Meet The Vinegar Mother

No, this post is not a Christmas attack on my relatives. Read on to find out.

Well it may have been the shortest day, but we seem to have got a lot done.
I've been taking advantage of the ridiculously mild weather to tidy up the veg patch. The main job has been to make a start on edging the beds - the grass encroaches more and more every year, but I'm determined to have everything looking spick and span by early spring. This is a big job though, so after each bit I do a quick other job - pulling up old vegetation, removing posts and wires, weeding, turning compost.
This way, lots gets done and I don't really notice how hard I'm working.

A nice crisp edge is very satisfying... but a lot of work to maintain

And when I'd finally put the chickens to bed and sat down to relax, what better thing to do than make the first slice into the Solstice cake.
It was delicious and will definitely become a tradition at Swallow Farm.

Meanwhile, in the house, Sue has been racking off the cider vinegar. This is the first time she has made this properly (though we have let cider turn to vinegar before). A couple of months ago Sue organised an Apple Day for the Smallholders Club. A big part of this was cider making and Sue brought home some of the apple pulp. Usually this would be a treat for the chickens or pigs, but this time Sue had other ideas. She covered it with water and left it in three large plastic boxes, covered with muslin to keep the fruit flies out.
After a while the entrance hallway was filled with a distinctive vinegary aroma. The developing vinegar grew a layer of white mould on top. This is supposed to happen. We were supposed to leave it there until March, but my winter squashes kept going mouldy until I figured that the fermenting vinegar might not be helping the situation.

So today Sue racked off the vinegar into demijohns. She filled almost nine! She has added a dollop of the mother of vinegar back in - this is that slimy white layer of mould! It is actually a form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria. It's good for you. Honestly.

The 'Mother of Vinegar'

She has also added some apple pulp back in. The demijohns are not sealed, just covered, but they have moved to a different room.
Come March we should have 8 and a half gallons of very authentic apple cider vinegar.

And now the chickens can have the vinegary apple pulp mix. They love it and it's a very good natural wormer. It's also a bit of an all round tonic for them, which is just what they need on the shortest day.

News From Nowhere

I find the seasonal cycle reassuring. Like the sun coming up, there is a certain security knowing that winter will come again and spring will follow it. Each season holds its own wonders and challenges. Without them things would get monotonous. And as a smallholder, each time they come around I get another chance to try and improve on last year. Unfortunately I grow a year older too!

But this cycle doesn't make blogging easy! How do you write about your potato harvest for the fifth time in five years without getting repetitious? I find pulling potatoes from the ground just as amazing, every time I do it, but it's hard to get enthused about writing about it again. I guess I could always hope that no-one except me remembers the post from a year ago. For this reason, I don't always post about everything I do.

One thing which I do look forward to are the cider club days which Roger runs. The spring meeting fell through due to a last minute lack of apples, so it is now a full year since our last flow of apple juice. I don't see the group in between times, but I enjoy their company. They are a group of thinkers.

This last Saturday we gathered again under ominous skies.
The weather held for us, just, and as we chopped and scratted, pulverised, liquidised and pressed, it put me in mind of a book by William Morris, News From Nowhere, a utopian and nostalgic image of times gone by. (Alternative Title: An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From A Utopian Romance). It is one of the very, very few books to which I periodically return. In particular it reminded me of the community effort to gather in the hay. These days one man comes along with a massive combine harvester and creates a dust storm. Then, a couple of days later, someone else chugs up and down the field and the hay magically pops out the back in its shiny black plastic roll. It is called haylage these days. But in the past people came together. Undoubtedly it was hard work only made possible by a community effort, but it helped bond the community in a way which has now disappeared.

Anyway, back to the cider making. The beauty of the autumn cider day is that the apples are freshly picked. This year Roger had secured a new supply of mixed apples. Such a mix makes for the best juice and the best cider. He had also surprised us by procuring several boxes of mandarins.

These went straight into the shredder, peel and all and it wasn't long before the juice was flowing.

It tastes absolutely delicious as is, but we have put a good quantity away for when Sue gets time to turn it into wine. Now that's something we don't make every year.

The apple juice turned out equally delicious. We've now got three demijohns naturally fermenting. It won't be long before the bubbles start and the airlock valves start making mysterious noises in the kitchen. There's a demijohn unsealed too. This will turn itself into cider vinegar.

As for those changing seasons, we had the fire on last night. It was dark well before 8. And this morning I watched the swallows streaming across the fields. They are not 'our' swallows, for there are hundreds of them, occasionally accompanied by a handful of house martins. These have not yet chosen to adopt our farm as their summer home, so I see them only very rarely on such days when an exodus is in full swing.

I, on the other hand, will spend much of the winter snuggled up in front of my cosy fire with a glass of cider, or even mandarin wine.

And I'll be thinking of my friends. Thank you Roger.

How to make cider and have fun.

Thank goodness the Easter holidays have arrived. For it's been a hectic last week, not helped by the advent of BST (an hour's sleep lost), a dose of Saharan sand and a European smog cloud (of course, all this pollution must come from somewhere else). Add to that the fact that I always get my hayfever early in the season and it leaves me short of breath and it really was the perfect storm. All these factors have left me absolutely knackered for a few days, but the prospect of almost three weeks on the smallholding with no other work commitments is making me feel much more lively again.

As I write this, sat with my morning coffee, something has just mysteriously popped in the kitchen. It's a bottle of slowly fermenting apple juice, destined to become cider vinegar for the chickens. Sue squeezes the bottle in to allow room for the gases to expand and every now and again the plastic pops back out.

Cider making day - The team at work.

Last Saturday was cider-making day. This has become an enjoyable ritual which we perform a few times every year. A group of us get together and gradually demolish a third of a ton of apples, wielding various weapons with the general idea of reducing them into smaller and smaller pieces until they are almost unrecognisable.

Chopping

The process known as "scratting"

We had a beautiful day for it and a newly arrived chiffchaff sang out for springtime as we chopped. We made faster progress on the initial chopping than usual and the scratting - further chopping using lawn edgers and a hoe - somehow seemed less arduous than usual. From there it was into the adapted shredder which does a great job of reducing the apple pieces into a fine pulp.

smaller...

By lunch time, all apples were chopped, but there was a problem. The shredder had shorted and kept tripping the electricity. It was dismantled - note the use of the passive verb, as I kept well away from the operation - cleaned and left to dry out a bit while we took a lunch break. A delicious tomato soup followed by various bits and bobs which people had brought along. The biscuits from the Blokes Baking Group went down very well.

and smaller...

By early afternoon the shredder was recuperated and ready for another bash. There was quite a queue of buckets full of chopped apple to go through it and then it all had to be pressed, a job which cannot be rushed too much.

and smaller.

As the production line moved towards its end, I became more involved in operating the press. This is a beast of a machine, pretty much cobbled together from recycled and scrounged materials, but it exerts quite some pressure and the juice soon starts to flow out of the pulp. It reminds me of a medieval torture machine and brings new meaning to turning the screw.

SQUEEEEEEEEEZE!!!!

And so to the end product. 110 litres of freshly pressed apple juice and nine bags of squeezed apple pulp. We shared out the apple juice to go home, ready to be converted into cider, apple wine or cider vinegar (or just simple kept as juice, though it doesn't keep too long without pasteurising or freezing). As for the pulp, that went into the back of my car and will keep Daisy, the chooks and the geese happy for quite some time. They seem to especially enjoy it when it starts to ferment. Funny that!

So, how do we turn the juice into cider?
Well, once we've got it home it's decanted into clean demijohns (the big glass containers with a narrow neck, readily available on ebay etc) and there it sits. Leave a bit of space at the top. The only other equipment you need is a bung with an airlock. You half fill the airlock bit with water. This works similar to a u-bend! Any excess gases bubble up through the water and escape, but the fermenting apple juice is not exposed to the air outside. You don't need to add anything. After a few days, sometimes a bit longer, the juice starts to develop a froth on top and not much later you start to hear strange bubbling sounds. Look closely and you will see millions of tiny bubbles of gas rising through the fermenting juice. It's really quite astonishing how active it gets.
This continues for about a week and eventually it all settles down. The bubbling stops and the sediment starts to settle. Leave everything to settle completely, then syphon the liquid off into whatever bottles (sterilised) you're using. There may be further development of gases, so old lemonade / coke bottles are good for this, or proper beer bottles, either the Grolsch type or normal bottles if you have a bottle topper.
Of course, it can be a bit more complicated than this. You can measure the specific gravity of your fermented juice, you can sweeten it, you may experience secondary fermentation (!). But, at the end of the day, we don't mind how it turns out as long as it's drinkable. Sometimes it's sweet, sometimes it's dry. Sometimes it's still, sometimes it's fizzy. To tell the truth, we don't know why. It just happens and it's always a good moment to find out how a batch has fared.
Of course, if you want to be more scientific and control the outcome a bit more, you can read up on it elsewhere. But the basics as outlined here should get you a fairly decent tipple.
None of the equipment costs very much. By far the most expensive is the press, if you're buying a new one. Pulverising the apples can be a bit of a chore too and you can buy various machines to do this for you. The best will set you back in the region of £700! You'd have to drink a lot of cider to make this worthwhile. Of course, you could always start up your own cider club. It certainly makes for a very pleasant day.

Cider making

A couple of days spent with friends. Some good old hard work. And at the end of it, 4 gallons of cider and ten bags of apple pulp for the pigs.

An orchard dripping with apples.

Here's the story in photos.

Easy picking
 



And the next day...

 

Just a few apples to pulverise

Chop

Pulverise (proper word, scratting)

Pulp



Squeeeeeeze!

 

The whole operation

A  well deserved break

 

The next day...

Should be ready to drink by Christmas!

Balmy weather

I can't quite believe it has been five days since I last posted. Time sure flies when you're having fun.

Firstly, a series of calm, clear morning sunrises (apart from 17th, which let the side down).

Thursday 16th August 2012

Friday 17th August 2012

Saturday 18th August 2012

Sunday 19th August 2012

These beautiful daybreaks have been followed by balmy days, with temperatures peaking at over 30 degrees. And we have been taking full advantage of the good weather. I'd like to say that we were making hay while the sun shone, but dealing with the swards of grassland will have to wait just a bit longer while other priorities take over.

No, instead, in the hot sun we have been strenuously building fences, scratting apples (yes, more cider is on the way!) and wrestling with sheep (more on this tomorrow).

Unfortunately, as is so often the case when we are at our busiest, photos of what we've been up to are thin on the ground.
I've been trying to persuade Sue that our journey to collect rubble and our visit to the wood yard count as two of the days out which I promised at the beginning of the holidays!

The fencing project.
One day, soon, I promise, all the fences and gates will be finished. We've been busy fencing one side of the corridor which runs down our land. When the task is complete there will be a continuous run from the stables right down to the pigpen, with gates off to the various garden rooms either side. Unfortunately, work has had to come to a temporary halt as Lady Guinea is still sitting on her seventeen eggs and her nest is nestled in right along the intended line of the fence. I'll be surprised if she actually manages to raise any young though, especially since there was a stoat bouncing around in that area a few days ago.

Cider making
On Saturday we spent another very enjoyable day cutting, bashing (officially known as scratting), shredding and squeezing (pressing) apples. We picked the hottest day for such strenuous effort, but the four demijohns of juice have already started bubbling away furiously and it won't be long till we're supping cider!
The whole process is surprisingly straightforward. Just make sure everything's sterilised, filter the juice into the demijohns, bung in the airlock and wait until everything settles down again. Then drink!

Sheep
These merit their own post, but suffice to say that we had a crash course in sheep handling and have come back with two delightful sheep. Technically they are lambs, but they are pretty big. Unfortunately they won't be staying with us very long. They just need finishing before they go off in late autumn.