This post owes a lot to friends – John and Victoria who give me apples from their Bramley tree every year, Liz Zorab who posted a Youtube video of making Cider apple vinegar and Stephanie Hafferty for her post this time last year about scenting vinegar for cleaning.

Whilst the apples John and Victoria keep well if stored correctly I usually turn most of them into a huge pan of stewed apple and bottle them. Which leaves me with a bucketful of peel and cores which I have always put on the compost heap. But this year Liz reposted her Youtube video explaining how to turn them into Apple cider vinegar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJpgLuLb7o4) so I had a go.

When I mentioned to her that I was making some she pointed out that as the strength of the vinegar is unknown she prefers not to use it in things like chutney where it might not preserve the ingredients properly. That was fine because I use vinegar to clean the house in place of disinfectant or anti-bacterial whatever. Partly the decision is based on not liking having heavy duty chemicals in the house or on me but also because I have a septic tank and those commercial cleaners can kill the bugs in it just as easily as the nasty ones on my kitchen worktops and if that happens the result is a stinking tank. Eco-friendly cleaners tend to be expensive but vinegar (usually white distilled vinegar) is traditional, safe and cheap.

This time last year Stephanie Hafferty (https://nodighome.com/) who is a garden writer, homesteader, Youtuber and one of my facebook friends and, like me, uses only ‘nice’ cleaning stuff, wrote about steeping citrus peel and spices in vinegar to make a nice smelling cleaner for her pre-Christmas tidy up. So into an empty coffee jar went the peel off some satsumas I had eaten, a few cloves and some of my home made vinegar. It will sit on a windowsill (it should be a sunny one but the weather may not cooperate!) for a week or two before I use it. The cloudiness is a ‘vinegar mother’ which I will add to the bucket of peel next year to speed up the process. I thought I had got it all out of this year’s batch but either I missed a bit or it is still working and forming another one!

Scrap Happy is hosted by Kate (link below) for us all to show what we have been making from rubbish. You can find the others using the links. Not everyone posts every month but they are all interesting blogs.

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Kate, Eva, Sue,Lynda,
Birthe,Turid,Tracy,Jan,
Moira,Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny,Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera,
Ann,Dawn 2,Carol,Preeti,
Viv, Karrin,  Alissa,
Tierney, Hannah and Maggie