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This afternoon we took a walk in the woods...







We found jelly ears to eat.





And lots of other fungi, some very tiny and delicate.





And some that looked a bit like intestines!

Siblings' adventure 2012

Instead of buying each other birthday gifts, my brothers and I decided to take quality time-out together instead. Last weekend the three of us camped near Swanage on the south coast.

Here are a few pics...





Swanage itself is nothing special, but it does have the most amazing off-licence with lots of local beer, interesting wine and cider by the barrel! I keep some (very poor) cider-tasting notes. Mark helped me out this time - he described the above, Dorset Cider Company 'Smoke Oak', as "Dry with a throaty twang, hint of autumn crabapples with wasps on them".

The next two pics are by Mark.





We spent our only full day walking, climbing, swimming, and sitting along the coast path. We saw lots of wildlife including butterflies we remember only from childhood, beetles, bugs and a slow worm. Oh and I made them both taste random plants...









We visited the Square and Compass pub at Langton Matravers for more cider. I enjoyed a half of 'Eve's Idea' (home pressed), but Mark said it was not waspy enough for him. It's a great pub, deserving of its fame. It even boasts a little museum (of very random objects)...



After packing away our little camp we drove home via Durdle Door which is very beautiful, as is that whole stretch of coastline.



There are a few more photos on my Flickr.

The siblings' adventure was great! Happy belated birthday Mark and Chris! :)

0446/2124 In praise of mint

The weather has been wet and rubbish, the plot is waterlogged, seeds haven't germinated, plants have been munched by slugs and snails, and some pesky little critter has been nibbling off all of my unripe strawberries and hiding them under the leaves in little piles.

At least I have lots of mint. It's reliable and it's tasty, and I really should do more with it.

Last year, my friend Miriam and I held a mint-tasting event (well, we had a barbeque on my allotment and there we sampled about eight varieties of mint and were amazed by the differences between them). My favourite has always been water mint - the type that grows wild by streams and lakes. It has a sort-of smoky/earthy flavour, a bit more sophisticated than the others in my opinion. I have it on my allotment now (which is almost like a lake) and yesterday I picked a big bagful to make water mint wine, which will be interesting at the very least!

As well as growing it on my allotment, I'm guerilla-gardening some mint on a patch of ground close to my flat. This plant was originally part of a mojito from a cocktail bar in town. I rescued it, then forgot all about it and accidentally left it in my handbag for 24 hours where it got slightly crushed and a bit thirsty (oops!). Still, when I remembered I put it in water and it rooted (mint is *so* easy to propogate this way, I've never known it not to work). As you can see, it's now enjoying a healthy teetotal life outdoors with plenty of fresh air and sunshine...

0655/1926 Notes from today

Saw: butterflies (a peacock, a tortoiseshell, a white one). A goldfinch who lives near me.
Leaves unfurling: apples, brambles, raspberries, hops, gooseberries.
Flowering: bluebells, pak choi, alexanders, gage (nearly).
Excited about: rhubarb, strawberries, walking onions.
Might be dead: bay tree, kumquats.
Sowed: beetroot, lettuce, mini sunflowers, the contents of the bottom of my seed tin.
Re-potted: chilli. Also potted up the mint I rescued from a very alcoholic cocktail in a bar.
Picked: nettles, but left some for the ladybirds (who are in love). Also ground elder and sorrel.
Could have picked: parsley, chives, rosemary, thyme.
Tested: my foraging apron. It was a gift from the lovely and very talented Claire Smith.
Most happy about: British Summer Time :)

0624/1804

It's finally light enough to visit the allotment after work, and warm enough to eat my lunch outside in the sunshine.

I've just had a weekend of catching up (or attempting to at least!). I got lots of work done on the plot - it almost looks under control. I'm looking forward to a year of fruit, herbs and leaves (all low maintenance you see). There may also be the odd bean and perhaps the occasional beetroot...

All of a sudden it feels like spring, and there are plenty of wild plants to gather. I spotted some early hop shoots down by the river last week, although the ones on my allotment have yet to make an appearance. There are nettles and other green leaves in abundance now, and the first flowers are beginning to bloom. I love the plum and blackthorn blossom which is everywhere at the moment - if you see white or pink candyfloss trees remember to check them later in the year for potential harvests of fruit!

I picked some gorse flowers yesterday - I was originally considering making wine but I didn't have the motivation to pick enough for that so instead I made do with bright yellow gorse flower tea.

Autumn seems to take its time in passing. A few leaves still cling to the trees and shimmer in the low sunlight, even now the winter frosts have arrived and we're approaching our darkest day.



My allotment is in slow-motion, which is good news because I have very little opportunity to get over there at this time of year. Last weekend I moved a few blackcurrant bushes and took cuttings from some wild gooseberries. Most of my fruit trees are bare, but one small apple which I grew from a pip is still green and energetic. There are lots of wild and self-sown leaves to pick, my favourites at the moment are sorrel and cornsalad. I have a small patch of alexanders, which when it resurfaces each year on my boggy land-locked plot always amazes me. I plan to try a liqueur, perhaps John Wright's Gin Alexanders. I'm not convinced I'll have it ready by Christmas though...

Today I spotted some mushrooms in the woods and I thought they might be Wood Blewits. They were growing near an old pile of wood-chippings, under deciduous trees. The tops were greyish lilac and slightly wavy, the gills pale and the stems mottled with a brighter purple. I took one as a sample so that I could do a spore print (results to follow), and as soon as I got back from my little foray I consulted Rogers Mushrooms. As usual, when I got my results from the easy key I was filled with doubt. What I had thought were fairly easily identified common edible mushrooms could actually be pretty much anything...

I'm a cautious forager. Since I've been actively studying fungi I've not found any that I'm confident enough to eat. The only ones I've been able to identify with certainty were Fly Agaric - the classic red and white toadstools of fairy tales (eating them didn't even cross my mind...).





I don’t actually like mushrooms that much as food, so you may wonder why I’m bothering to learn about them at all. Well, apart from the fact that fungi are absolutely fascinating and often very beautiful, for me foraging isn’t just about finding food - it’s about learning and exploring. It's a treasure hunt. Finding interesting and useful things satisfies my hunter-gatherer instinct. I think that's also why I enjoy photography - with a camera I gather information and I collect memories of things I've seen or made.

Apples and rosehips

Last Saturday Matt and I picked some tasty apples en route to The Museum of English Rural Life (a fascinating little place in Reading town which is packed full of countryside curios). We then joined in their Apple Day celebrations - learning how to press juice, sampling many different varieties of fruit, purchasing local cider, watching apple-and-spoon races and being thoroughly entertained when a friend attempted the longest apple peel competition! Afterwards we headed to Oxford to partake in the mini beer festival Oxtoberfest, where I drank cider. Which I probably would have done anyway, but I used Apple Day as an excuse...



On Tuesday I went for a long walk in the rain and collected about a kilo of rosehips. If nothing goes wrong they will eventually become rosehip wine - my brew is currently glug-glug-glugging away in the kitchen... I think this is my sixth homebrew. I've previously made mayblossom wine, nettle beer and haw wine, as well as a couple from kits. I've had no disasters so far, and the haw wine I made last year was actually very good indeed. I'm hoping the rosehip will turn out well too as the recipe is very similar (it's from Roger Phillips' Wild Food).

Gathering and crafting...

In those early days of autumn when the leaves are just beginning to change colour and the morning air has the first hint of an icy blast, it's wise to start making plans for winter. For me this means hanging thick curtains, digging out my bike lights and thinking about Christmas presents. When you make your own gifts you really do have to plan ahead. Last year I spent the whole of October, November and December knitting, crocheting, jam- and liqueur-making...

A few weeks ago I collected sloes. I use vodka for most of my liqueurs but this year I've decided to make traditional Sloe Gin. I collected these before the frost because I was worried they'd all be gone if I waited!



In the depths of my kitchen cupboards I also have summery jars of Blackberry Vodka and August Liqueur, slowly mellowing and becoming more festive.

My next task is to think of something nice I can make for my non-alcoholic family members. Perhaps a jelly of some kind - crabapple, quince, rosehip...?

Fungus foray - my best find!

I was genuinely out looking for mushrooms when I spotted this:

A short walk...

This morning I decided to check out a jitty (leicestershire-speak for a pathway between houses) that I often pass on my way home from work. In doing so I explored a whole extra 100 metres of my local area. It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit of newly discovered land can hold treasure for a foraging photographer...

I ended up at Maiden Erlegh Nature Reserve where I took lots of pictures that I didn't like (the wild chicory flowers were amazing!), and my brain is now full of ideas about mapping and adventuring as close as possible to my own front door. I can feel a project coming on.

General catch-up

I've just got back from a quick session on the allotment, and it's doing well. This year I haven't harvested as much as I usually do, but then I haven't put in as much work either! Notable successes so far include beetroot, blackcurrants, various herbs, a giant sunflower which was self-sown and my lovely little potted fig tree. My (once) wild burdock is looking good too - I'm quite excited about trying it. As usual, though, I'm struggling with carrots and rhubarb, and this year my beans have failed miserably too...

I was just thinking about my mulching system of old cardboard boxes covered with grass clippings, wondering whether it's really such a great idea. It provides a lovely damp home for slugs, and doesn't seem to deter the bindweed at all. But as I was tidying up a little frog hopped out, and just a bit further away a lizard scuttled over the warm dry cardboard. Then a cricket landed on my head. There is such a fantastic variety of wildlife on my plot, I really don't want to disturb things if I can help it. Even the slugs are interesting! As long as they're not too close to my salad plants.

I've done very little foraging this year. I always pick wild greens from my allotment, and I've had a few cherries and redcurrants from the hedgerow, but that's about all. Blackberries are just coming into season though, as are cherry plums, so perhaps it's about time I got my act together! I recently acquired an ice-cream maker, so now a whole new world of preserving has opened up to me...



Redcurrants growing in the hedgerow, click for larger image.

Happy Spring!

This is a cherry plum in full bloom :)

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!

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.

Blackberries!

The blackberries seem bigger and jucier than ever this year - despite all the dry weather we've had!



My current favourite way to eat them is with homemade yoghurt...

Small-scale foraging

I just collected at least 956544285878 poppy seeds, and in the process of doing so made a lovely arrangement of seedheads in a vase. During the activity I only found one spider, one caterpillar and one earwig (which is still on the loose somewhere in my flat)! I realised afterwards I should probably have left the seeds in their cases for a few more days to make sure they were properly dried out, but you live and learn.

I now have plans to collect Honesty seeds (more dried flower arrangements - I am turning into my mother! But that's OK) and Himalayan Balsam. I want to get experimental with my biscuit and bread making! :)