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It's been brewing fo r a week, but when I tasted it today there was a *very* bitter hoppy aftertaste (and I speak as very much a real ale fan), so I've added more malt extract and water to try and dilute this a bit - it's now bubbling away all over again. It might be my hops rather than the recipe -...

No personal experience, but I found this on the net ... Hops have a 75% moisture content, so 4 oz of fresh hops will give you 1 oz dried. That's the theoretical line. The same article also quotes a real figure of 4 oz fresh hops resulting in 0.75 oz dried. Looks like 8 to 10 oz of fresh hops might ...

Hi, I'm planning to make the Ish 'simple beer with real hops' from the main site. I've made some wines before but this will be my first beer. Can anyone tell me what 2oz of dried hops is like in volume? I need to pick and dry the right amount from our garden hop plant, and presumably the fresh weigh...

And it's "strigging" young man. De-stalking indeed! :mrgreen: Mike Duly noted! I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully 5 gallons will mean enough bottles will survive temptation to really mature properly. I was stunned by how many elder trees there are in our area of Kent - I gathered...

Yesterday I started off 5 gallons of elderberry - my first non-kit wine (and only my 3rd ever brew!).

De-stalking 15lbs of elderberries took me most of the day!

A few of us tried last year with 'Ustie' - there's a thread buried in the archives: http://www.selfsufficientish.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9518 Unfortunately no-one except me came back with any stories of how well or otherwise it went! I found it a bit disappointing - got a crop of beans bu...

SusieGee wrote:Just an aside JustinFun, have you noticed the scarey similarity between your avatar and Tom Good!!

I'll take that as a good sign!

Once you've grown the onion from seed I don't know how you would stop the small onions from growing to make them into sets.

Why would you want to though? You can leave them where they are and they'll happily grow into onions on their own.

Probably either my Azada (allotment would still be mostly brambles and couch without it) or my Opinel No.10 knife, which has so many different uses (admittedly all involving cutting things).

Just broke the handle on my favourite fork though.

At the risk of making everyone hate me...

...our allotment is at the end of our garden, the other side of a public foot path. We can even run a long hosepipe from our house to our allotment beds!

Yes, I know I'm very very lucky.

We're digging over a long neglected allotment at the moment and last night we had a very satisfying bonfire composed largely of a mountain of bindweed root. Very smokey, but grimly pleasurable nonetheless.

Bindweed must die! (as must couch grass)

I imagine it would work, but you'd either need a 100% germination rate, or sow several seeds in each pot (in which case you'd still have some pricking out and potting on to do).

Depends on what you're growing and whether you have the space for 100s of pots instead of a few seed trays really.

I didn't cut ours down - just left it in place over winter. It wilted slightly in the heaviest frosts but bounced back quite happily when the weather improved. Perhaps it's better not to cut back?

Well we got a crop, but they weren't hugely productive (about 10 or so small pods per plant). Might have been to do with the godawful summer we had last year though.

There's a new 'UK-friendly' strain available this year (last year we grew Ustie) so we're going to give it one more try.

Well our january caterpillar has come out of its chrysalis (our 4 year old has been keeping it in a large jar and dutifully feeding it more perpetual spinach leaves). It's some sort of moth - beautiful, it looks like a spiky dried leaf. We took some photos - will post them soon.