Morning Sunshine Throught Ceonothus and Rose Leaves, 30.01.10

Looks like spring could be on its way ^^

Long Time No See!

Well, this weekend I have finally found some time to catch up on the blog! I've missed it a lot but things have been extremely busy, and now that I'm at college I'm afraid homework and coursework have to come first! I haven't had much time to do much gardening etc. and the bees are all in bed for the winter...just as well, as we have had a really cold snap and almost a month of snow! Our village was on the news with some of the heaviest snowfall in the south, and oddly enough my Mum visited Toronto recently and for once we had more snow than they did! It has been absolute chaos, roads blocked, lorries jack-knifing...we've had nearly a foot of snow and everything has come to a standstill. Schools have been closed, and even when they're open some entrances have to be blocked off because of huge, dangerous icicles...it does have some benefits though: everywhere looks so beautiful in the snow, and when you can't get your car out of the drive it means you have to walk everywhere...good for our health (provided you don't slip and break something, of course) and the environment. Although I have to say I'm slightly relieved now it's thawed! We spent 8 1/2 hours in a traffic jam when we went to get our Christmas tree, and although there was a great spirit of comradeship among all the stranded travelers, I'd rather not repeat the experience. And there's even a luscious hint of spring in the air today.

^ The village early one morning, in the snow

^ Our Christmas this year. Peeling sprouts, our tree, and chocolate pudding and syllabub with Christmas dinner!

^ Up until last February when we had snow, I had never seen icicles. The past few weeks they've been everywhere!

Anyway, as I have mentioned, things are rather quiet here in terms of gardening at the moment, although recently Dad and I did harvest and blanche our celery crop, by washing it, plunging into boiling water, cooling in ice cold water, and then freezing. I grew enough celery to last us 6 months this year (21 plants) so I'm looking forawrd to using it all in soups, chilli, stews...all the warming food you need when it's cold outside.

The animals are all doing really well. The ducks and chickens had been moulting in the autumn, which made them look rather scrawny, but they're now resplendant in their plumage. None of them have really enjoyed the wather recently, although the ducks are enjoying the mud now that it's thawing. Willow however loved the snow and took a lot of persuading to get back in the hutch every evening. And we now have a cat called Lucas, a stray that sheltered in the greenhouse at work after the storm and who has become part of the family. He'll probably go back and live in the greenhouse but we have been taking care of him at home recently. I'm not really a cat person at all - there are way too many of them in the UK, they kill the wildlife and think of all the energy that goes into producing cat food, not to mention the fact that what goes in and out of them absolutely honks - but I have to admit that it's great fun having a cuddly, fluffy animal running around the house. We keep him well away from the other animals however.... Alfie the tortoise is still hibernating in the fridge but we will wake him up sometime in the coming fortnight.

Anyway, something that I have been doing lots of at the moment is reading. It's one of the most enjoyable things you can do on a cold winter night, I find, and it's definitely useful for my Literature AS level too. A new string to the blog that I am adding for winter is a reading list - books I have read, am reading or want to read. Sorry to keep adding more and more things! But I need something to do apart from building new frames when the bees are in bed (and my English teachers are shouting at me).

Anyway, the subject of my course is First World War literature, and I am getting more and more interested in history, so this year so far I have read:

• The Accrington Pals - a play by Peter Whelan.
• Birdsong - a novel by Sebastian Faulks.
• Up The Line To Death - selected war poetry
• The Runes - non-fiction by Horil Svensson. I got a set of runestones for Christmas. I'm not sure if I believe in all the "mumbo jumbo" around things like this but the history of it all is so interesting and the runes provide a different viewpoint on life, so I am finding out more.
• All Quiet On The Western Front - a novel by Erich Maria Remarque.

My favourite of these have to be All Quiet On The Western Front and Up The Line To Death. Up The Line was written during WW1, by people who could actually hear shell fire etc. while they were scribbling down the poems. The anthology features work by the greats such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and my personal favourite Isaac Rosenberg. It's so interesting because it takes you from the beginning of the war, when the poets all believed the jingoistic propaganda going around and that they'd all be home by Christmas, through to the work that describes horrific individual episodes in unflinching detail. I love Sassoon's work becuase it just drips sarcasm, but Isaac Rosenberg is my favourite. I love his poetry but even more I just can't believe how unfair it was that a talented, pacifist but poor, wheezy and short lad from the East End had his life cut short on April Fool's Day 1918. And he wasn't tall enough to be a medic, only for cannon fodder. Poor bloke.

All Quiet is fantastic because it was written in the 20's by someone on the other side - a German veteran. It's an amazing book about the power of the human spirit, and reminds me that there was suffering on both sides - when you study the English literature, that is always going on about the Hun and the Bosch, it's easy to forget that the opposing troops didn't have it any better. I also love it because it was banned and burned by the Nazi's in the 30's - a sure sign of a good philosophy. It's written from the first person too so you really feel like you're there, and the detail...the reported stories of men continuing to attack when both their feet had been blown off, or crawling back to safety holding their intestines in with one hand, and the inimitable Katchinsky...it's a really short book, it only took me a day to read, but it's one of the best books I've ever read.

Birdsong is one of my set texts, and I didn't enjoy it quite as much for several reasons, but it's still an amazing book that I would really recommend.

At the moment I'm reading:

• A Small Sound of the Trumpet - non-fiction by Margaret Wade Labarge - all about women's roles in the middle ages. Really interesting and shows that there were powerful and influential women even in a society dominated by men and religion. And my village's castle is mentioned twice - I had never realised that the old pile of flint down the road was so important!
• The Rune Primer - non-fiction by Sweyn Plowright
• Mslexia issue 44 - women's writing magazine, absolutely inspirational. I have already had work rejected by them, which made me feel like a proper writer, haha! Poetry, short stories, flash fiction, articles...if you love literature, you'll love this, no matter what your gender or background.

And I'm planning to read (for the time being. The list gets longer every day):

• Goodbye to All That - memoir by Robert Graves
• Regeneration - novel by Pat Barker
• Life Class - novel by Pat Barker
• The Middle Parts of Fortune - novel by Frederic Manning
• Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man - memoir by Siegfried Sassoon

Nice to be back blogging and hopefully the next post will be along much quicker!

Putting the Bees to Bed

Today Dad and I went and visited all 11 of our hives. At the height of the summer we had 15. A couple were very weak splits and didn't make it or were united back. But luckily our current 11 all seem to be doing really well! I was so surprised by how big the populations still are and how much stores they have. Luckily October has been very mild so far. But today we went and put the girls to bed - I will miss them so much this winter! We fed them some sugar syrup and have just about closed them up. I'm sure we'll go and visit again soon but our summer jobs are over now and soon it will be too cold for them to even venture out. So onto the winter and building endless frames etc!

Last weekend we spent forever making up our own sugar syrup. It was meant to come out as fondant, and this required a very long and tiring process. When I went into the kitchen it smelled like Dad was making chutney, but it turns out he had added vinegar to the sugar mixture to "invert" the sugars. I haven't researched this yet but it's something to do with unlocking fructose from the sucrose or something. After that came a lot of heating it to an exact temperature, cooling it down to an exact temperature, and then whisking it until the electric mixer died! After that we put it in bottles ready to feed the bees. It isn't quite thick enough to be called fondant but it's so much thicker than simply boiling up sugar and some water!

After tasting my Grandpa's delicious tomatoes I harvested all ours, even the green ones. I put them in the airing cupboard to ripen - this must have been ages ago now - and forgot about them. Then when we were doing more de-cluttering yesterday we found all these ripe tomatoes in the cupboard! Unfortunately the Brandywines were a bit mushy but the Roma were divine...but even the mushy ones wills be great in my Mum's tomato sauce!

Mum's tomato sauce

Mum used to live in Italy. She's always telling us stories about her old landlady who hid Italian Jews in her attic during the war, strange past Italian boyfriends who had nose jobs, ridiculous superstitions about odd numbers of nuns...English people just don't seem to know how to cook Italian food, putting cream in their carbonara and god knows what in their tomato sauce. Don't do it! This sauce is only 5 ingredients and it really doesn't need anything else! Use it on pizza, with meatballs, on pasta, with chickpea croquettes...anything. Makes 1 quantity.

Ingredients:

1 x tin plum tomatoes (whole, not chopped)

glug of olive oil

pinch of salt

good grind of pepper

a clove of garlic, crushed

and you can add a couple of basil leaves or a pinch of dried oregano or marjoram if you like ^^

Heat the oil in a pan. Fry the garlic for a minute or two. Add the tomatoes. Break them up a bit with a spatula. Cook until it starts to thicken slightly, perhaps for about 20 minutes. It will smell wonderful. Add the seasonings if you want them. Savour.

Thanks everyone for all your comments recently! I'm really interested to hear what you all think about the plastics - maybe one of us will come up with a cunning plan and save the world! See you soon ^^

Clear-Out

Recently we've started having a huge clear-out. We've been living knee-deep in pointless clutter for ages and it was starting to get us all down, so we are taking steps!

We've tidied up and rearranged the garden a bit, and have got rid of lots of the pots we don't use. Inside the house I'm in the process of going through all my textiles and crafts items and chucking out the stuff that I don't use any more. We're getting rid of a few books here and there and I'm slowly redoing my bedroom too (hopefully going to be using reclaimed timber furniture!). But until now I have never really realised just how dependent we are on plastics.

Everything we use is plastic. I always thought I was quite careful about avoiding over-packaged goods but everything we eat and buy comes in plastic, from crisps and oven chips to health foods and fruit and veg. Even the stuff packaged in metal, glass or plastic is still printed in a plastic-dependent process or stuck together with plastic tape. I've been rifling through plastic beads, acrylic yarns, nylon pipecleaners and even the bags I use to store them or throw them away in are plastic.

We have always reused our plastic shopping bags and use "bags for life" but even then there is always the odd occasion when you've forgotten a bag and so have to use a new one from the shop. We buy a lot of stuff from the co-op in the High Street, and they use only potato-starch biodegradable bags, but is it really better to use food crops for plastics? I worked at the nursery on Thursday when I had a day off from college and Jim showed me some new very expensive pots he was trialing. He says he wants to give up plastic pots, and these ones were made from rice. He insisted they were made from by-products such as husks etc. but I'm still sceptical: one of these days, we will have a food crisis, and if there's no rice, he won't be able to buy any rice by-product pots either.

The fact is that we are utterly dependent on plastics. The things we use that are not made of plastic are more than likely produced in industrial conditions, and guess what - those industrial conditions rely on plastics. Everything from our cosy jumpers to kagouls and wellies, windows, furniture, and our food packaging is made from plastic. It's pretty scary to wonder what if we woke up tomorrow and all the plastics had gone or had never been invented. We wouldn't have anything.

But I'm also sceptical about the alternatives. If we justs topped using plastics, what would happen to all those plastic goods that are already in existence? They'd either be incinerated (can we really capture all those harmful gases?) or put to landfill. I like using natural fibres in my textiles work, but would it really be better to rely on wool for our clothing, house insultaion, etc? And could we really put precious land down to fibre plants without struggling to produce enough food, and would many of them grow without petrochemical fertilisers? Would, for example, rice by-products really be a realistic option in a world without plastic parts for aeroplanes, ships, and machines?

I'm still not sure what I think about all this but I think the best thing we can do is continue to use plastics, just not make so much of them. I think we're in too deep to stop using plastics, and look at all the good things they do for us - medical supplies, for example. I think we just have to reuse and recycle all the plastic we can. So I'll be trying to throw away as little as possible during this big clear out. Someone out there on ebay or Freecycle will have a use for all my junk, and hopefully that will keep it out of landfill.

Catch-up

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't blogged for a long time yet again, and I can't believe how much I've missed on my favourite blogs!!! Things seem so buys round here that I haven't had much time for gardening, and we haven't seen our bees for a month! But this week is our catch-up week and thankfully the October weather has been kind to us so far...long may it continue!

Today we went up to see my Grandpa and Grandma and Grandpa gave me a tremendous gift - the first ripe Brandywine tomato from the plant I gave him earlier in the year! It was a whopper and I've cut it up for our supper's first course, along with a couple of Grandpa's other tomatoes (I expect Ailsa Crag - he's always recommending them to me, and Alicante too) and some of ours too: our Alicante, Gardener's Delight and Sungolds. I've had a little nibble and wow...so many big flavours on one plate! I love tomatoes! I literally just cut them up and put them on a plate - no salt, no oil or vinegar or herbs - they really don't need it.

^ My Brandywine tomatoes still ripening up

Yesterday we went to the Farnham Food Festival. We didn't stay long because Pabi Bach didn't feel well but I managed to buy some proper baklawa! Baklawa is a Middle Eastern sweet full of delicious things such as pastry, nuts, sugar/honey, spices...it's absolutely delicious and one of my favourite indulgences. I have two other treats that I look forward to and those are greengages (a cousin of the plum) and chestnuts. I literally get a tingly feeling when it's the season for these! I didn't get any greengages to eat this year but I still remember the ones we ate on a beach in Brittany on the only sunny day of summer 2008...and the chestnuts are just beginning to fall now! I went for a weaving lesson with Carol on Wednesday and she has a chestnut tree opposite her drive and they all looked very small and weedy...but hopefully when we go to France around Halloween the French trees will be faring better.

My Style Challenge didn't fare so well in September so to make up for it I'll be making TWO style-related projects this month. I think I'll try making a cosmetic of some description and maybe get going on the cheong-sam dress I've been meaning to make myself for a while...first of all I've just got to persuade my sewing machine to relearn the art of winding bobbins correctly!

We have something like 15 gallons of booze fermenting away now and soon I'll be collecting rosehips to make soothing rosehip syrup with! I've also found that our homemade green tomato chutney has quite a good effect on a sore throat.

Anyway. Supper tonight is our lovely tomatoes followed by my Moroccan chickpea soup with rosemary focaccia and some crispy sauteed potatoes. I leave you with some pictures of how the garden's looking and hope to talk to you all again shortly!

Mega Update!

I don't seem to have blogged in ages, probably due to the fact that there has been loads going on recently, not least my starting at college! I'm studying English Lit and an art course that lets me try everything from painting to pottery to patchwork to photography. So far it's all going really well!

Anyway, here are some of the other things that have been going on lately:

^ Dad and Pops in the canoe, picking blackberries from the canal bank.

^ Poppy suddenly decided that she liked jam, so we made some Blackberry and Apple.

^ Blackberry wine and Blackberry and Apple jam.

^ Apple wine. The key difference between cider and apple wine is that with cider you crush the juice out of the apples and ferment that. With apple wine you crush the apples and soak them in water. Then when the apple flavour has permeated the water, you ferment that.

^ Dad beekeeping.

^ Worker bees eating up some spilled honey.

^ Some of my handspun yarns soaking in hand hot water to set the twist. The grey-brown stuff is my weaving teacher Carole's corriedale fibre from her own sheep! I spun it very slubby and textured, and it's a 2-ply. It came out at about 8 wraps per inch.

^ I knitted my Corriedale handspun into a nice slouchy hat! Here I am with my new hat and some of Mum's clay jewellery that she made me. Sorry for the poor picture quality! I finished the hat on August 31st so I had better think of something else to make for my September Style Challenge!

^ Honey bee on golden rod in the garden yesterday.

^ Brandywine tomatoes fattening up - can't wait to taste these beauties.

^ Today we planted pretty pansies in the garden for winter colour. They're really amazing plants - some that we planted two years ago were still going by last summer. They flowered the whole year except January! The name pansy comes from the French "pensee" which means "thought" (n)...so here are some very happy thoughts.

^ Pabi Bach digging up and rehoming strawberry runners.

^ My first (and as yet only) Blue Hubbard Squash! I harvested it yesterday and am now allowing the pale underside to cure.

^ Bear's Britches fading flower heads. Mum likes to dry these and have them in a vase. When the seeds are dry they go pinging all over our living room.

^ Apple blossom on the trees. If a fruit tree hasn't set (enough) fruit in the spring, sometimes it will try again in the autumn when the weather cools down again. Luckily we have a few apples to enjoy as well as the lovely blossom.

^ Purple verbena flowers - been going for months! - in front of Mum's pink rose.

^ The garden, with a purple cotinus and golden rod in the foreground.

So that's it. It's well and truly autumn now. Although we still have sunny days the Canada geese fly over our house every morning and evening and I'm already pining for hearty lamb casseroles and savoy cabbage fried with lovely streaky bacon.......shame I'm veggie really!

Style Challenge 2009/2010

I had an idea today that I would set myself a "monthly style challenge" for a whole year. I'm still planning how I'm going to go about this but here is the basic gist of it:

1. Every month I will make (and finish) an item of clothing/accessory/cosmetic.
2. It will be made from scratch.*
3. I will try and use recycled or natural materials wherever possible. I think I'll allow remnants from the fabric shop too - if I don't buy them they might go to landfill.
4. The things I make must be finished and useable by the end of each month!

*I'll allow myself to use existing clothes but the rule is if it's a top I have to change it into a skirt, i.e. I have to use it to make something else, rather than just decorate it.

I'm pretty excited about this. It might seem a bit of a departure from my usual topics of bees and vegetables but the textile and clothing industry is a huge contributor to all the things I don't like: environmental and human degradation, irresponsible consumerism etc. So if I can make just 12 fashion/style related things this year whilst harming the planet and people as little as possible it can only be a small step in the right direction.

Hopefully it will also push me to learn some new skills! Every time I flip through a fashion magazine I find myself thinking "I could make that" and then I get to my sewing machine and find that actually I can't. And of course money is pretty tight this year so being able to make clothes that actually last for a fraction of the price they'd cost in a shop would be fantastic. So this year I will learn to make clothes etc. and I will go to the ball!

I've decided that my first project will be a hat for winter. It'll count for September as we're already halfway through August. I'll knit it from my weaving teacher Carole's homegrown Corriedale fleece, handspun by me, according to the instructions for the Slouch Hat in Lexi Boeger's "Intertwined". I don't think you can get much more handmade than that.

So wish me luck...I expect that in a month's time I'll really be wishing I'd set myself something easier but oh well...it could be fun ^^.