is the holy grail. At the very least, the idea tends to bring a strange yearning. Growing your own crops is incredibly rewarding; the sense of achievement when it finally comes to harvest, when you see the result of your months of careful labour, is profound, and the entire process can bring a strange and deep sense of contentment. These little glimpses make many gardeners wonder what it would be like to feel this constantly. The way to achieve this, of course, is self-sufficiency.

A life consisting of little more than survival (as it probably seem to outsiders, anyway) may not appear to be very appealing, but even with all the luxuries of modern life, so many people still feel like they lack something, and very few people indeed feel truly content and satisfied. Total self-sufficiency can bring a remarkable sense of completeness, and a contentment rarely experienced by most people. It may be rustic, even outdated and unnecessary, but with the trend back towards the natural, which can be seen in the sudden desire for organic and local foods, the removal of artificial colours and flavours from food, and even the increased interest in growing your own (as perhaps you may have experienced!), perhaps we should be wondering whether this 'natural' way of life, if illogical, is in fact superior to our modern way.

That said, self-sufficiency isn't for everyone. It takes a lot of effort to even get close; one bad crop may be enough to convince you that it was all a silly idea and make you give up, and let's face it, most of us don't know the first thing about keeping livestock. Besides this, the majority of people aren't in the position to become self-sufficient: you may not have enough garden space, and moving isn't an option. For most people then, getting as close to self-sufficiency as possible should be the goal.

After all this talk of a 'deep sense of contentment', it's worth mentioning that self-sufficiency is a great money-saver, too. Growing as much of your own food as possible can cut down massively on food bills. Learning to conserve energy, mend and make do, and to basically live a much more economical lifestyle are all parts of self-sufficiency, and they make sense even if you're not planning on going the whole hog, quitting your job, and working the land for a living.

Beans, peas, and other legumes...

I recently discovered, perhaps a little late in the year (but that's always the way) that legumes are absolutely fantastic croppers. Runner beans in particular produce more pods than I'd know what to do with, and can continue for at least a month. With a bit of planning, you could have a continuous supply from maybe mid-summer through to autumn, and given that you can easily freeze beans and peas, you could potentially have a year's supply if you wanted it.

What's really good about beans, though, is that they require so little effort. Planted straight out into the ground, there's always the risk of slugs and snails getting your seedlings before you even see them (as happened to me earlier this year!), but if you germinate them inside before planting them out, you'll find them incredibly quick-growing and hardy. They take to stakes easily, and they'll be high above the ground after just a few days, well away from the reach of any greedy, slimy creatures. From then on, minimal weeding is required: the plants are so high above everything else that there's no fear of them being shaded out. You can more or less leave them to their own devices until they start to flower.

Peas are slightly more difficult, requiring more careful training to get them onto a cane, but if you take good care of them, they can provide a great crop too. You'll need to make sure they get nice and tall, as they're prone to fruiting quite quickly, so you should pick off the earliest flowers to promote further growth before you allow any actual peas to grow. Peas prefer to grow both outwards and upwards, and unlike beans, will not appreciate having only one cane to support them. Either use several canes in a teepee shape, or use a couple of small tree branches, with plenty of sticks and twigs branching off the main stem, to provide a sort of nest of supports.

Peas and beans are, as I mentioned, relatively hardy, but there are a few pest and diseases they can contract. Leaf miners are a chronic pest, and seem to particularly enjoy pea leaves. If you see their trails (which look like thin, discoloured trails on the leaves, often winding around) you should pinch the leaf at the end immediately between the pads of your thumb and forefinger, to squash the insect before it does any more damage. Pea pods can also be infested by larvae, who will eat away the peas without leaving any damage to the pod itself, making it impossible to detect the problem until it's too late. Finally, the pods of peas and beans can suffer from 'powdery mildew', a nasty fungal infection which is difficult to treat once established. It thrives in warm, humid weather. Don't mistake the natural, waxy covering of pods for powdery mildew, however.

There's little you can do against any of these problems, but the worse ones are less common. Leaf miners, though a nuisance, are easily dealt with, and won't damage the pods. Beans and peas are still hardy heavy-producers, and a great addition to any vegetable garden.

The Joys of Composting

We recently purchased a new composter, a 'composting cone', in fact. We've composted all our plant-based kitchen waste for over two years now, but we haven't been able to do anything with the leftover meat and bones. This cone, however, is supposed to be able to deal with them. Allegedly harnessing the power of the sun to encourage bacteria activity and accelerate the decomposition, it breaks down meat-based waste with frightening efficiency, not producing lovely compost as a traditional bin does, but instead producing a fertilising liquid which seeps into the ground from the bottom of the cone. Unfortunately, you can't collect this liquid - it just seeps in wherever the cone is. As such, I've decided to give it pride of place in the very middle of my patch (my thinking being that I can plant tall beans and tomatoes in the space behind it, which will unfortunately be a little shaded.)

You have to dig a hole 60cm deep, which doesn't seem like much, but when the topsoil stops after about 30cm, before the clay begins, it suddenly becomes a lot of work. You then test the drainage, and if it isn't particularly good, you have to dig another 10cm. Given that it's all clay in my garden once you get that low, I suspect I'll be digging those gruelling 10cm!

Whether we can even get it in, let alone whether it'll work and help improve the plants, is yet to be seen.