Dad and I went to a piece of MOD land near us where people often walk their dogs etc. and a lot of gorse grows, although to be fair gorse grows pretty much everywhere around here!
Today we were after the flowers, which we are using to make wine. I'm using a recipe from a book called Wines, Beers and Spirits by Maurice Hanssen and Jacqueline Dineen (an old book of my Grandad's). Basically you simmer 1/2 a gallon of gorse flowers with 1 gallon of water for 15 minutes. Then you add 3lbs of sugar, a sliced orange and a sliced lemon as the mixture cools. Then - and this is the weird bit - you float the yeast on a lump of toast on top of the wine! Presumably this is so that when the bread breaks down you get the sugars and yeast...though I really don't know. I've never come across this before!
Checking on it after a night out, I found that the bread had swollen up...
Gorse is of course very prickly but providing you have some sturdy gloves on you should be OK. I wore some plain leather gloves today and didn't get prickled once. The flowers are pretty easy to pick and come off in clumps of two or three. It took Dad and I perhaps 1/2 an hour to pick a little over 1/2 a gallon.
The flowers were realeasing puffs of pollen as we picked them - there were lots of insects buzzing around and it turns out that gorse is a good bee plant for pollen, so it is very useful for early spring, though not so much for nectar. I think it flowers for a long time too, although bees prefer other things and move on to other sources as soon as possible, according to F N Howes!
When picked the flowers smelled faintly fruity - like lemon or even mango. However, when we started simmering them in the water, they released a wonderfully powerful lemony aroma - absolutely beautiful!
Yesterday and today I have been doing a little research on Permaculture and forest gardening - there are a wealth of resources on the net and lots of good videos on youtube too. Below are some links.
Permaculture started out as Permanent Agriculture - from my little research, it seems to me that it is all about imitating nature by design in order to produce food that doesn't take much maintenance but equally is sustainable and requires no pesticides etc, although apparently it can be applied to other areas of life too.
Forest gardens are one edible ecosystem that adheres to these principles. The idea is that a natural woodland has no waste products - the soil is fertile, biodiversity is high, the way that different plants and animals work complements each other, and the woodland pretty much takes care of itself. It's also what our land naturally wants to be. By imitating natural woodland, we can grow edible plants. According to the video I mentioned yesterday, growing in this way can porduce double the amount of food as traditional arable farming, with minimal work.
One aspect of forest gardening that particularly attracts me to it is the concept of the seven layers: the canopy of tall trees that need light; the next layer of shorter trees that can tolerate more shade; a shrub layer; a herbaceous layer; ground cover layer; rhizosphere (root layer) and a vertical layer of climbing plants. It sounds to me as if this would allow you to make the most of limited space and grow a huge variety of foods. Companion planting and attracting beneficial animals is also a large part of forest gardening, both of which are concepts which I already try to use in my traditional vegetable garden.
The only problem - well, not really a problem, but something that would slow a lot of people down even if they were really interested in forest gardening and permaculture - is that it requires a lot of planning and designing. Permaculturists take a long time - sometimes even years - to observe how the current ecosystem works, where the prevailing winds come from, and even to let natural regeneration occur. So planting a garden like this takes quite a lot of work at the planning stage - I need to find out more before I take the plunge!
Web links:
http://server9.web-mania.com/users/pfafardea/ - Plants for a Future
http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permaculture/ - Permaculture: A Beginner's Guide
http://www.agroforestry.co.uk/ - Agroforestry Research Trust
http://www.permaculture.org.uk/ - Permaculture Association (Britain)
http://home.klis.com/~chebogue/PermacultureIndex.html - A Permaculture Primer
http://www.konsk.co.uk/webmap.htm - Tir Penrhos Isaf
Videos on You Tube:
There are lots more besides these links - go have a look!
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