Reading Beer festival food & frivolities

Reading Beer Festival

Every year we venture down to Reading’s Beer Festival, looking forward to sampling a little of everything we can manage to fit into our stomachs (especially the pies!). Well it used to be the hog roast, but it was a little disappointing last year, so now it’s the wild boar and mushroom pies! Yummy!

In the previous years I have tried some very tasty beers, ales and mead’s, though I am not really a cider fan. Probably since those dreaded teenage years of getting ridiculously drunk on white lighting & TNT and now the smell of any cider makes me want to hurl.

2 new dwarf trees: Peach & Apricot

New additions! Left: Peach - Right: Apricot

Well we went out for a ‘quick look’ at one of the local garden centres on Saturday, which turned out not to be quick at all! Though we (ok i) came back with two dwarf fruit trees, a Peach and an Apricot!

I got permission from high command to approve the use of a little garden space for these two new additions to our edible family. Well I think we nearly have every possible fruit tree available and only in a small urban garden, it’s a good job they are of the dwarf variety lol…

Finally, potatoes planted out

Chitting what? ooops we forgot.

Most of the potatoes have now been planted out, we were a little behind schedule (to say the least). They should have gone out a couple of weeks ago and were starting to get a little leggy and grown through the netting. Ooops!

Yes our chitting regime has been left a little by the wayside, instead of well sprouted tubers we opened the box to find them their long triffid ‘tendrils’ trying to escape through the gaps. Most of the years prior we have been pretty good at saving our egg cartons and getting the potatoes chitted, but this year we were so busy we fogot time and time again.

Interesting..Making wild nettles beer!

Making Wild Nettles Beer

Oooh, this sounds interesting! making beer from wild stinging nettles. You could end up being stung all over if you are not careful haha! I think i would need plenty of vinegar to hand and doc leaves.

I am quite curious to what it might taste like, we could either wait for them to force their way into our garden from under the fence or alternatively go on the hunt.

Keeping our mushrooms fresh

Covering your mushrooms with kitchen towel

Take mushrooms for example, refrigeration is the best way right? Well yes, but leaving the plastic film over them causes them to go off quicker and become slimy due to the build-up of moisture. Piercing several holes in the plastic will increase their life by a couple of days, but no more than the general 4-5 days life span. However, there is in addition to refrigeration a very simple trick to extend the life of your mushrooms well beyond the ‘best before’ date. Now this might be common knowledge, but we had never heard of it before…

Fun moving soil to the back garden

Shifting a tonne of soil

This looks like it’s going to be hard work, its a lot of soil to shift from the roadside to our back garden lol. We knew when we ordered a tonne of soil that we would have to move it to the back garden ‘manually’ ourselves with a couple of spades and a wheelbarrow, as we have no access for deliveries. Damn!!

All these great ideas, always seem to result in a little missing forethought on just how we are going to move the materials from point A to B. The rest of the construction/ideas have been planned and thought through, just not the deliveries…

Brewing our own light beer

DIY Beer Brewing!

I have been keen to learn how to make my own beer and for Christmas my sister bought me a wheat beer microbreweries kit. I know it’s a kit with the premade syrup already provided, so the process is much easier than preparing the hops. But I figure, you have to start somewhere just with learning the basic principles how to “home brew” and this kit just gets the ball rolling.

My efforts most likely will not be as tasty as the beer you buy from the shops, but hopefully this will get better with practice, plus the amount of beer you get for the money you spend, is so much better ROI for only a little effort.

Saving money: Energy bills Part 2

Part 2 Energy Efficiency

At first glance around our house we knew there were plenty of improvements that could be made to maximise our energy efficiency, despite not having a great deal of knowledge on the what and how.

The key consideration was how do you achieve these home improvements on a limited budget without borrowing any money on these government green schemes? Well first step was to work out where we stood.

Slashed our water bill by 57.3%

Our Water bill

A year ago we were looking at ways to reduce our water bill and after rummaging around the web we found a few online calculators to gauge our annual estimated usage. Of course for these to work and have any level of accuracy we had to answer as honestly as one can, in some cases slightly over estimating the amount we generally consume. It’s better to overestimate to receive a nice surprise of a slightly lower bill, than to underestimate and receive a much larger bill at the end of the year.

So the first step was to work out if a meter was the best way forward to cutting back on our bill by calculating our average usage…