Heroin Safe Elderflower Cordial

Seeing the clouds of elderflowers everywhere we walk this month was a prompt for us to make Elderflower Cordial. This is relatively easy and the results are very refreshing and pleasing. All the recipes call for citric acid as a preservative and we first thought that this would be a simple matter ot calling into our local pharmacy. This prove to be a mistake. As citric acid is used for cutting heroin the pharmacists have stopped stocking it. Calls in various shops and a crawl of the web conformed the problem. The recipe below replaces the citric acid with lemon juice and seems succesful but I guess the longevity of the cordial (unless frozen) will be reduced.


Ingredients

40 elderflower heads (brown flowers are fine)

2 sliced lemons

20mls lemon juice

1.5 kg granualted sugar

2 litres boiling water

Instructions

Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water. Pare the lemons and place the zest and peel in with the elderlfower heads. Slice the lemons and add to the flowers along with the lemon juice. Add the sugar water mix and allow this to steep for 24 hours. After this strain through muslin and bottle. This will freeze if placed in a plastic bottle.

(B) : Bees, Beans, Berries and Basil

We returned from holiday in the Tyrol to discover that not t0o much damage had been done to the vegetable plot by our desertion. One starwberry plant tooked too dehydrated to survive but there was little other fall out.

The garden is now staring to look productive. Flowers are appearing on the beans and the onions, as well as the non-productive but colourful inhabitants of the garden. It seems perverse, give the crisis facing bees, but we seem to have more visits from bees (both bumblebee and honeybee) than usual. Perhaps we are noticing them more by spending more time in the garden or perhaps the ecology has changed and become more inviting.


The chickens now recognise a spade at 100 yards and know it is associated with worms. Basil has not learnt how to be helpful in the garden.