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).

Green and country in the city 20 August

• Asked a guy putting up a screen around lift that is going to be worked on if I could have the two little bits of wood he had just sawn off for my wood burning stove. I was overheard by his foreman/boss who has said he will bring in the wood they have - sawn up as well. I have said I had to get this home on the tube so hope ne doesn't bring in too much at once. Especially as I haven't got room under for storage as I have lost property from a recent big event under my desk (and a load more to come).
• Got a yard of thickish pine from skip on way to girls club, a 5ft length of skirting propped up against a wall down the road, and several bits out of a skip on my way home from the shops yesterday. And I've got them all sawn up!
• Day off this week, weather better tan forecast so did Parkland Walk from Highgate to Finsbury Park. Got a small totem mug from the RSPCA shop in Highgate which makes my 10th Totem item.
• Luckily I resisted temptation to get hare cushion from a catalogue for my bed, even though golden yellow background, as I already had one and two would mean it would be in danger of becoming a collection. In a week I've seen 2 other hare cushions, so good thing I nipped it in the bud!
• Posted an order to Sarah Raven - tulips (scented and they naturalise), Iceland poppies, anemones a self seeding camassia and a daisy (9-months flowering and it self-seeds). As just over £40 I will get some free tulip bulbs I won't have room for, so will have to find them a good home.
• Rain Thursday night. Friday morning out picking autumn raspberries for breakfast and catching snails late home to bed and found a frog sitting on the huge pile of stuff too tough for the compost heap behind the shed.

Green and country in the city 6 August

• Picked surviving plums - 6. But that's 6 more than I've had before!
• Two catalogues, both autumn ones but with large Christmas sections. (What's that to do with Green and country in the city? Well, it's a seasonal marker!)
• When we arrive at the canoe club on a Sunday this summer there is usually two swans with 6 cygnets. We have been watching them grow. They are now nearly as big as their parents. Today there were only 5 cygnets. Sad the brood survived when they were small and vulnerable and lost one when nearly full grown.
• Saw a comma in the garden - first for some weeks. Also a gate-keeper, a red admiral and a cabbage white. Also a moth but it was on a leaf by the fence so I could only see its underside.

Green and country in the city 30 July

• Got my first runner bean on Monday and a big handful today
• Also first tomato today - and others ripening. 
• Dug up one potato plant that had squeezed in from Dorothy's - must originally be from a plant at least 5 years old as Dorothy hadn't gardened for that long.
• I have moved a lot of pots over a week ago to make room for when Peter comes to paint the outside woodwork, etc, and today there was the frog that doesn't jump away in the wild strawberry pot again!

Green & Country in the City 23 July

• Last Saturday I got an enamel daisy necklace for £5 at a local charity shop. On Monday I wore it with a long, green, sleeveless, button-through dress and a yellow long-sleeved t-shirt. I got 5 compliments on the whole outfit and 3 more just for the necklace. Two of the compliments for the whole outfit were from colleagues in their early 20s, which I think good-going for someone my age!
• The wind with the thunderstorm on Tuesday night had one of the plum trees in pots over and it lost a few more plums. 
• Today able to kayak, go to the café, take a detour to pick blackberries and cut back stuff in the garden before a thunderstorm and then a hail storm. Compensation for the 30 minute walk to Tescos and the same back again in the rain yesterday afternoon!
• Getting a large handful of plump autumn raspberries each morning.

Green and country in the city 16 July

• Sunday evening found two tiny frogs in garden - and have seen several around the garden since, as well as the full-grown frogs.
• It rained hard Tuesday evening which was welcome on the garden. The rain on me walking back from Stowtellers (story-telling club) not so welcome as my pac-a-mac turns out not to be waterproof.
• Less insects in the garden around at the beginning of the week though they have picked up again now.
• Picked some large juicy blackberries yesterday and made a crumble.
• Klaus, a German friend, was saying it was drummed into him as a child to keep away from an unafraid fox, as that lack of fear a symptom of rabies. So he is really spooked by all the tame foxes in London!