Watering and wining.

Inbetween the early morning watering and the last thing at night  watering,  we are still making wine.  Last weeks fig is ready for pressing now,  that's on tomorrow's job list,  I'm also hoping to pick enough figs when I go for the morning dog walk to get another batch started using some of the current brew as a yeast starter.

The pear wine is still eating sugar - not sure that's the technical term for it,  but we still need to add sugar every 4 days or so.  The grapes still look good,  this time last year we had much more intense heat and they had started to shrivel,  but we've only had a few days of temperatures of more than 30 ...... so far.


On Sunday friends came and joined us for the day,  lunch, drinks, lots of cooling off in the pool,  afternoon strawberries -both freshly picked and vodka-y - and ice cream, plus I'd made strawberry vodka again.  Not much, just 300mls, but this time we left it in the fridge to soak as that's the coolest and darkest place I know.  A gorgeous colour and flavour,  and the strawberries were vodka-y too.  No photo because there's none left!   Luckily they'd all walked up from Yátor, although they arrived very hot and out of breath, they soon cooled down in the pool and didn't have to worry about driving home later on after the slightly boozy afternoon.

A couple of years ago I came across a way to make lemonade using the whole lemon, skin and all,  the recipe is on this blog if you go to the search box,  we made it again recently but without the sugar as the gaseosa that we buy here has enough sweetness to make a long cool fizzy drink.  Gaseosa is - according to the label - just carbonated water with citric acid and sweetener.  But it's almost calorie free and is cheap too,  usually 26 cents for a 1.5 litre bottle.  So good for the waistline and the wallet!  Also bought a kilo of limes and made a lime version.  It isn't green like limes for some reason but has the taste of limes though which is what matters.