Archive for the ‘Living the Country Life’ Category

Home Made Sloe Gin Recipe

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
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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British Sugar Supplies Raised Beds Top Soil

Sunday, April 18th, 2010
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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Laying Out the Vegetable Patch

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

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! (more…)

Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus Rotundifolia) Planting

Friday, March 26th, 2010
New Parking Bays (Dec 08)

New Parking Bays (Dec 08)

Following the driveway work we had done in December 2008, forming two new parking bays, we finally found an afternoon to plant the shrubs that we planned to use to cover up our neighbours garage. We were not sure what to use to start with, but in the end decided to continue the existing Laurel. Also Tammy spotted an advert in Cheapcycle for ‘dig-your-own’ Laurels in Wreningham.

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How the View has Changed in a Year!!

Thursday, March 18th, 2010
We’re approaching the first anniversary of our moving into Waterloo Farm and I was just browsing through some of the old photos. We’ve done a massive amount of work to the place since we moved in, but I particularly liked the change in the garden, as seen in the photos below. As they say, what a difference a year makes! You can just about make out the 25+ trees we planted last years if you look closely!! Still nowhere near finished, at least it looks slightly more like a garden now and not just a field!! The third photo shows the garden in September 2008 when we still had a dividing fence and a paddock (and everything was greener obviously!).
Garden March 2009

Garden March 2009

Garden March 2010

Garden March 2010

Garden September 2008

Garden September 2008