Finally Planting some Horse Reddish

A friend of a friend declared on Facebook that she would like her allotment garden horse reddish bed cleared - and as I have been wanting to grow my own for a while, I offered to remove the offending plants for her.

It may not be easy to see in the pics, but I planted about 30 individual roots (I removed the green tops before planting) between the tall spruces standing between the veggie garden and the creek.

For a while, I shall have to water them every day that it is not raining, and I hope that at least 1/3 are going to survive and start spreading offspring, as I love horse reddish salat, horse reddish sauce for old fashioned roasted beef, and plain grated horse reddish topping for traditional Danish rye bread open sandwiches with a variety of meat spread.

Normally, horse reddish is very hard to kill, so I do have my hopes up for this little project!

Got Myself a Nice Sideboard

Today, we went to the permanent flea market in Kirkeby, and I found this sideboard, perfect for the purpose I needed it for.

For a long time, I have been wanting a place in the basement to put my schnapps away, and as it should be kept in the dark both while extracting and maturing, it needed to be something with doors.

I got the thing for DKK 250,- (about £30), and I am very happy with it!

As seen below, I only use two of the three sections - the last one is now used for storing homemade marmelades/jams and pickles like pickled beets, cornichons, and pickled gherkins-

This has freed up a lot of shelf space in the bar cabinet, the kitchen, and the basement, and I think my wife is rather chuffed by the arrangement, too!

Add to that, that I now have a much better overview over my WIP schnapps, as well as the bottles with the finished product, and this is an all over win-win!

Making Space for a New Bed

When I first cleared the pad where I now have my vegetable garden, I had to move about a ton of old branches, roots, logs, and other remnants of a lot of bushes, apparently cleared from the front lawn years before we bought the place.

Our homegrown garlic thrives in the herbs' bed

Some of that crap ended up between the trees to the right, and the hazel and elderberry bushes to the left.

Lately, the mess started to bug me, and yesterday I cleared it away, and am now planning to use boulders to create stepped beds for either flowers or herbs all the way down to the raspberries at the foot of the slope.

The steps will be constructed in a similar manner as the herbs' bed shown to the right.

We decided that the hazel bushes had to go, and reserve the area for elderberries and whatever is going to be planted in the beds. Today I massacred the hazels, which opened the area a bit to light and air.

When making the next shot, I was standing to he left of the area - the trees in the centre are the ones to the right in the first picture. The remnants of the hazels are clearly visible. I may take a sledgehammer to some of those stumps one of the next days (some of them are long dead, and should come off with the appliance of restrained violence.

Mint and Licorice/Anise Aquavit/Schnapps

I am composing a 'bitter' aquavit using mint and licorice root/anise.

The golden liquid to the right is a sample of the mint extract (which tastes fantastic in itself).

Below is the licorice/anise extract filtering (and it tastes even better in itself than the mint).

I am going to mix some of the licorice/anise into the mint, and then maybe add some brown sugar, if the sweetness of the licorice/anise is not enough.

I expect to have a finished product worthy for a king's breakfast table!

I have another large jar of mint extracting in the basement, which is going to become a mint sweet liqueur. More about that on a later occation!

A little Garden Project.

Between the showers last Sunday, my wife and I did some work on the spice/herb garden I established last autumn:

In the front bed, we sowed parsley and chives (the plan is to sow each year, as both herbs are biennial, in two different sets of rows). The middle bed contains rosemary, thyme, and oregano for now, and we moved a lovage from the front garden to the upper bed. There's some spearmint to the right that the camera didn't quite capture.

We laid down some stepping stones to have easy access to the herbs. I think I'm going to re-do the upper stone edge - I have fouind some stones that I didn't have access to when in a hurry to finish the job.