When I made the Sloe Gin, I left the gin for 3 months before filtering and bottling it. I then poured a bottle of sweet sherry onto the sloes to see how much extra flavour could be extracted from them. I didn't add any sugar, I hoped that the sweetness in the sherry was sufficient.

Today, I filtered and bottled the sherry. It doesn't have as much flavour as the gin but it's still acceptable. Next year, I think I will leave the gin for 2 months rather than 3, so there should still be some flavour left in the fruit for a 2nd 'extraction'.

I've been told that it's possible to make a rather nice 'sloe liqueur' chocolate by taking the used sloes, removing the stones and mixing the flesh with melted chocolate, then leaving to set. I was going to do that today but removing the stones was very fiddly. I tried one of the sloes and found that it was fairly dry and tasteless. Having used them to make two drinks, I had probably removed too much of the juice and flavour.

The chilli pepper seedlings, grown from seeds I bought from Woolworths, have been growing at different rates. That is fairly normal but what's slightly strange is that there seem to be two different types of plant growing from the seeds.

When I planted the seeds in the propagator, I divided the tray into 3 and planted one type of seed into each area. This was to help identify the seedlings when they started to grow.

The seedlings on the left look normal, compared to other photos I've seen.

The ones on the right grew in the area where I planted the chilli seeds. They weren't present in the other areas of the propagator, so it is unlikely that they were 'contamination' or present in the compost. They don't look like the other seedlings but I'll allow them to grow, just in case there were different types of chilli seed mixed in the pack.