Sloe vodka

In my post last weekend I mentioned starting my sloe gin to the recipe that takes 2 1/2 years. Then I realised I should have used vodka!

I've put sugar in the jar and have been stirring that.

The weather has improved over the week, so today after a damp start it dried up nicely with some sunshine. I went to a park near Kingsbury in North East London. It was obviously once a farm with some hedges still surviving, only 15 minute walk from the tube station. There were plenty of sloes there and I quickly filled my tub.

The shoes were all large - much better than the ones on Leyton Marshes. Does this show the extra rain that West London gets.

I'll be pricking the sloes tonight, putting in a jar and then filling the jar with vodka.

Green and country in the city 17 September

It's been 3 weeks since my last post as I haven't done much with a green and country theme.

• I have been sewing some new material on to the thermal lining for my door curtain. I won't put it up yet. I have someone painting the outside of the house and he will need to get a ladder through, so thought best to wait till he has finished. And then I need a wood delivery and the boiler maintenance. (My hall is very cluttered, even without the bicycle!)
• 2nd September there were primroses out in my garden.
• Unexpected evening home Monday 4 September so I cut down tree parsley. It was 7 feet tall and 3 ft wide so taking up a lot of room, and I preferred the swiss chard leaves so only using the tree parsley leaves out of a sense of duty.
• A colleague had frost on the cars near where she lived in Essex on Friday morning (15 September. My beans are over, courgettes almost over and tomatoes getting blight, so not as worried as I would be some years. (Last year the tomatoes were very late so a frost about now would have meant losing half the crop.)
• Pulled my carrots yesterday - all 8 of them!
• Picked sloes yesterday. None by the path by the old Essex filter beds so only had those on the thicket on the east side of Leyton marches. Only those sloes on the south east corner had berries. The ones in easy reach by the path were very small (surprising considering the amount of rain we have had) but the ones to the south were bigger though I had to put my hand  into the thicket to reach them. Luckily only mildly scratched! They were damp so I spread them on kitchen towel in flan dishes and kept turning them. Today I pricked them all and put them in a kilner-style jar and poured vodka on them. I have to leave this for 6 months, decant and then wait for 2 years. I made some last year but it will be another 18 months before I know whether this method is worth the wait!
• Yesterday I went to two houses open as part of the Walthamstow Green Homes. 
• Yesterday I also went to the Repair Café in Leytonstone about a vintage office chair I have whose seat I have broken by standing on it. I didn't take the chair as it is heavy and not on casters. I am to email a picture of it to Nostalji Home Design so she can she whether she can do anything. However I have tried downloading the pictures from my phone, the first time on my new computer and it doesn't work - I press to download on to the PC on my camera but nothing pops up on the computer screen! Probably a simple solution to those in the know but I am an analogue girl in a digital world (words of a country music song).