Christmas part two and new year part one

I am rubbish at keeping my blog up to date. Oops! Must try harder.

For Christmas-plus-birthday I got a brilliant present from my Dad: a food dehydrator. It's yet another kitchen gadget, of course... but to be fair I do use *most* of my kitchen gadgets... really I do!

Anyway, it's quite exciting! So far I've only used it for simple things, like dehydrating fruit to go with my breakfast cereal (apples are the best). I imagine it'll really come into it's own later in the year when I'm desperately trying to preserve all of summer's bounty. I think it'll be useful for making christmas gifts too. I'd really like to try candied fruits and flowers, and also fruit leathers (which get mentioned so frequently by foragers). When I make something exciting, I'll post pictures!

Since Christmas I've had very little time for allotmenteering, because mornings and evenings are so dark and I'm usually busy at weekends. I think I'm obsessed with sunset times though - I've been watching it get lighter and lighter every evening since mid-December, and now I'm just about leaving work in daylight again. This makes me happy! Soon I'll be able to visit the plot on my way home, and then the crazy gardening year will begin once more. Can't wait! :)

Christmas Part One

This year I managed to grow enough Blackcurrants to make a batch of jam. Hurrah! These little jars made ideal presents for my Dad and Nan. The alcoholics in my family got Greengage & Victoria Plum Vodka.



I also knitted scarfs (scarves?) but that's another story!

A gardening day

I enjoy winter gardening - finally a chance to catch up with everything! It's quite relaxing compared to the race and constant battle of summer.

I spent this morning on the allotment, generally tidying up and clearing out rubbish. I "pruned" some young trees which border my plot (I'm attempting to use them as living fence posts!) and made a big heap of twigs which I'm hoping will make a nice home for wildlife (especially lizards). I saw a friendly garden toad, which I'd have thought should be hibernating by now, but I'm happy for him to eat a few extra slugs before the really cold weather sets in!



This afternoon I decided to finally take ownership of a strip of land next to the carpark by my flat. It's not loved by anyone, and although I've occasionally pulled out the odd weed, I've always been reluctant to do much more. Today I cleared a big sackful of brambles and nettles, and I've decided it's time to make further plans...

I also removed a few of my neighbour's thistles... hope he doesn't mind!

Another attempt at homebrewing...

Last weekend Matt and I collected 2.7kgs of Haws:



I'm attempting to turn most of them into wine, following the recipe in Roger Phillips' "Wild Food". Stage one was to cover them in boiling water, and leave for a week, stirring daily. Stage two was to strain them, add the liquid to a sugar syrup with oranges and lemons, then introduce the yeast. I did that this evening. Now I have to wait for 24 hours before transferring to a demijohn then fermenting for... however long. I'm not convinced it'll work (as I've already done lots of things wrong!) but I'll keep you posted on my progress :)

Scrumping!

Well perhaps not strictly scrumping, because I think that means stealing from other people's trees. But I do like the word, and if I had a cider press I'd certainly be making scrumpy!



(The cat didn't help - she's just pretending)

An urban forage...

This morning I gathered 3lb elderberries, 2lb plums (greengages and victoria), 8 apples and 1 grape (just testing it!) all within the space of about half an hour.

Then I tried to make elderberry vinegar, but the recipe I followed didn't seem to work out, so it's not really vinegar at all - more like ketchup. Or perhaps syrup with a kick. Sweet and sour. But very yummy all the same and I might just make some more!

I also started some greengage vodka. It's kind of experimental. I imagine it will be quite sweet, and hopefully it'll end up a nice golden colour...

The apples taste nice, although they are a bit grubby so need cutting up rather than blindly shovelling in to the mouth! They are windfalls from an overhanging garden tree. The Victoria plums were also from a garden tree. And so was the grape :)

It sort-of feels like Autumn already.

An experiment in fungus identification

The other day, I found these tasty-looking morsels* growing in great arcs in the grass outside where I work. Although I'm getting pretty good at recognising edible wild plants and flowers, mushrooms confuse and intimidate me! So I decided to have a go at identifying (but not eating) them, just out of curiosity...





They are on a "lawn" I suppose, growing near to a mixture of trees but not under any one inparticular. They look like the kind of button mushrooms you buy in the supermarket, but then I imagine so do a lot of these things! The older ones have dark brown gills and a slight ring on the stem where the cap used to be attached. The younger ones, as you can see from the picture below, have pink gills. The stem is not bulbous, and the mushroom doesn't change colour or do anything weird when sliced.



I made a spore print. This excited me very much! Look! :)



The spores are chocolate brown.

I looked on Roger Phillips mushroom site and filled in the "easy key". It came up with 4 suggestions, but each of these had a "distinct or odd smell (non mushroomy)". My specimen definitely smelled like a mushroom! So I went back to an earlier suggestion which came up before I did the spore print - Agaricus Campestris or Field Mushroom. I noticed that although the short description says the spores are purplish to black, the long description says they are brown! So there's an error there somewhere. I didn't notice the flesh bruising slightly pink, though.

Anyway, this is my amateur nearly-identification result: Agaricus Campestris. I'd be grateful to hear from proper mushroom experts with their opinions. I'm also going to post this blog entry to my favourite online forum to ask the good folks there for some input...

Spore prints are great. I can feel a new art project coming on! :)





*I don't actually like mushrooms! I'm determined to keep trying though.