Do you remember ginger beer plants ? If not, you must be intrigued. It is not a plant as such, but a mixture that you keep in a jam jar or a coffee jar. You feed it each day with dried ginger and sugar. Watch the plant pop and bubble during the week and then after 7 days you strain off the liquid and make homemade ginger beer. After a week the ginger beer ‘fizzes up’ and is ready to drink. Absolutely delicious. All natural ingredients, made to a traditional recipe. There are no nasty E numbers either. After you have made a batch of ginger beer, you carry on feeding your ‘plant ‘ for another week and then you are ready to make another batch of ginger beer. The great thing about the ginger beer plant is that each week it produces an offspring ... another ginger beer plant which you can give to a friend. So little in, so much out.

As kids, part of our Sunday ritual was to make up the next batch of ginger beer and drink the last batch. When we were kids we had no option but to use glass bottles to store our ginger beer in. Occasionally they used to explode in the pantry—great fun for us kids, not so fun for Mum! Thankfully, with the invention of the plastic pop bottle, the risk of exploding bottles is now eliminated.