Home Made Sloe Gin Recipe

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 7:07 pm by Nigel
Sloe Gin Recipe

Sloe Gin Recipe

Sloe gin one year on! Our sloe gin recipe is continuing to prove popular with visitors to our Waterloo Farm blog, so I was keen to give an update one year on.

However, I must confess one year on it still tastes pretty disgusting to me. Now, this could be for anyone of the following reasons:

  1. I don’t actually like gin
  2. I don’t know what it is supposed to taste like having never drunk any before
  3. It is very bitter – perhaps more sugar?
  4. It tastes too much of sloes – perhaps we used to many?

I think I shall amend our sloe gin recipe to use more sugar and less sloes. Oh, I also think it might be a good idea to taste someone else’s sloe gin and see if it is meant to taste like this.

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Planting Our First Crop of Potatoes

Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 10:33 pm by Nigel

planting_chitted_potatoesFinally today we were planted our first crop of vegetables in our rabbit proof vegetable patch! How exciting is that!! :) Already looking forward to eating the results!

We have got a number of varieties to plant including Maris Piper and King Edwards. We are also going to plant the non-raised beds with pots to help break up the soil and help keep the weeds down. I think we counted 86 seed potatoes in total…so I think we shall be setting up a road-side stall with ‘Waterloo Farm Potatoes’ later in the year! ;)

British Sugar Supplies Raised Beds Top Soil

Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 7:22 pm by Nigel
British Sugar Top Soil

British Sugar Top Soil

Having made the raised beds we now needed to fill them up, easy you might think! However, using a number of online topsoil calculators we discovered that to fill all 10 of our raised beds we would need over 20 tons … eeekk!

After looking around at local Norfolk topsoil suppliers we realised that a delivered ‘per ton’ price was coming out at over £70, so doing the maths this was going to cost over £1,400!!! However, a useful friend recommended that we contact British Sugar. British Sugar you might ask?! Well, every year they have a surplus of top grade arable land topsoil produced as a by-product of the sugar beet production process.

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Making the Raised Beds

Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 9:04 pm by Nigel

Large Raised Bed (pre-dropping)

Large Raised Bed (pre-dropping)

Having marked out the vegetable patch and sussed out that it would all fit (we even re-configured the layout to get a few more beds in) we have started to make our raised beds. Fortunately we have an ‘old-fashioned’ wood yard up the road where we sourced our pressure-treated wood.

We ordered 12 ft x 6in (3.6m x 15cm)  lengths, which meant that when we cut those into thirds we could use the lenghts for the end panels. For 2010 we are only planning to make 2 large and the 2 small (wedge shaped) raised beds. So the large beds will be 3.6m long, by 1.2m wide by 30cm high and there will eventually be 8 in total!

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Laying Out the Vegetable Patch

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 11:05 am by Tammy

So, the rabbit-proof fencing has been finished and we have been making progress on the vegetable patch, hoping to plant our first crops in time for this year! I have spent more hours than I care to confess to in designing the layout of the veg patch, drawing scale plans of the raised beds and making a detailed crop rotation plan for the patch once it is fully established (more on that another time!). I guess all that makes me a little bit ’sad’ but I have really enjoyed it, and as the saying goes, it’s all in the preparation! Read the rest of this entry »