Peas and beans

(I like the macro setting a bit too much on my camera...)

Finally, our early peas and broad beans are ready.  A good few have got botrytis mould on the pods so will plant further apart next year for more airflow, which will also help with harvesting.  We're also starting on the broad beans, and the French beans are coming along nicely.

Not bad: we get this about twice a week, but the hot weather's slowing things down now.

Both of these crops will be sown this autumn for overwintering as I am finding that the brassicas that need to go in after the legumes are growing fast in the holding bed and as the peas were sown late, plus the bad weather we've had, they're not ready to be cut down yet.  Overwintering the peas and beans will hopefully get them cropping a month earlier next year and the next crop can go in at the right time.  This will also help with the aphid attacks.

Kelvedon Wonder (right) and Hatif D'Annonay early peas.  

Guess which ones are being sown next year?

Coffee break.

Bit of a stroll and then a coffee with a slab of home made bread, peanut butter and habanero sauce (not home made).

Path down the side of the field needs a trim...

Pond looking better, and plenty of water boatmen on it!

Irises coming up...

Things finally waking up in the polytunnel.  Pachypodium very happy.

The first Gigante Liscio tomato!

Phew, hard work that...

Brewing summer beer.

How to make your own for 19p a pint.  Helps to buy ingredients in bulk: Tucker's Maltings is good, as is Warminster Maltings. 25kgs will last 6 months.  Hops are very expensive because of the madness of lager drinking that has infected England, poor harvests due to all the diseases monocultures get and a dearth of Cockneys on stilts at picking time.  Grow your own, pick the wild ones or order in bulk and keep in the freezer.  £100 of hops will last a year at least.  Give up on buying organic hops - there's one farm in Kent that I could find that grows them and they supply all of it to large brewers.

I use a ratio of 1lb malt : 1oz hops : 1gal water to keep it simple and weak enough to drink a lot of, plus it's easy to remember.  It turns out a nice golden, lightly hopped bitter about 3.5%.  I've been using East Kent Goldings hops which are a lot more bitter than I'm used to, so I only add 2/3 of what would normally be added to the beer.  I want something a little stronger this time so I am adding more malt.

So...

Warm up 2 gallons of water to 66C in your brewing thing.

Crack your organic pale malt in the mill.  

All beers are mostly pale malt because pale has all the sugar in it and thus alcohol.  Darker malts are used to add colour and flavour.  Add to the water, stir in.  Should be like sloppy porridge.

Cover the brewing thing with a sleeping bag and wait two hours for the enzymes in the malt to convert the starch to sugar. 

I usually do this overnight to make sure all the starch has been turned to sugar, but couldn't be bothered last night.  2 hours is ok.

Drain out into 5 gal fermenting bin.

Sprinkle boiling water into brewing thing to flush the sugars out, until you have 5 gallons of "sweet wort" in the bin.

Taste a bit of the delicious malty liquid.  Yum.

Clean out the spent malt from the boiler and give the chickens a treat, mixed with chopped nettles and carrot - not all of it mind or they will explode and you'll have sans oeufs (not that you've got any anyway from the fat lazy Frenchies).

Put the "sweet wort" back into the boiler, add all but a handful of the hops and boil for 55 minutes.  

You can boil for longer and get darker beer, but any less and it'll stay cloudy.  Add rest of hops along with copper "worm" (beer cooler).

Turn off after one hour, run cold water through worm until beer gets to room temperature.

Put water from cooling into water butt for polytunnel watering tomorrow.

Drain into sterilised (or beer goes bad) fermenting bin, top up to 5 gallons with boiled and now cool water.  Want it stronger than 3%?  Add 8oz sugar per gallon of liquid -any more will give you a really bad hangover.  

Taste again, noting how the hops have made it even more delicious.  

Add yeast skimmed from previous ferment (or bread yeast if you ain't got anything else, which works fine).

Cover and pray to Bacchus.

Skim foam off after a day or so and use that for next brew (keep in fridge).

Only took all bloody day, but in between stages I hope you were doing productive things like clearing ragwort from the field and not lying on the lawn with a book on composting toilets or something!

See? I was being productive!
Bottle it the following Sunday - anything sterile and able to take a bit of pressure.  I use those Grolsh-type bottles but did start out with placcy pop bottles from the recycling skip!

Books

As I have gashed my left hand ripping up old laminate flooring from the gite, I'm on light duties for a day to let it knit together.  Thought I'd write a bit on my favourite books and peoples and sich to make y'all as bored as I am.

"Narrow Boat" by LTC Rolt.

I often wonder what England was like before modernism got a stranglehold.  This is a glorious, poetic book to show you a place that has long vanished under by-passes, luxury developments and cheap tat, written by someone who must have had an engineer and a poet for parents.  A journey around the canals of England in a narrowboat before WW2, showing you what has been lost since.

"Sailing Through England" by John and Sally Seymour.

A similar book as the above (John S. wrote a book on narrowboating after this one in a similar vein), but more adventurous, chaotic and funny.  Another personal view of England, this time on the rivers and wide canals in the 50's.

"The Education of Little Tree" by Forrest Carter.

This is one of those books you haven't heard of but ends up changing your life.  Semi-autobiographical story of a young half-caste Cherokee boy being brought up by his grandparents in the mountains and learning about the world from a mountain "indian" perspective.  Funny, touching, and enlightening.

Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien.

Read into it what you want about war, progress, the ruin of the countryside, etc.  I like it because of it's huge depth more than it's literary quality.  Pinching elements from Nordic, Celtic and German myth to make something unique that I have to read once a year or I start seeing pink Oliphaunts.

"Unto This Last" by John Ruskin

Man was a genius.  I attribute my spitting hatred of PVC double glazing on old Breton farmhouses to him.

"On Walden Pond" by... see picture.

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."  I wonder what his comment on mobile phones would be?

"One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka

Every bloody person with more than a patio should read this book about how to farm properly without ruining us all. 

"Cobbett's Cottage Economy" by William Cobbett

The original "back to the land" book, to help the poor and needy not be poor or needy.  Great wit and style, a master of prose.  Not a huge fan of tea and potatoes though: apparently only good for whores and the Irish.

William Blake's poetry.

Touched in the head, but touching.

...Last but not least...

Most books by John Seymour

Have only what you need to live well (ie, not bloody cars, tellies, phones and other sh-te), get some exercise outside in the fresh air, dig that lawn up and grow some bloody onions, then get pish on home brew with your mates!  Leave those big cities to fall down in the dust!  I blame him entirely for my current predicament.  I could have been content with a flat in Brighton, as an overweight office chump, with nothing to think about but trainers and records, and only a distant inkling that I had it right when I was a kid when I used to go out to the crags by myself and get stuck trying to climb them.  As long as I avoided Ray Mears I would be ok, but then I saw this bloke's book, looked at the nice drawings and got it into my head that I should be doing the same as they were and not devouring the only place we have to live on with everyone else.  So here I am in Brittany (not France, by God!  Bit like saying Wales is in England) with a sore back, gashed hand, sunburn, a beard of all things, callouses everywhere, and on top of all that, because I tried milling my own flour for sour dough bread and cracking my own barley for home made beer and growing my own veg I can't eat anything in the shops any more like normal people 'cause it all tastes like shite and I'm now starving to death!  AND the chickens haven't laid a bloody egg all week, the little bastards!

Better than working for a living though.

Chickens at last!

After months building one tiny coop and run, we've finally bought some chooks to live in it.
Cuckoo Marans - 3 hens and a cock, all looking a bit sulky out in the rain.

Looking a bit traumatised after sitting in the boot for an hour...

Marans are said to be very hardy, disease resistant, placid, and suited to wet conditions.  They lay about 200 dark brown eggs a year, and hopefully will go broody from time to time, or my efforts with chicken coop mk.2 will be wasted!  Meant to taste damn good as well.

The ladies settling in, which took literally 3 seconds!

Mr Lover Lover ...or you're in the pot, lad!

Evening in Mesle

Veg plot looking up from the potato patch.

Lawn's a bit dry...

...but the rhododendrons like it.

Pond is starting to look natural now the grass around the border's growing.

Things taking off at last in the polytunnel. I think it was the cold weather that delayed everything. That's Puck being his usual slightly creepy follow-me-everywhere-meowing thing.