Crab apple jellies

Whilst out for a walk with my neighbour on Sunday, we came to a place where the footpath was liberally strewn with crab apples. Not to let a good thing go to waste, we picked them out of the mud and gathered up as many as we could. Just a little further on, she spotted a rowan tree:

Rowan tree. It was a lot more visible in real life, and less blurred. How did I manage to blur half of the photo?

With a bit of mountaineering on my part, we collected a fair few rowan berries too. My neighbour tells me that the combination of these two fruits make tasty jelly that's a good accompaniment to roast turkey. Well, we only have roast turkey one day a year, but I'm sure it goes with other things too. She gave me all the fruit as she's too busy this week to do anything with them, so the task of jelly-making was mine.

I checked a recipe or two online and learnt that the recommended ratio of crab apples to rowan berries is roughly 1:1. I had considerably more apples, so looked for other ideas, and came up with herb flavoured crab apple jelly. Mint is favoured, but others can be good too.

I had just over 11 oz of rowan berries, so I combined those with 12 oz of crab apples (after washing the mud off, halving, de-stalking and cutting out obvious brown bits) and stewed. While that was cooking, I washed and picked over the rest of the apples, including a handful I gathered in the midlands a while ago. I also picked out seeds when they hadn't been sliced in half, as I'd like to include crab apple trees in a new hedge (this is a long-term project). This gave me just over two pounds of fruit.

By the time I'd prepared the rest of the apples, the rowan and apple mix had stewed pretty convincingly (small quantities are much quicker) so I strung that up to drip and started stewing the rest of the apples, then strung those up too. That required a second cup hook screwed into the kitchen beam - this is getting serious!

The next day...

Hmm, not going to get much jelly out of that. There are more than two pounds of crab apples there!

You've probably heard the dire warnings against squeezing jelly bags, Don't touch it - the jelly will go cloudy! Um, what's so bad about cloudy jelly? These bags were clearly in need of a good squeeze. If you have a similar set up, bear in mind that the weak point is the string. Hold tight to the top, or fruit pulp will squeeze out and make a terrible mess.

That's more like it.

Though considerable froth was produced, squeezing turned a few spoonfuls of juice into an amount that could feasibly be turned into jelly. It was hard work, and clearly left my arms in a state unfit to hold a camera steady, but I think you get the idea.

Next I decanted the pink juice into a measuring jug to see how much there was; 3/4 pint. The recipe I consulted said one pound of sugar for each pint of juice, so that's 12 oz sugar. I added it in the jug, so I could see what the total volume would be; 1 1/4 pints. Then began the hunt for jars - surely I had a load of smallish jars? Oh yes, I remember - I put jam in them. Some rationalisation of jam ensued, until I had a suitable number of jars. These went into the oven on low, sugared fruit pulp went into a pan on the hob, on high, and a small plate went into the freezer, on chilly.

Sugary gloop duly boiled (scary stuff. DON'T BLINK.), wrinkle test conducted to my satisfaction (it took a few goes, and I definitely saw wrinkles), jelly poured into jars, but not as many of them as I'd thought I'd need. Obviously this reduces quite a lot while cooking. Oh well, that's a couple of jars I don't need to find for the herb jellies.

Process repeated with the rest of the apples, but with the added complication of what herbs to add. In the end it came down to what I've got in the garden; plenty of mint (with fresh new growth, too), some rosemary, and a little sage. I think sage and apple would be good with pork, don't you? Taking a tip from Boboff on the 'Ish forum, I soaked the herbs in sugar solutions to start with, to stop them floating to the top of the finished jelly. The logistics of all this were quite a challenge, but I managed somehow. Once the apple gloop was ready, I poured the sage syrup into a heated jar, filled with apple gloop, and stirred in the jar. Next was rosemary, mixed in a basin then poured into two jars (I got the quantity exactly right for two jars - go me!). Finally mint, mixed in a saucepan in case it needed reheating (which it didn't) and poured into three jars.

Four jars of rowan jelly, three of mint, two of rosemary and one of sage.

Aren't they pretty? Who cares if they're cloudy, they're lovely colours, especially the rowan. The herb jellies all went quite exactly into jars with none left over, which was very pleasing, but meant I had none to taste. I did manage to salvage a teaspoonful of the rowan jelly, though. I can't really describe the taste - there's certainly a bitter edge to it, I suppose a bit like cranberries. On its own, I wasn't sure I liked it, but then I tried some with a bit of cheese. Oh, wow! That is something special. I don't care what it's like with turkey, I am not at all sorry that I have four jars of crab apple and rowan jelly.

Cute crochet cot blanket

My sister's having another baby any day now, so we went to visit while she was on maternity leave and still has some energy and capacity for adult conversation. I started to feel like doing crafts again a little while back (a good sign, I thought) and, having checked that another blanket would actually be useful, decided to tackle this really cute crochet pattern. Apparently its origins are lost in the ether, but Gingerbread Lady did a very helpful photo tutorial which meant that with my tenuous grasp on the terminology, I was able to look at the pictures and see whether my stitches looked like they were supposed to.

I had some green and blue yarn left over from the little hat, but that wouldn't be enough on its own. I popped into a charity shop and checked their bin of yarn, which turned out to be mostly baby wool (I say wool - it was mainly acrylic). I bought a load of blue and white and thought that would probably do... and it nearly did. I also dug out some bright pink halfway through.

New blanket artfully(!) draped over my sister's sofa

I think it takes a bit of imagination to see this as rows of cats, but it's still a pretty blanket and it was a nice project to do - not too big. I need things I can finish, and if they're cute and snuggly at the end of it, so much the better!

A challenge too far

I've been struggling a bit lately, which you might have picked up on from my recent (lack of) posts. I was chatting to a friend (who happens to be a counsellor) about my sense of paralysis when faced with a to-do list and she said, You know, that sounds like depression. Of course it is! Why didn't I see that before?

I've had depression before and while this is a lot milder than my previous episode - I haven't found myself rocking gently and wishing the whole world would go away and leave me alone - there are some similar symptoms. For a start, my brain isn't working properly. It was a relief to realise this is due to depression - I'd thought it was getting rusty from under-use, what with giving up my job and all. Then there are the more obvious things like not being able to face tasks that I really should be able to manage, and not having any enthusiasm for things I enjoy. I didn't feel like picking up a crochet hook for months.

It's also fairly obvious to me why I have depression now. When I had it before it was the result of stress and in spite of the New Life, I've had a few stresses over the last couple of years. Going back eighteen months or so, I was attempting to be treasurer for a large club and failing. Failing badly. That drove me to the edge of a nervous breakdown, or possibly over the edge - I'm not sure where you draw the line. Luckily a good friend and fellow committee member spotted the signs and phoned me up to say, Would you like me to make it all go away? I wanted nothing more in the world, and I remain very grateful to those who picked up the pieces and sorted out the mess that I left.

Moving forwards to roughly this time last year, there was the heating project, then in February an even more stressful ten days helping my dad get a house in Cornwall ready for sale. The final stages of the heating project, the insulation, was unfinished when I left for Cornwall and has remained so ever since, so I have that hanging over me (or not, as the case may be. Things that should have stayed up, fell down.) More recently I've tackled the Wild West Wales project. It wasn't so much rewriting the website that freaked me out - though that was a pretty big challenge in itself - but the financial side, which reminded me too much of my failure as treasurer.

Although I faced up to that challenge and looked the bank account demons squarely in the eye, it took a lot out of me. There was an initial buzz of having achieved something, but since then I haven't felt able to face anything very much.

Knowing that this is depression is very helpful. For a start, it means that various other things are not the problem. It's not the case that my brain's going rusty from lack of use. It's not the case that the new life really isn't that great once the novelty's worn off. It's just depression. It's an illness I've had before and recovered from, and with the right management, I can recover from it this time too.

I say management rather than treatment because that feels like a more appropriate word. Treatment implies a separation from the rest of my life - there's the problem, there's the treatment, apply treatment and problem will go away - whereas depression invades everything. What I need to do is manage my life so that I can recover from it. Susie at Useless Beauty wrote some excellent tips for dealing with depression. I find number 1 particularly useful - small achievable goals are good, large goals of which half may get finished are no help at all.

At the same time, some specific treatments are worth including. I've always had problems with the shorter days in winter. It's the reducing light levels that get to me, especially around the equinox, as well as the lack of light in midwinter. On sunny days I can (and must) get outside, but a lot of the time it looks like this:

There's a view out there somewhere.

On days like this, there is an alternative. For several years I've been trying to tell myself I'm over the SAD and been meaning to get rid of the daylight lamp, but didn't get round to it so I was able to dig it out of the loft and start using it again (and by the way, if I was better at decluttering, I'd be looking at spending a couple of hundred pounds to replace that).

I got Ian to help me dismantle the spare bed so there's space to use the room for things other than sleeping.

As you'll see in the picture above, I've started knooking/crocheting again. This is a good sign as I'm obviously starting to get better already. If I can just fend off the seasonal blues and avoid any challenges that are too big for the time being, then I should make it through winter ready for a new start next spring.

To cheer you up after all that, here's a gratuitous photo of a cute small child:

My niece introduces me to one of her favourite trees.

Edit: After I posted a link to this on facebook, friends offered various pieces of useful advice that I know, but had failed to include here. As they might be useful to other people, here they are:

1. Exercise is probably the best treatment for depression. It doesn't have to be strenuous to be worthwhile, even a ten minute walk is worth doing.
2. Eat and sleep well. The second of these is harder to control than the first. Don't beat yourself up if you can't sleep, but try to give yourself the best chance.
3. Take notice of beautiful things, which is another way of saying count your blessings. They're there, but we often overlook them. Look out for them and pay attention so they register in your conscious awareness.
4. Alcohol is bad for depression. If I had any sense I would have stopped drinking (at least temporarily) by now, but I haven't.

If the first two of these feel like far too much effort, it's probably time to talk to your doctor and consider drugs (your doctor may have other suggestions, too). I am wary of this option unless things are really bad. I've taken antidepressants before and they did help, but they also have a lot of side effects and I still have restless leg syndrome to this day, more than ten years since I stopped taking the drug. No, I don't know how that works either.

Crossing things off the list

For someone who doesn't like to-do lists, I've found the list I made earlier in the summer surprisingly helpful. The first thing, as I said at the time, was to make me realise that I couldn't do it all. Since all my tasks are self-imposed, that meant that I could then decide to just give up on some of them.

The other effect was to level the priorities. Whereas before, I was thinking, I can't do that job, because there's this other job that's more important, and then not doing either job, once I had a list, I felt free to do any of the jobs, without worrying about whether it was the most important thing or not.

Here's how my list looks now. The grey items are things I've given up on, but the other crossed out ones are things I've actually done. There are a lot of things still on the list, but it was quite nice going through and seeing how many I've crossed off in the last two months.

1. String up peas
2. sow more peas, and beans, and replacement carrots, and fennel, and broccoli
3. plant out French beans
4. pot on tomatoes
5. clear ash out of tapped bucket (missing trowel) and start making comfrey tea
6. improve slug defences for brassicas and strawberries
7. inspect and register septic tank
8. unblock kitchen drain
9. arrange book club meeting (choose book)
10. finish camera bag (find suitable washers)
11. seal bathroom floor
12. paint kitchen cupboard doors
13. add decoration to kitchen cupboards
14. clear, level and lay kitchen floor
15. ditto hall floor (edging strips)
16. brick arch over fireplace (get more bricks)
17. strip rest of wallpaper
18. plaster around fireplace
19. remove radiator
20. paint sitting room walls
21. empty room, lift carpet, sand and polish floor
22. clean up beam
23. make and install solar panels
24. finish insulation and ceiling in store room
25. loft insulation
26. rig up doorbell
27. put cupboards/shelves in store room
28. renovate boots
29. harvest oak leaves; make cordial and wine (get more buckets)
30. ditto elderflowers
31. sorrel cordial?
32. pull up rest of horsetail for plant food/blight treatment
33. paint dresser
34. finish making laundry basket
35. mend laundry bag
36. mend trousers and skirts (mine and Ian’s)
37. make new woodstore roof
38. weave bench seat from leylandii offcuts
39. treat wooden chairs for outdoor use
40. put extra shelf in airing cupboard
41. finish plastic bag sandals
42. take lavender cuttings
43. replace tent poles
44. clear out fridge
45. book musician for September
46. ditto October
47. book musician for November
48. rewrite music website in nice tidy code
49. tidy up archive
50. publicity for July/August music
51. collect wild garlic seeds when ready and sow
52. ditto pak choi, cabbage, probably onion and parsnip too
53. write blog posts
54. find out about greenhouse for sale; ?dismantle, move and assemble
55. make press for sawdust briquettes
56. make solar dehydrator
57. get sawdust; make briquettes
58. fix spare room skirting boards
59. bedroom ceiling
60. fix cornices
61. paint wardrobe
62. fix wardrobe
63. strip/paint bedroom walls
64. fix kitchen cupboard door
65. learn Welsh
66. plan and prepare dinner EVERY DAY
67. WASH UP!

I'll tell you about a couple of the bigger jobs. Since we replaced all the floors last year, we needed to put down new floor covering. I'd done the dining room, bathroom and spare room, the bedroom got its old carpet back; next on the list was the kitchen.

Just as a reminder, here's the kitchen as it was when we bought the house...

Gorgeous seventies vinyl, with gaffer tape

... and here it is after we replaced the floorboards:

An improvement, certainly, but not quite the look we were going for.

I investigated vinyl in various forms. The maximum length of our kitchen, going into doorways, is more than 4m in both directions (yes, I do know how lucky I am!) which means we couldn't get a single sheet of vinyl to cover the whole lot; there'd have to be joins. Since we had to have joins anyway, I decided on vinyl tiles. You can get self-adhesive ones nowadays, but they're not really sticky enough, especially if you have a less-than-optimal surface to lay them on, and I wasn't prepared to line the floor with hardboard before I started this job. I went for old fashioned tiles, which turned out to be quite heavy, somewhat flexible, and double sided. That is, the pattern, such as it is, runs right through the tile and shows on both sides. It does not mean that you can stick the tiles down either way up. I learned this from experience. The tiles are slightly curved and if you put them down the wrong way up, the edges curl upwards, which is not good. Luckily I'd bought some spares. The good thing about tiles, spares notwithstanding, is that I only needed to buy enough for the floor I was covering, not for all the bits under cupboards that would end up as offcuts with sheet vinyl.

Before doing the floor, though, I wanted to tart up the cupboard doors. First a coat of paint and then, because that made the room look rather clinical, some kind of decoration. I dithered over this for ages - I had an idea of what I wanted, but wasn't at all sure of how to achieve it. Eventually, in spite of misgivings about the whole thing going horribly wrong, I settled on stencils. My sister stencilled navy blue ivy leaves around her student room, back when stencilling was fashionable, and they looked really good.

It turned out that deciding on stencils was a long way from the end of the story. Since stencils aren't fashionable now, they're really difficult to get hold of. I certainly couldn't find any in local shops. Vinyl stickers are widely available and seemed like a good idea, avoiding issues of smudging the edges, but much searching revealed that these are almost all huge. I just want a bit of detail round the corners of the cupboard doors, not designs big enough to cover a whole wall. After that diversion I returned to stencils, found a good online supplier, then suffered from too much choice. When there's a vast range to choose from, it's all too easy to get drawn into thinking we must have exactly the right one. I needed not one but two designs, one for the cupboards and one for the drawers, and these beautiful designs were pretty expensive. I could end up paying forty quid before I'd even started the work, and quite possibly still mess it up. Finally, I found a small, cheap stencil (I think it was £3.50) that, with a bit of masking tape, could be used for both designs.

Doctored stencil

I managed to get the paint on tolerably well. There was a bit of smudging round the edges if you look closely...

A nice bit of stencilling, just for Susie

... so I find it's best not to look too closely. Once I'd levelled the floor with offcuts of the bathroom vinyl (new floor panels matched old boards at the edges, but not in the middle, thanks to a sagging joist) and laid the floor tiles, the finished result looked like this:

Finished kitchen, if you ignore the wall tiles and that bit over the cooker.

I rather like the fact that the floor tiles look old already. Brand spanking new just isn't my style.

The other big project I've done recently is to overhaul the website for our music events at the local hotel. I won't write much about this because it would get very boring, but I've done a bit of html programming before, and the site we inherited was created in sitebuilder, which builds the most hideous code I've ever seen. Every time I had to update the site it made me wince.

The other motivation for rewriting the site was to include online payments. It was something we'd been meaning to set up, but it came to a head when we booked a band who are frankly out of our league (Mad Dog Mcrea! We can't believe they're really coming to Devil's Bridge!) and when their agent confirmed the booking he said, "...and could you give me the web address for your online ticket sales, please." Ah, um, yes, well...

So I rewrote the website, registered with HMRC, opened a new bank account, and signed up with an online credit card processing company. All of this took rather a long time, but having got to the end of it, I'm really quite proud of the result, so here it is: Wild West Wales.

Bean report

After the crisis of the soggy seeds way back at the end of last year, I've had beans growing in pots in the conservatory. I did intend to plant them out when the weather got warm enough, but that hasn't really happened this summer and while some gave up the ghost, quite a few survived...

Beans not dying

... and one even climbed up its pole.

Climbing bean shows the others what they should be doing

They produced a few flowers and now all of them have at least one pod developing.

I'm pretty sure they're supposed to go purple like that

So after soaking and neglect, it looks like I might get some beans after all - some, but not many. In fact, the quantity is so small that I don't think I'll get any to eat if I also want to keep seeds for next year. These are the seeds given to me by a friend of my dad's which are the closest to baked beans that will grow in the UK (at least I think they are - she gave me two varieties and it might be the other ones). The Home grown baked beans project is proving to be rather long term.

Mystery plant still a mystery

This is hogweed:

Common hogweed by the roadside

Since investigating the mystery plant in my garden, I've learnt to recognise hogweed and spotted lots of the common kind growing by the roadside near here. As well as being able to harvest it next year, it should also help with identifying my mystery plant. I was fairly sure it was hogweed, but couldn't tell whether it's giant or common. One feature that would help would be the flowers. Both have umbrella type flowers, but the shape differs, so if I examine the flowers of my mystery plant carefully and compare it with those by the roadside, maybe I can tell whether it's giant hogweed or not.

My mystery plant is now flowering. Here it is:

Mystery plant

Let's take a close look at one of those flower heads:

Mystery plant flower head

Hmm, that would appear to be not hogweed. It's not even an umbellifer! Right, back to square one, then. Any ideas on ID of a plant that has leaves like giant hogweed and flowers like round teasels? It's currently about five feet tall.

Slug trap update

This is what I found when I went out to check the slug traps this morning:

Note the complete absence of slugs in the trap. Note the trail of slime up the inside of the trap. Note the happy slug sitting outside the trap, contentedly drinking the beer that is drawn up the trail of slime.

Beer traps for slugs: a test

After hunting down and evicting around two hundred slugs over the course of three evenings, I was starting to wonder if simply throwing them over the railway line wasn't enough. Are they just coming back? Maybe it's time to get tough.

I'm reluctant to waste good beer on slugs, but I've heard that it's the yeast they really like, not the beer as such. I kept the yeasty sludge from a batch of homebrew (kit beer), added sugar and water, and used that to bait a few jam jars, which I then buried in the soil yesterday evening.

This morning I went out eagerly to check my traps and... not a sausage! Nor a slug, which might look quite similar to a sausage, but should not be confused. I wasn't entirely surprised by the total failure, as I'd spotted this little fellow last night checking out one of the traps and deciding it wasn't worth the risk:

The slugs round here aren't as daft as they look.

Solar dehydrator - Mark 1

I picked a second harvest of blackcurrants the other day. I got three and half pounds and my neighbour got a couple of pounds as well, and there are still more ripening on the bush - it's a good year for blackcurrants. I stewed mine with a little water and strained the juice overnight to make cordial (with sugar added to taste, made about a litre). I then squeezed the bag to get more juice out - the murkier pressing - and made sorbet out of that (dilute and add sugar to taste. Freeze, but take out and stir at intervals. It still needs warming a bit before it's soft enough to serve, but if you don't stir it you just get an ice lolly, which is another option).

Finally, I pressed the remaining sludge through a sieve, leaving behind just the pips and skins, and sludge that I hadn't the energy to push through (this is very hard work). Again adding sugar to taste, this thick sludge can be dried to make fruit leather. As blackcurrants have a very strong flavour, I would have preferred to mix them with something bland like haws, but they're not ripe yet. I think I can live with intensely flavoured fruity snacks. Thick sludge was duly spread out in thin layers on baking sheets.

When I've made fruit leather before, I've dried it in the oven. As we have the novelty of actual sunshine here at the moment - and it's hot! Getting on for 30°C! (OK I know that's pretty cool by American standards, but it's unheard of in Wales) - I thought I'd try the sun dried approach. I started by laying the trays out on the garden table, which is perforated metal, so good for warm air flow around the trays. To increase the chances of actual drying happening, and because I've been thinking about solar dehydrators recently, I decided to construct such a device to help things along.

So... solar dehydrator step 1: Choose something dark coloured and non-insulating to serve as a collector. This is the bit that heats up when it sits in the sun. I picked roof slates as we have lots sitting around. The rigidity is handy, as they need propping up at a suitable angle to face the sun. I used bits of old brick for this, as we also have a lot of these sitting around.

Slates propped up on bits of brick. High tech stuff, this.

The next step is to set up a sheet of glass or plastic over the collector to make a little greenhouse. There should be a gap between the two to allow air to flow from the bottom to the top. I had a broken piece of greenhouse glass to hand, and found a bit of car in the garage (it wasn't attached to a car at the time, I promise!) that looked good for a spacer/ seal for the sides.

Glass resting on piece of rubber. This also keeps the glass off the ground, allowing air to get in at the bottom.

Once I'd set up my collector, I just needed some way of directing the air from the top of it towards the table with the trays of fruit sludge. I also thought that protecting the fruit from flies might be a good idea. I took the fabric part of a tent (yes, that was just lying around, too) and draped it round the table and collector, with the insect net supported by some garden wire (which was tidily put away in the greenhouse). I'm not sure I did a very good job of this.

There are three trays of fruit pulp in there somewhere

The idea was to catch the hot air emerging from the top of the collector and send it in the direction of the table. I did want to take the temperature of various parts of the set-up but the only thermometer I could find (pinched from the central heating system) was very slow to react, and we were going out, so I just left it.

Several hours later...

Tada!

We have actual, dried fruit leather. I didn't really believe it would work. Of course, if I was being scientific about it, I'd have left one tray out in the open as a control condition, to see whether my roof-slate-and-tent setup made any difference at all, but I didn't. I just wanted to give my fruit the best chance of drying, so now I have no idea whether this works as a dehydrator, but I do have a tin full of blackcurrant fruit leather stashed away for the winter.

Seasonal weather forecasting

I love the old sayings and legends that tell us how the weather's going to be for the next few months based on recent weather or other natural signs. I learnt a new one last autumn from a bloke in the pub: If we get three nights of hard frost before the fair comes to Aberystwyth, then it'll be a mild winter. I love the local nature of this one, and the fact that the fair is sufficiently fixed in the calendar (late November) to have been incorporated into a weather prediction. We did have three nights of hard frost last November and sure enough, the winter was mild.

At the opposite extreme, being about as non-local as you can get, is the old Imbolc legend that the hag gathers firewood for the rest of the winter on this day (1st or 2nd Feb) so if she's planning a long winter she'll make the day bright and clear - good weather for collecting wood. This is pretty much the same prediction as groundhog day, 2nd Feb: If the cute furry animal can see his shadow, he'll retreat into his burrow, expecting another six weeks of winter. The first three days of February were bright and clear this year, but I can't say the following six weeks were particularly harsh. We did have a cold snap in the middle of that period, but it was generally fairly mild.

There's a little rhyme I've known since I was a child, about when different trees come into leaf:

If oak be out before the ash, then the earth will get a splash;
If ash be out before the oak, then you may expect a soak.

I confess I didn't notice when these trees came into leaf this year until they were both out, so I can definitively say which came first but I think it was roughly the same time. The ash certainly didn't lead by enough to hint at the deluge we've had this summer.

Yesterday was St Swithin's day, which traditionally predicts the rain for the next forty days: If it rains on St Swithin's it will keep raining, but if it's dry it will stay dry. In spite of all the rain we've had recently, yesterday was dry... but today isn't.

So much for St Swithin.