(With our apologies to Laurie Lee) Owen recalls home cider making with his father Elijah.
Hello Ole Partners,
I hope you are all keeping well in these strange times. This month my gardening tips mostly relate to compost.
If you can, get some horse manure. Stack it in a heap and water the layers well as you stack. After 3 weeks turn the outside to the middle to help it rot down and water it well again. Adding poultry manure to it will help decomposition. Come next March you will have a delightful compost for roses, shrubs, fruit trees and bushes and veg patches. Raspberries, in particular, thrive on it.
DO NOT use this mix on land intended for growing parsnips or carrots because they don’t like to be heavily manured. If you do you will get twisted and stunted veg you will not be able to use.
Look out now for spring cabbage plants. Plant them quite thickly and use alternate cabbages before they are matured for tasty young leaves and leave the others to mature for the spring. Protect the plants with nets and watch out if we have heavy snow to ensure the nets are not pressed down on to the plants - or the pigeons will have a free feast.
I still enjoy a tot of whisky and I reckon since many of us are confined to barracks due to this here Covid a lot of you may be enjoying a drink at home too. That set me to thinking that this month I would tell you all about my Bunwell home cider making days.
Cider making starts in early October and it’s something my father Elijah did annually for many years. He was paid to make cider by his brother George James, who ran the Queen’s Head pub in Bunwell. Father made hundreds of gallons and stored the cider in empty port casks – 120 gallons in each one. Apples – a mix of eating and cooking for sweetness and acidity – were crushed in a special hand cranked machine before being placed in a cider press. When I was strong enough, aged about 14, it was my job to crush the apples – it was hard physical work. Our cider press was a huge standing machine with a big screw on the top that was turned to squeeze the juice out of the crushed apples. After a week or two demerara sugar was added to the casks and it was left alone for the natural yeasts present in the apples to do their job and ferment until it was ready to drink – which in those days was reckoned to be when you heard the first cuckoo call, in April.
When I married my late wife Sheila in 1959 I moved to Bunwell Street. In addition to my one and a half acres of flower and veg gardens, I was lucky enough to have my own quarter acre cider apple orchard, which was originally planted in 1921. Sadly, many of these little orchards have disappeared now, although Annette tells me there is a group called the East of England Apples and Orchards Project that works to preserve them and promote the planting of local orchard fruit varieties. You can find it on that there Interwebby thing: www.applesandorchards.org.uk/.
I gave my apples to Father and he would give me 60 gallons of cider back. It was potent stuff I can tell you – uncle George would only allow a customer to have half a pint of it. Mr Chapman, a local farmer in Carleton Rode, made his own cider and would dole it out to visitors in rather larger quantities than uncle George did. I remember seeing one of those visitors on his way home, drunk and incapable, struggling to walk past Bunwell Primary School. It did amuse us boys to see him staggering all over the place. I never got drunk on cider myself though I did once indulge in a little too much alcohol at a wedding – Sheila made me sleep outside in the shed that night!
We didn’t bother with food hygiene or trading standards then – few sterilising procedures were followed and the alcohol content was measured more by experience than anything else. I can still smell those apples as they were crushed and taste the rawness of that cider. On balance, though, I think I prefer a single malt whisky!
Until next time, moined ‘ow yer go.
Owen
(First published in the Wymondham Magazine, November 2020)
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