Nancy Reading

Are you wanting to make hard cider, rather than wine? Just checking as it's easy to leap to conclusions.

My understanding is that cider is normally made with the yeasts naturally present on the apple skins. I've only failed to make proper cider, but I have made pretty nice applecore cider on the way to applecore cider vinegar.

Some apple varieties are much easier to juice than others. I have 'Tom Putt' which happens to also be one of the few that also seems to crop reliable for me. You can eat is out of hand or cook with it, but really it is a good juicer/cider apple.

I've found a few recipes online - jam, jelly... mostly variants like these at fuchsietum
Advice is to freeze the berries until you have enough for a recipe. I've also found a few recipes for adding the berries (or flowers) to scones, cakes and shortbread.  
Apparently different varieties of fuchsia have different flavours, but they're all edible.

Fuchsia Berry Jam (from fuchsietum and others)

1 lb. sugar [ ≈ 450 g]
2 tablespoons water (or apple pectin, apple juice or cider) [ ≈ 30 ml; 1 tbs ≈ 15 ml]
juice of 1 lemon
1 ½ lb. of ripe fuchsia berries, washed [ ≈ 525 g]

Combine the sugar, water and lemon juice in a pan and cook carefully over low heat until the sugar dissolves.
Set the mix aside and allow it to cool completely.
Add the berries gently, folding them into the mixture so as not to break them up too much.
Bring the mixture slowly to a boil.
Boil until the mixture will set when it’s tested on a plate.
Seal in heated jars.
Allow to cool completely before eating.

Hmm. I wonder why they let the sugar syrup cool before adding the berries? I'd be happy with a mushy jam rather than a 'conserve' with whole berries. The 'jelly' recipes seem to include an apple for pectin (or gelatine), so I might try a basic jam with a cooking apple, lemon juice and some pink fuchsia flowers to add a bit of colour.

Mmm... that does sound good. We have a baker that used to bake sourdough for our shop and one of her recipes was an 'Ethiopian spice' bread. It made the front of the shop smell divine! We called it spicy nipple bread due to the shape....

It looks like it will be lovely Eleanor! Is it going to be a tiny house or 'just' a workshop?

I used an old 1/2 inch hosepipe to trickle water my old polytunnel - There is a tool like a punch that just makes a tiny hole about 1/10 or 1/8 inch (it shrinks a bit due to elasticity of the pipe). The tricky thing I found was getting the watering evenly over the length of the pipe.  The water tends to come out more at the start and then the pressure drops as it went along the pipe. The spacing/size of the holes and slope of the garden can influence that. I did also find that the holes did get clogged a bit as the pipe just sat on the ground and didn't run all the time. It wasn't a big problem though. I'm thinking of reusing the pipe now in my new tunnel, but as I have less gravity (just rain collection) I'm still exploring the possibilities.
My water was just out of the stream and was clean enough - just fed by gravity as I live on a hill. I would suggest a settlement tank to take out debris, but if you are pumping the water and don't have gravity to help, then you would end up pumping twice.

junk pole fence construction

So the second upright on the support post defines a bit how thick the uprights need to be? Do you alternate the 'junk pole' infills up and down to nest them better? I do quite like the look of these fences....

Andrew Greaves wrote:I couldnt figure out how to quote nancy about her comment and question about the herb spiral and stephens growcano,

check out how permies works There are links there on how to make posts, publishing standards and lots more. There should be a 'quote' button next to my post which will copy my whole post in a new box for you (you can delete out the irrelevant parts.)
Text may be quoted like this:

[quote=name of person being quoted]Text that is being quoted.[/quote]

Here is a tutorial on how to post on Permies. This thread goes into a bit more detail on quoting. If you still have problems, ask in the Tinkering With This Site forum.

This post will disappear in a few days.....

I guess the drought didn't get as far as cutting off the mains water supply like in 1976.... but it could still happen, so good to plan ahead.

I'd look at what existing structures you have to collect the rainwater from (composting toilet? community shed?). See what your possible rainfall (big guesses required) and roof area will give you. Calculate likely useage requirements. Do they match or will you need more catchment? What capacity will you need?
A couple of threads that may help:
https://permies.com/t/88043/benefits-rainfall-collection
and https://permies.com/t/378390/IBC-Cistern-Plumbing
https://permies.com/t/181674/economical-catchment-surface-roof

What functions could be stacked with the water storage/catchment?:
https://permies.com/t/53356/functions-water-barrel

It sort of seems wasteful of surface to stick water tanks on the ground, but the alternative is probably digging a big hole and pumping the water back out again, which is far more complicated.

How exciting - I hope the purchase goes through OK for you!

My advice is start small. If you haven't observed the property for a year then maybe just make a little kitchen garden near the house and concentrate on zone one. Don't assume (like I did!) that the soil is OK because it looks OK. Get a soil test or check what is growing there for indications of nutrient shortages or other issues. Don't try and do too much, maybe look into cover crops for other areas that are already cleared, but observation might save you heartache in the long run.

Make an overall plan and see how that shapes up when you've been there a while.

Go and visit with the neighbours, see what you can do together (zone 5, tool sharing, community building.....)