(Please note the following is a press release from Defra, however selfsufficientish 100% agree that every gardener should go peat free)

A new, younger generation of ‘Good Life’ gardeners has emerged through the recession, according to research released today by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) but they may be unwittingly harming the environment by using peat products. Those in their thirties are leading a new trend for grow-your-own vegetables – in fact, two-thirds of people between 30 and 39, are planning to turn their hand to growing their own vegetables this year, in comparison to 53% of those in their 40s, and 56% of those in their 50s.¹

However, many gardeners are not aware that irreversible damage to some of the country’s most valuable habitats and wildlife is being done by buying compost that contains peat.  Barely a third of gardeners are aware of the serious environmental issues surrounding the use of peat and many don’t realise that most multi-purpose composts and growbags contain peat.[1]

Peat is a valuable natural resource formed over many hundreds and thousands of years. The UK’s lowland raised peat bogs (from which peat is extracted for horticultural use) are home to many rare animals and plants, as well as offering unrivalled protection for valuable historic artefacts and archaeological remains.

When peat is harvested for use in growing media like multi-purpose compost and growbags, it not only damages these habitats but also releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Just under half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere each year as a result of peat extraction from UK sites alone; that’s comparable to the total emissions of over 100,000 homes.2

But there is hope – almost four in five of us (78%) say that if they knew more about the damage caused by peat extraction, they would stop using products containing it1.

To help gardeners learn more about the perils of peat-based compost and encourage them to buy peat-free alternatives, Defra is teaming up with celebrity garden designer Diarmuid Gavin who has produced a helpful video about the benefits of using peat-free compost when planting.

Diarmuid says,

“Consumers’ concern about what they can personally do to help protect the environment is at a record high. However, people often struggle to find easy ways to make a big difference. Using peat-free compost in the home and garden is one of the simplest, yet most effective ways that people can make a positive environmental impact and reduce their carbon footprint.

“For most uses in the garden (e.g. pots, growbags, hanging baskets, digging into or tidying up flowerbeds) peat-free alternatives are just as good as peat-based compost, and they don’t lead to the loss of our valuable peat bogs. We hope that this campaign will prove to gardeners that you can have blooming good results with environmental friendly peat-free products.”

Secretary of State for the Environment Hilary Benn said:

‘Most people are unaware that peat has such a significant environmental impact – not just on the depletion of a natural resource that takes hundreds and thousands of years to form and the release of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, but also in damaging valuable habitats for animals, plants and insects.’

‘With high quality alternative composts on the market these days, there is no reason for gardeners not to ‘go peat free’ and still enjoy a beautiful garden.’

For more information on Defra’s Peat-Free campaign visit, www.direct.gov.uk/buyingcompost

[1] One Poll Survey, over the period 27028 Jan 2009, 2000 respondents

² The UK’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory records emissions of 420,000 tonnes a year for peat extraction from UK sites. However, 57% of the peat that we use in the UK is imported, mainly from the Republic of Ireland and the Baltics.

Well this year I advise you do some research before sowing your seed and make sure you know where it is coming from.  Over the last few years Monsanto have been buying up seed companies all over America and the rest of the world. One such company is Seminis who use smaller companies to distribute their seeds – I have included a list below.

***I have to make an apology here as I was contacted by one of the companies I’d previously listed as being owned by Monsanto as they had threatened me with legal action!!! – The new list I have included below is a list of distributors for Seminis seeds and NOT companies owned by Monsanto***

In other words the list of companies (below) distribute seeds from many companies including Seminis who are owned by Monsanto  – so in effect they are selling Monsanto seeds.  I’ve taken the following from Seminis’s own website – the choice of whether to buy from them or not is entirely up to you.  As the person who contacted me was adamant he had no dealings with Monsanto I have just taken the follow information from the Seminis/Monsanto website and I do not accept any responsibilty for the information I am mearly posting a link to it.

“Seminis does not sell directly to home gardeners; however, many of our products are available to consumers from U.S. and Canadian mail order and packet seed companies. The vendors below carry our newest products:”

Burpee, W Atlee
300 Park Ave.
Warminster, PA 18974
Ph: (215)674-4900
Fax: (215)674-0838

Dege Garden Center
831 N Century Ave.
St Paul, MN 55119
Ph: (651) 739-8314
Fax: (651) 739-8326

E & R Seed Co.
1356 E. 200 S.
Monroe, IN 46772

Earl May Seed
208 N. Elm St.
Shenandoah, IA 51603
Ph:(712) 246-1020
Fax:(712) 246-1760

Garden Trends
355 Paul Rd.
Rochester, NY 14624
Ph: (716) 295-3600
Fax: (716) 295-3609

Gardens Alive
5100 Schenley Place
Lawrenceberg, IN 47025
Ph: (812) 537-8650
Fax: (812) 537-5108

Germania Seed Co.
5978 N. Northwest Hwy
Chicago, IL 60631
Ph: (773) 631-6631
Fax: (773) 631-4449

Johnnys Selected Seeds
955 Benton Ave.
Winslow, ME 04901
Ph: (207) 861-3900
Fax: (207) 861-8381

J.W. Jung Seed Co.
335 S. High St.
Randolph, WI 53956
Ph:(920) 326-3121
Fax:(920) 326-5769

Lindenberg Seeds
803 Princess Ave.
Brandon, Manitoba
Canada R7A 0P5
Ph: (204) 727-0575
Fax: (204) 727-2832

Mountain Valley Seed
1800 South West Temple #600
Salt Lake City, UT 84115
Ph: (801) 486-0480
Fax: (801) 467-5730

Nichols Garden Nursery
1190 North Pacific Hwy
Albany, OR 97321
Ph: (541) 928-9280
Fax: (541) 967-8406

Park Seed
Hwy 254 N.
Greenwood, SC 29647
Ph:(864) 223-8555
Fax:(864) 941-4206

Rocky Mountain Seed Co.
6541 N. Washington
Denver, CO 80229
Ph: 303-623-6223
Fax: 303-623-6254

T & T Seeds, Ltd.
Box 1710
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3C 3P6
Ph: (204) 895-9964
Fax: (204-895-9967

Tomato Growers Supply
P.O. Box 720
Fort Myers, FL 33902
Ph:(941) 768-1119
Fax:(941) 768-3476

Willhite Seed Co.
PO Box 23
Poolville, TX 76487
Ph: (817) 599-8656
Fax: (817) 599-5843

End Note -

Alternativly you can just avoid buying seed altogether and save your seed.  Take a look at this video

Or here’s a website which talks about saving seed

Kids in the Garden

Not being a father makes it difficult to give this book a truly objective review. This troubled me somewhat, especially as I now generate the majority of my tiny income from writing and know how useful a review can be.  So, to do it justice I tried to think back across the decades, back to when I was a child.  I used to like the Mr Men, and love Dr. Seuss but I could not remember liking gardening books. I was interested in the outdoors and gardening, but back then books were aimed firmly at adults.  Or at least I never came across a gardening book aimed at me.

I have often wondered about writing a book that is both for adults and children, thinking that it would be very useful. Essentially this is what Kids in the Garden is trying to do. The big question is, does it work? There are jokes throughout, some of which I even found funny – “What’s a ghosts favourite berry? Goo-berries”. Ok, perhaps I don’t have the best sense of humour. Perhaps, instead I should focus on the little tit-bits of facts that pepper the book. These I liked and I learned something new.  I found out that in India chilli peppers are hung over doors to ward off evil spirits and the fastest bean is the runner bean.

To say that this book is just full of dubious jokes and a few facts would be to give it a disservice. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was also full of good, sound advice.  The usual suspects of plants are mentioned but what really stood out was that the advice and information was beyond what you would expect to find in a kids book, therefore managed to step away from the easy trap of being patronizing.

The book is not for the seasoned gardener, although they will learn something (I did). What I think it is, is the sort of book you buy for your sister, friend, or anyone else who has kids, a garden and commits the unforgivable crime of not growing anything. I think it will encourage children to engage with where their food comes from and afford them a healthier diet, which can’t be a bad thing. So, to answer my own question, yes it does work.

Blackdog publishing have also kindly offered all selfsufficientish readers a massive 40% discount on this book -email jess@blackdogonline.com, quoting ‘Self Sufficientish Offer to get yours!

Well, let’s correct some of those faults by cheating. I’m not suggesting that this is always the way to go – but learn the cheats because they’re always handy. Most non-grape wines will benefit from a bit of adjustment.

So, let’s deal with the faults one at a time.

What about that “feel” in the mouth? Where does that come from? Well, it’s that strange thing which wine afficionados call “body”. No-one has yet successfully defined what that is, nor exactly how to achieve it. Some say that it depends upon the amount of fruit used to make the wine. Others insist that it is a result of the alcohol content of the wine. Still others confidently claim that it is a characteristic solely of grape wines. It’s most probably a combination of all of those things and others I haven’t mentioned, but the only important point is that the new wine doesn’t have it. So let’s give it some body.

We can’t go back and add more fruit for body because the wine is already made. But we can take a hint from a wine which probably has more body than any other – Sauternes. For those of you who’ve never tasted it, it’s an extremely sweet wine (usually treated as a dessert wine, although I think that’s wrong) which gives you the feeling that you’re actually drinking a very well-flavoured oil. This stuff crawls around your mouth. The interesting point as far as we’re concerned is that Sauternes is made from grapes which have been infected with a fungus which dries them out almost to raisin standard (that’s Botrytis for you). It’s said that this concentrates the sugars to such a degree that this sweet, viscous wine is the natural result – but if that was the case, then it should be reproducible merely by using more sugar to make a wine. You can try that, but it doesn’t give you a Sauterne. So the Botrytis infection does something else. What WILL give you a Sauterne-like wine is a trick of yeast chemistry called “bending the Krebbs cycle”, but we don’t want to go deeply into that at this point. Suffice it to say that the result of this trick is to force yeast to increase its production of a substance called glycerol – very similar, if not identical, to the glycerine you can buy in the supermarket. In Sauterne at least, it’s the glycerol which provides that heavy body – so will supermarket glycerine give a similar effect? The answer is a resounding yes.

What you need to do, then, is add glycerine a little at a time (say, a teaspoon to start, followed by half-teaspoons) to your gallon of wine, tasting it after every addition, until you begin to recognise a change in the feel of the wine in your mouth (don’t forget to gently stir it in, by the way). Stop at that point – adding glycerine is OK, but it won’t perform miracles. One of the extra benefits is that the glycerine will sweeten the wine slightly. I know some people like their wines dry, but an absolutely dry wine is not very pleasant.

Now you should have a wine which feels right, but doesn’t yet taste right or warm your gullet. We’ll attack warming next, then. The impression of warming is produced by alcohol. It’s as simple as that. So, you could get that effect by adding a slug or two of vodka to your wine. However, that rather defeats the object. You need to con your body into thinking there’s more alcohol there. Now what can you think of which produces a warming effect on the tissues of your mouth and throat? Any curry fans out there? Chilli will do the job very efficiently – chilli essence to be precise. Add that a drop at a time (stirring once again) until you JUST – and only just – begin to recognise a change.

Time for that astringency – a characteristic produced by tannin, which is remarkably low in the fruit tea-bag wine. You could, if you wanted to, go out and buy some grape tannin, or even some oak chips. Adding those to your wine and leaving it alone for a while will certainly increase the tannin levels. But there is another way to do it (and here I can see the wine buffs swooning in complete disgust) which is altogether cheaper and easier. Tea – ordinary tea. In fact a tea bag – but this time a real one. Tea is high in tannin, as you’ll know if you’ve ever let tea brew for too long – it begins to turn your mouth furry. That’s tannin. So make a cup of tea from a tea bag and allow it to carry on brewing for much longer than normal. In fact, let it go cold. Add a quarter cup of that to your wine, following the usual procedure of tasting and adding more if necessary, until you JUST begin to register the effect but not the taste. Now you have viscosity, warming and astringency.

Nearly there. Now, IF NECESSARY, for a bit more flavour. You should be getting into this conning game by now, so if you’ve already thought of adding a cordial, well done. Which cordial to add would depend upon what ingredients were in the fruit tea bags, but blackcurrant works surprisingly well in most cases. But here you have to be very careful. What you DO NOT want is to add so much cordial that its flavour takes over. Once again, it’s a matter of adding a little at a time until you recognise the smallest change in the flavour of the wine. Leave it at that point.

That’s it – you have now improved your wine about as far as it will go, and there will be a world of difference between what you started with and the finished product. There will also be appreciably less wine – welcome to the fun world of winemaking.

There are no guarantees, by the way. Following this method may result, if you overdo any part of it, in a gallon of rubbish. But the whole point is that it’s cheap and the practice is good. You may take to it right away, or it may take you a couple of attempts – but sooner or later you’ll get the hang of the adjustments and you’ll at least have had a lot of fun in the attempts. Don’t get all discouraged if you have a failure – just think about what may have gone wrong and avoid that next time.

Note that not all of the adjustments need be made to all home-made wines. Indeed, once you’re into the full swing of things, you’ll only rarely need to adjust anything.

The really observant amongst you will no doubt already be asking questions – like “Why didn’t we add that tea bag at the outset?” and “Why not get more alcohol to begin with rather than con my taste buds later?” They’re good questions, and deserve good answers – in Part 4.

If you want to see more of the character above Self sufficient Trish then have a browse around the site as she appears on some more pages, if you want her to return then let us know.

Personalised Oils

Buy some cheap olive oil and cut a few twigs of rosemary or a similarly decorative herb.

Put the herbs in the fanciest bottles you can find along with some garlic cloves.

Top up with the oil and print off your own labels with something like ‘Nothing says I love you more than garlic infused with rosemary…..’. This works with all kinds of herbs, basil, chili etc and you can do the same with pickles or jams you may have left over. Even though this is a cheap present it is highly personalised and original, I know I would be flattered to receive this.

Favour Cheque Book

Here is one I prepared earlier. Feel free to print this off and use it, but it is only really meant as an example, use your imagination and come up with some of your own.

Heart Shaped food

Exactly what it says cut the toast in the morning into a heart shape you could also try shaping my veggie burgers into heart shapes. Any food that can be manipulated really.

Plants

On a final note I will add that you don’t have to have a fortune to create a thoughtful gift. Why not get some paint and paint some old plant pots with a seed of your choice growing in it. February is a good time to start off some seedlings, whats more is that your valantine can eat your gift in the coming months. So why not say it with tomatoes?

Unwashed Fleece

The method I use is to only work on a small part of fleece at a time, the advantage being that it’s not so daunting and you can keep the rest of the fleece ‘in the grease’, in your shed!

When you first get your fleece, it needs to be ’skirted’ – this will often be done by the farmer, but if you are the farmer .. then it’s up to you. Lay the fleece out and remove a few inches all the way around, and probably more around the tail end, depending on how mucky the fleece is. Remove any other mucky or stained parts, then wrap up in an old sheet or duvet cover and store somewhere cool and dry, until you are ready to scour.

Start by gently tearing off a piece of fleece about the same size as your washing up bowl. Sit down and go over it, picking out debris and particularly pooey bits of wool, you can put these disgarded pieces on the compost heap.

Now fill up the washing up bowl with water just as hot as you can stand to put your hands into, then shake in about a few tablespoons of the washing soda and a squirt of washing up liquid. Gently immerse the fleece into the water. At this point the water will go pretty murky – thats the lanolin rushing out. NB, if you are allergic to lanolin, you should be wearing gloves, but to be honest, if you have a problem with lanolin, working will wool might not be for you.

To wash wool you need soap and hot water, to felt wool you need soap hot water and agitation.. so the key is not to move it around much at

all. Gently push the fleece with your fingertips, and squeeze it – but very very carefully. You can very gently work on a muddy lock with your fingers, but gently gently. Did I mention being gentle?

Next lift the fleece out of the water (don’t pour the water off the fleece, any grit and dirt you washed off will just collect on the fleece again), rinse your bowl and refill with just hot water, the same temperature as the first time.

Gently immerse the fleece again, then lift out again. If it’s a particularly dirty fleece you might have to repeat the washing and rinsing steps again, but generally I don’t have to.
now you need to dry the fleece – and best to get as much water out now as possible – I tie it up in an old pillowcase, quite closely, and use the spin only cycle of my washing machine. then the fleece is laid on a rack – ours are an old caravan drying rack, and an arrangement made out of an old picnic table and some fridge shelves. We dry ours near a radiator in winter, or outside in summer.

Once it is completely dry, bag it up in ziplock bags or sealable boxes, to keep it away from moths. now it is ready for carding and spinning!

Please note this article is for guidance only and the author nor selfsufficientish can be held responsible for anything silly that you do as a result of this article.

Biography

Andy Hamilton - writer, forager and broadcaster

Andy was born in Northampton where he undertook a collection of “interesting” jobs the highlights including being the mash potato man in a food factory, selling double glazing door to door and the dizzy heights of operative in charge of cardboard box making for the then Burtons warehouse. He briefly moved to Nottingham and restarted his education finally receiving a psychology degree in Bath.

Andy now lives in Bristol where he runs two allotments, forages and lives a low impact lifestyle. He is the co-author of the hughley popular and critically accliamed book The Selfsufficientish Bible, Published by Hodder and Stoughton. He writes a budget gardening column for Kitchen Garden a wild food column for flavour magazine and a outdoor column for the Bristol Magazine. He also works as a freelance features writer and has had articles published for the Guardian, the Ecologist, Home Farmer and Ethical Living.  He has also appeared on BBC Breakfast, BBC inside out, BBC Politics Show, BBC Points West, BBC Inside out, ITV’s west tonight, RTE’s Baz’s Culture Clash and ARTE’s Global Magazine; radio appearances include R4’s the Today program, R4’s Farming Today, various times on Radio Bristol and other local stations.

Andy is part of co-operative that runs a coffee shop/second hand book shop called the Little Co-op in inner city Bristol.

He takes groups of people on wild food walks sharing his knowledge of edible wild foods, plant folk lore and herbal medicine He still finds time to work on this hugely popular website selfsufficientish.com that he co-created and helped launch his career.

Contact Andy

Andy is available for public speaking, freelance features, corporate and personal forages (wild food walks) and on a consultancy basis. To contact him please Email in the first instance – Andy at selfsufficientish dot com.

If I said to a fairly representative group “Take some fruit juice, squeeze some lemon juice into it, empty a bag of sugar into it, top up to about a gallon with water from the tap and then stir or shake until everything’s dissolved” then I’d witness no signs of panic, no biting of nails or gnashing of teeth. If I added “Now stick some yeast into it” I’d bet that half of my audience would start to back off. If I then complicated matters further by asking for isolation under an airlock, or further additions of grape tannin and various salts of nitrogen and potassium, an enzyme or two and a vitamin complex … well, how many of that audience would be left? Not many.

Which is a shame, of course. Lots of people want to make their own wine, but lots of people give up the idea before they even start. They read a little about the process and become overwhelmed by tales of tradition, absolute hygiene, things which can go wrong, exploding bottles, complex recipes – the list goes on. There’s only one way to deal with this – the myths, rather than the bottles, have to be exploded. Fortunately, that’s not too difficult a thing to do.

So, to begin, here’s what you actually NEED to make wine: flavoured and sweetened water, and yeast. That’s it for the ingredients. Now, something to put it in. Virtually anything will do as long as it’s clean and coverable. That’s the lot. Now you can make wine.

I could stop right there – really I could! That was six sentences which actually tell you everything you will ever need to know about winemaking. That’s how simple it is. Everything else, then, is decoration – nice to know about, but nowhere near as important as what you’ve read above. Bear that in mind. You can always walk the five miles from A to B. A bicycle makes it easier and quicker, but you don’t need one – you’d still get there – and a bicycle necessitates a pump and a helmet. A car makes it easier still, but now you have all the ancillary complications of fuel, licences, parking fees … you get the point, I’m sure.

Hidden in there is the real winemaking secret. YOU don’t make wine. YEAST makes wine. YOU must become a yeast warden. YOU must provide an environment which is yeast-friendly. The YEAST then performs all of the incredibly complex chemistry which turns your flavoured and sweetened water into wine. Now, how difficult can it be to produce a nice environment for what is, after all, a very simple fungus – and one which, as it turns out, is very difficult to kill? Yeast can be dried or frozen, or both, and still survive. It can be starved – that’ll slow it down but it won’t kill it. To kill yeast off, you have to take its environment to extremes of heat or chemical hostility which would be virtually impossible to achieve without artificial aids. It’s very, very difficult to prevent yeast from doing what yeast does.

Alright, then – what does yeast do? Once again, it’s simple. A yeast cell has very few aims in life – actually, only one. It reproduces. To do that it must nourish itself, and it does that by breaking down sugars. After extracting the tiny amount of energy needed by a single cell, it excretes the waste products – carbon dioxide and alcohol – in roughly equal amounts by weight. There’s the magic word: alcohol is the thing that you, as the yeast warden, have been working towards all of the time.

So there you go. Simply by not artificially producing conditions which yeast doesn’t like, you’re going to harvest alcohol. Much easier than growing a lettuce, believe me. It may not have escaped your notice that, apart from flavour, all of the conditions for winemaking can apparently be met by adding yeast to a straightforward solution of sugar; that is to say that wine really can be made from water. It isn’t quite as simple as that, but it’s basically true – an alcoholic drink can easily be made with no fruit additions at all, just using water straight from the tap. Now I ask you – how much easier would you want it to be?

But …

THEM THERE THINGS THAT GET IN THE WAY

It’s always the case, isn’t it? A very simple process becomes inordinately complicated by “experts”, so much so that it takes on a mystique, a murky surround of arcane knowledge, which only said “experts” can penetrate. Without those experts to interpret the secret initiations, winemaking becomes fraught with pitfalls, a scary thing to undertake. And, whichever way you look, the experts are there to intercept you and inform you of the error of your ways. The problem here, of course, is that there are several groups of winemaking experts, and not one of those groups agrees with any other group. Let’s have a quick look at the schools of thought …

THE TRADITIONALISTS

These are the people who will tell you that only the old, old recipes are any good (usually the ones which use no added yeast). Our ancestors, they tell you, spent centuries making their wine their way, and who are we to gainsay them? There’s a problem here, though. Cider, mead and ale have, indeed, been made in Britain for centuries – but we’re talking about wine. To make wine from the fruits available to the average Brit, added sugar is a necessity. But, until 1874 when Sugar Tax was abolished, sugar was simply beyond the financial reach of the great majority of people in the country. Between the 14th and mid-19th centuries, the average price of sugar ranged between the equivalents of £80 (earliest) and £10 (latest) per kilo. At that rate, it’s much cheaper to import your wine from France – which is precisely what any wine drinker then did – rather than risk a precious commodity. The modern winemaking movement began in about 1970 or so. Now, take away a few war years when sugar was mostly unavailable, and you’re left with around 86 years in which to develop this “old country” tradition.

The tradition is, I’m afraid, a complete fairy story. It never existed. Our late 19th and early 20th century forebears certainly did what they could, but most of the time they were guessing. It shows – a lot of their recipes fail and others produce terribly out-of-balance wines which have to be heavily disguised by overwhelming any faults with massive amounts of sugar. Take my advice. Read the old recipes and smile, as you would when reading the recipes from the kitchens of Henry VIII – but for goodness sake don’t even think about using them (at least, not without heavy modification).

THE PURISTS

These are the people who insist that the only true wine is one made from grapes (wrongly – there are two definitions of wine in the OED). This doesn’t mean that they disdain the making of wine from other fruits – merely that any such wine should taste as if it had been made from grapes. And it is certainly possible to achieve that. However, their recipes are amazingly complex and demanding (and usually involve the addition of at least some grape juice) – demanding enough, anyway, to frighten any beginner off to a safe distance. Take my advice again – stay well away from such recipes until you are totally comfortable with the basic stuff.

THE CHEMISTS

This set of Einsteins (OK – he was a physicist) will insist that wine cannot be made without the most scrupulous standards of hygiene and the ever-present aid of a battery of chemicals with frightening names. Well, there’s hygiene, and then there’s cleanliness, if you see what I mean. Imagine that, just before beginning your first-ever apple wine, you had to don an NBC suit-style outfit (having first washed your hands) and then undergo a thorough drenching with a bactericidal solution sprayed into every crevice of that suit. Ridiculous? Hmmm. But that’s what you’re expected to do with your ingredients and equipment. There’s certainly a degree of cleanliness which is only common sense – but there’s also a line around obsession which can easily be crossed.

The use of winemaking chemicals is a subject which creates strong discussion. There are those who wouldn’t be seen dead without their chemicals, and there are those who wouldn’t be seen dead with them. Both sets of people, though, make wine. That should be enough to tell you that you needn’t worry too much about those chemicals. We’ll deal with them at a later point but, for now, bear in mind that most of the chemicals have been commonly available for only a few decades at most – yet people made wine before then.

THE MODERNISTS

These are the culmination of all of the winemaking research which has gone on since the 1970s, and a few of them actually understand the results of all that research. Not many, though. They’re the ones who will tell you that you absolutely must degas (that’s de-gas rather than a French painter) a wine, forgetting that any wine will quite happily degas itself given enough time. They’ll also insist that fermentation temperature should be tightly controlled, forgetting that most people have a choice between the airing cupboard and the garden shed. Look around the internet – you’ll find them easily enough.

Admittedly, these sketches are mere caricatures. But I remember being a beginner and being flummoxed by contradictory advice, wildly varying recipes and over-technical methods. What it all boils down to is this …

Do you want to make your own wine? If the answer is yes, then I’m telling you that you can do so very simply and cheaply, and you can learn how to do it in a progressive and enjoyable manner, taking on more complex procedures if and when you feel the need to do so. But, to put it at its simplest, you can make wine in a bucket with hedgerow ingredients and a bag of sugar. At this moment, the cheapest sugar I can find costs 66p per kilo, and that’s enough to make a gallon of wine – or six bottles. Add in the cost of your yeast and maybe boiling a kettle and what have you got? A pleasant drink at less than 15p per bottle. This cannot be bad.

Watch out for Part 2, in which we’ll take a closer look at making a constructive mess in a bucket.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Selfsufficientish Christmas ideas. This year I have given Christmas my own twist and called it Ishmas.  Ishmas is sustainable and thoughtful and it is more about the person than the gift, many of the ishers celebrate Ishamas (of course).

Free Wrapping paper.

For the last few years I have not paid for wrapping paper, I have not just stolen paper either. Instead I use old magazines and Sunday supliments. This means the paper can be very individual for instance if one of your friends or relatives is celebrity obssesed you can cut out pictures of Paris Hilton, Russel Brand and Gary Coleman or if you are giving a gift to a comp uter obssesed person then you can use pictures of Apple macs or whatever, just different strokes for different folks.

You might also consider making your own paper, turn to page 376 of your selfsufficientish bible. You might also benefit from using this very easy to follow video I found on Youtube.

To make my paper I tried something a bit different and used some bracket fungus. This took a lot of blending to get right, but the basic paper making principle was the same.

Free Christmas Decoratations

This year we have not bothered to buy decorations and instead we have hung up ivy, holly and mistletoe that we have harvested from the local area.The Ivy acts as the “string” and I collected stuff the grew along the ground. I then got some green gardening string and attached some holly and some more ivy to it. I am due to go out and look for some mistletoe to add to it.

This is similar to what would have happened in ancient times here in England. A house decorated with evergreens is “prepared to to welcome the nature spirits who may be seeking safe shelter from the cold and dark outside”. Ivy is considered to protect as is mistletoe.

I think it looks so much better than conventional decorations and they can even be made into compost to help grow your holly and ivy for next year!

Free Presents

I don’t plan on spending any cash on presents this year. I am instead spending my time making them for people. Many are getting home brew and I have been making labels for each one of them.  For example, on the wine I am giving my mother it will say “Mothers Ruin” and I am printing out a picture of her holding up a wine glass.

I am also giving a collection of herbs to another friend who is into natural remedies. This will include a hop pillow made from an old shirt filled with hops and a couple of sprigs of lavender then sown up. A jar of haw jelly and a jar full of dried chamomile flower heads.

You might also consider potting up some plants that you have in your garden. Look around to what is in flower. I am giving bulbs of garlic to give to some of my friends. It does grow indoors, just don’t water it too much.

Alternatives To Presents

You might also consider giving favours to friends for Ishmas. Make a card or even scribble on the back of bit of paper that you will offer your time as a present. I am sure that you have friends that would really appreciate an evenings baby sitting, a weekend of dog walking, a meal cooked for them, the washing up done for a week or a whole host of other favours. Perhaps even a weekend talking about Gary Coleman. I know I would love someone to offer to do the washing up for a week more than any other present!

In conclusion

Christmas or Ishmas should not really be about what you get for people but it should be about how much thought you give them. Even a phone call is a better present than one Christmas card each year with a “newsletter” that is sent to 100 people saying how great things are. There is a good reason why you become friends with people it is because you like spending time with them. It might sound morbid (well it is), but I am sure there are people out there who you would go to the funeral of buy won’t see them on their birthday or at Christmas, so get in touch. Oh and Happy Ishmas EVERYONE!