Earlier in the season I mentioned about making tomato wine.
Having brewed quite a lot of wine years ago using kits, I have had a good look around the internet for a recipe that would be easy to make and not take too long to brew!
The following recipe is from the BBC website and named “Pete’s Tomato Wine Recipe”.
A short background from Guernsey
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/guernsey/hi/people_and_places/nature/newsid_8508000/8508181.stm
Here’s the recipe
- The flesh of about four lbs of tomatoes, remove seeds and skin.
- Chop up the flesh into small pieces and add four lbs of sugar and 10 pints of water.
- Bring this to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes.
- Let cool down until just tepid and add live yeast.
- Then take a demijohn and fill with all the fluid and put in the neck an air lock and leave to ferment in a dark place with a constant temp of 16°C.
- When the fermentation has finished add a couple of camden tablets to make sure the fulminator (air lock) has stopped.
- Rack off the clear fluid and fill bottles and cork.
The demijohn, wine yeast, air lock and camden tablets can be obtained from Wilco’s or any Home Brew shop.
A sweetener can be added after fermentation if the wine tastes too sour.
It’s possible to make wine from any number of fruits and berries and if you have a plentiful supply this autumn, wine making may be a good way of using the extra fruit – I’ll have a large glass of Shirley Shiraz please!
In Germany they make and drink a lot of apple wine at this time of year – we call it cider!
Bush Tomatoes
Monty Don has asked, if anyone has success with bush tomatoes to get in touch. Thanks Nick Y. for mentioning this – I’m in an area at the moment with no TV reception!
On the subject of bush tomatoes, if you find a few seedlings coming up that have self seeded, you may like to continue to grow them through the winter indoors. This works best with early maturing bush varieties that produce cherry tomatoes. You can have ripe tomatoes as early as February/March if you grow them on a bright windowsill.
Regards,
Nick
Nick
Hi Rhys, I’ve also found that some cordon varieties don’t behave as expected – also it is possible to train a cordon to behave similar to a bush variety, given the right pruning.
I haven’t yet found a better way to grow tomatoes than by using the Quadgrow and Autopot systems – I think they’re the best way to grow tomatoes in containers.
Rhys Jaggar
Not sure what constitutes a ‘bush'”: I’ve certainly had consistent success with Maskotka over the past 3 seasons – this year’s plant is about to give up the ghost have produced over 7.5lb of fruit (around 340 balls of joy).
Super Marmande and Black Krim have grown rather like bushes most times I’ve grown them and those have done OK too.
Black Cherry and Alicante also certainly don’t grow as cordons and both have done very well the past 3 years. I have to do quite a bit of thinning of both those to keep the lower areas well aerated through the season.
The other thing I can report this year is that sowing Capriccia toward the end of April and growing in a Quadgrow outside still starts giving large fruit ripening now in the 1st week of September. Those sown at the start of April are > 50% harvested (Tigerella and Capriccia), so Quadgrow certainly gives a successful season even with April sown seeds.