Gooseberry Wine, We Grow Carrots

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Our competition "Summer Season - 2"

Difficult conditions of the competition were set this time. And not because there are no rare plants in my area and there are no big harvests, but because the weather was very extreme last season. And compared to the 2002 season, the harvest was much lower.

But three results in the past season, I think, deserve attention. Maybe not all gardeners, but beginners - for sure.

Black Negus

Of all the

berries (wild strawberries, strawberries, black, red currants, five varieties of gooseberries, red, yellow, black raspberries) both in the "Krasnodar" summer of 2002, and in the past, extreme, stable and very large harvest gave gooseberries "Black Negus" … And although you rarely find it on sale, but in every gardening, someone has it. The names can be different (in our region it is often called "northern grapes" because of the hanging branches, completely covered with berries). A distinctive feature is a high, 1.5-2 m, spreading bush, rapidly growing (it begins to bear abundant fruiting already in the 3rd year).

When ripe, the berries are black, they do not crumble until winter, they have a pleasant sweet and sour taste). You can eat quite a lot of berries straight from the bush, getting a sore mouth. Excellent material for winemaking (although some sources do not recommend using "Black Negus" for wine). Having two eight-year and one five-year-old bush, in 2002 he received 50 liters of wine. In the past - 30 liters, and not all the berries were processed.

Some may wonder why I measure the gooseberry crop in liters of wine. The fact is that when there is a "harvest", then we collect the gooseberries in any free container (buckets, baskets, jars), and there is no time to weigh and write down (at the same time we salt cucumbers, pickle tomatoes, fry zucchini, collect and process mushrooms etc.)

But in the processing of gooseberries with such an intensive work of the "apartment mini - cannery" modern technologies have to be used (at the sight of the hostess cutting off the tails of berries from a whole bucket of gooseberries with scissors, I want to bow low to her for her zeal and cry from Russian primitivism). We turn on the auger nozzle to the meat grinder (they are sold both for electric and ordinary ones and are inexpensive) and fall asleep in handfuls of berries, throwing out only the sick and too many twigs and leaves. Through the mesh, pure (without seeds and peels) juice with pulp goes into one container, and everything else (cake) goes into the other.

Add water to the cake - as much as the juice turns out (if the cake is very compressed, then knead it with your hands). Cover (otherwise small midges will appear) and stir occasionally. After three days - squeeze out. Liquid - in a bottle, and then according to the usual technology of making wine at home, and cake - to the country. At the dacha, we knead again, fill it with water. Stand a little in the sun (until signs of fermentation appear) and pour it onto the compost heap - well, it turns out a very good substrate for the development of microflora.

But we process juice with pulp in two ways

Cold method. In the volume of juice with pulp, dissolve the volume of sugar and pour into clean tanks. Banks must be stored in a cool place (refrigerator, cellar, in winter - balcony, loggia). Dilute with water to taste before use.

Hot method. Dissolve 0.5 volume of sugar in a volume of juice with pulp. Add perfume (orange cut into quarters). Boil for 20 minutes. We take out the odorant. We pour it into cans. Amazing jelly (confiture) turns out.

I tried to make champagne from "Black Negus" - it also turns out, and it is slightly pink in color. The only difficulty was in opening the bottles. used plastic containers of 1.5 liters under the container.

Carrots - separately, flies - separately

For several years now I have been getting a consistently good harvest of carrots. Previously, up to a third of it was eaten by a carrot fly (and the weather had a strong influence). Neither early, nor late, nor joint planting with parsley, nor the tension of "kerosene threads" over the plantings - did not give noticeable results. Now 100% successful.

Agrotechnics are usual: deep digging of the soil, early planting with germinated and dried seeds, watering, loosening, top dressing, ruthless timely thinning. What's the secret? The secret is in the continuous maintenance of the bed with carrots under a light covering material (lutrasil, spunbond, etc., 17 g / m2 - I tried a thicker one - worse) from sowing to complete harvesting of the entire garden. But despite the seeming simplicity of the secret, there are several nuances, without which there is no success.

The first nuance is the most important. There should always be a free distance of at least 1 cm between the covering material and the tops (if the tops touches, then in a cold and rainy summer it will rot, and in a hot summer it will burn).

The second nuance - do not water without removing the covering material, as advised in advertising - there is a lot of dirt - there is little sense.

The third nuance - for easy and pleasant work with a bed of carrots covered with covering material, you need:

1. To trim the beds around the perimeter with a board (it would be nice, but not necessary).

2. After 50-60 cm I put wire arcs (the wire is better galvanized and painted, but any is possible - only the service life of the covering material depends on it). At first I bury the ends of the arcs very strongly into the ground, then, as the tops grow, I take them out, observing nuance No. 1.

3. The covering material is attached to the arcs with clothespins (on odd arcs) at the bottom where the wire touches the board. In a strong wind (for insurance), you can put board trimmings (bricks, stones) from the ends of the beds.

4. When removing the covering material, for example, for watering - it is possible on one side, clothespins are released. In order not to look for them later, you need to hang a ring of rope around your neck and string loose clothespins on it, and then, when we close the garden, the clothespins are in place, and both hands are free (it seems like a trifle, but saves a lot of energy and nerves) …

And a few words about varieties and exchange of experience.

At the seed kiosk, two gardeners are talking about carrot varieties. One praises the Natalie variety, the other the Bishop variety. I apologize for interfering and ask where are their sites? It turns out that one near Luga, and another near Vyborg. I am interested further: what is their soil? One says - almost one sand, the other adds - almost one clay. I once again apologize and leave, and they remain to argue about their favorite varieties of carrots, wondering to themselves at a strange man who does not understand anything about carrots, but for some reason asked where their plots were and what kind of soil was there.

Fragrant vegetable garden

My wife is the chief technologist of the apartment mini - cannery. In blanks, where I used to use dry stalks and umbrellas of dill, now I began to use seeds. They are easier to dry, they take up less space both in the kitchen and in the workpieces themselves; and the aroma and taste of the marinade are stronger. And what a unique taste aroma is given by a pinch of dill seeds placed in "boyar cabbage soup" - thick cabbage soup with pork! Naturally, the question arose about obtaining dill seeds in a fairly large amount (without increasing the sown area). And again covering material came to the rescue (lutrasil, spunbond, etc.).

In the 20th of April, in a bed that had just been freed from the snow, in the middle, in a groove 3 cm wide, I sowed dill seeds (more often than usual). I put the arcs and covered it with lutrasil inside.

A little over a month later, in May, in the middle, between the row of dill and the wall of the garden, I planted cucumber seedlings grown in a greenhouse and covered them with a covering material already outside the arches. At this time, he was already pulling out (thinning out) the excess dill to the table.

He watered and fed only cucumbers, but dill also got it. In hot July, I removed the covering material, but the cucumbers covered the entire garden with their foliage and created a special microclimate for both their roots and the roots of dill. Dill seeds turned out to be large, fragrant and a lot (from a strip of 4 m - about a liter of seeds).

And maybe for the first time on my site in the fall there was a unique smell of an autumn grandmother's garden from a distant childhood - the smell of withering tops of potatoes, phlox and dill.