In case you were wondering how dock leaves affect nettle stings

A well-known folk remedy for nettle stings is application of the common dock leaf, scrunched up and either rubbed or dabbed on. However, very little research has been done on the chemicals involved. Some assume that dock is alkaline and counters the acidic sting that way, but it doesn't take much research to discover that dock is, in fact, acidic. This leads some people to say that there is nothing in the dock that will soothe a nettle sting, so it must be a placebo. Someone said this to me on facebook today, which led me to do a little research.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the power of the placebo effect, but I'd be surprised if that's what's going on here. Firstly, there's been at least one occasion on which I've picked the wrong leaf by mistake, and found the nettle sting still hurting hours later. Secondly, this looks like a reasoning error: Dock doesn't counter the acidity, therefore it's ineffective. This fails to consider any other chemical in the nettle sting that might be affected by the dock.

Infographic from Compound Interest detailing the chemicals in the nettle sting, and a possible source of the claim that the dock leaf is merely a placebo. The accompanying article makes clear how limited the research is in this area.

After a bit of digging, I managed to find one scientific study that looked at the effect of dock on serotonin (also called 5-HT), histamine, and acetylcholine, which are all present in the nettle's sting, and also the related compound nicotine. From the results of their tests, they conclude that dock leaf extract specifically antagonizes 5-HT. In other words, dock leaves work by suppressing the effect of serotonin in the nettle sting.

The original report was published in conference proceedings here (p58) and I'm not very surprised that this has been overlooked. Conference proceedings are not the most visible form of publication for scientific studies. I'm just doing my bit to spread the word about this little study.

Mushroom season has started!

I know that the serious mushroom hunters find 'shrooms all year round, and many are lucky enough to find the spring varieties - St George's mushroom, dryad's saddle, morels - but I've yet to find any of those (apart from the one I found growing in the store room), so mushroom season for me starts late summer/early autumn. From a couple of online groups, I knew that they're coming up early this year, so I've been on the lookout for a week or so. Yesterday, George came out for a look with me, and...

George, not entirely convinced that these mushrooms are interesting

... the greencracked brittlegills are up! I see from a previous post that these were up in late August a couple of years ago, so they really are early this year.

It's just possible to see the green dusting on the side of the mushroom in this picture. I tried to point it out to George, but he wasn't paying attention.

These are very mild tasting mushrooms. Fried in butter, they're very nice; they taste of butter. They're useful for padding out stews and suchlike, but there's a limit to how much almost-tasteless mushroom I have a use for, and they do come up in huge quantities. However, I had an idea.

I had great success pickling oyster mushrooms last year, following John Wright's instructions. I added some herbs - rosemary and bay - and the result was delicious. I wondered whether the very mild brittlegills might take on some herbal flavours with similar results.

The procedure starts with cleaning, chopping, and salting the mushrooms.

Salting the mushrooms

The purpose of this is to draw out some of the moisture. As it happens, this variety is very dry, so almost no moisture came off, so I'm not sure this part was really necessary, but I didn't feel like cutting corners this time. I duly salted, left for a couple of hours, drained off the non-existent liquid, salted and left again, drained (there was a little this time) again, before rinsing quickly to wash off the salt.

The next stage is to boil the mushrooms for a couple of minutes in vinegar, then leave them in the vinegar for a couple more hours. After this they can be bottled, but first I rolled them in chopped herbs - wild garlic (previously frozen in oil), lemon balm and thyme - before putting them in the jar and covering in olive oil. John Wright doesn't include the next step, but I did heat the jar in a cool oven (everything was pretty warm to start with) so that it would form a vacuum to seal it.

One jar of pickled brittlegills, infusing in herby oil

I'll leave these a while for the flavour of the herbs to infuse, then let you know how they turn out. As a bonus, the vinegar is converted into a delicious stock* as it has swapped some of its acidity for mushroom flavour. Similarly, when the pickled mushrooms are gone, the oil has taken on mushroom and herbal flavours.

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* I'm not sure that's quite the right word, but it's a savoury liquid that's a good basis for sauces

When life hands you very sweet wine...

Trying to get away from navel-gazing and back to writing about growing things and making things, here's a post that turns a saccharine-sweet motto on its head.

Last year I used bread yeast to make all my wines, with varying success. Some of them came out just fine, but several of them were far too sweet. The yeast just gave up and died before it had turned very much of the sugar into alcohol. I'm thinking of just adding some wine yeast and hoping it'll get started again, but in the meantime, it occurred to me that I could do with some decent vinegar for pickling samphire.

The cider vinegar that I made last year developed a quite convincing-looking vinegar mother. I poured all the vinegar into a jug so I could scoop out the mother before returning the liquid to its bottle.

I believe that this blob of jelly is a vinegar mother

I've chosen to use about half a gallon (that's a British gallon, so about two litres) of sweet beech leaf wine. I poured this into a large jar, plopped the vinegar mother in on top, covered it with a bit of old net curtain (it's important to allow air in, but not bugs and breadcrumbs and other things that might find their way in there in my kitchen), and added it to the general clutter on my kitchen worktop.

A couple of litres of very sweet wine, with vinegar mother added

At about this point in writing the blog post, I looked up instructions for how to make vinegar. The first useful tip I found was that vinegar can only be made in the dark, so I added a newspaper sleeve to my jar. I then got a bit concerned by the fact that all the instructions described a two-stage process, adding yeast first to make wine, and only then adding the mother to convert it into vinegar. I was sure I remembered methods involving putting apple peels in a jar of water and leaving them... I found them again and even these seemed to assume that the yeast would get to work first and the bacteria would move in later.

Hmm, maybe all that sugar wouldn't get converted. I sought advice on the 'ish forum, and the suggestion was that a vinegar mother would probably eat just about anything, so I left it alone to see what would happen. After a few days I couldn't see anything happening, so I bottled out and added a bit of yeast (wild, probably still alive). About a day later, I saw a film forming on the surface, which is a good sign for vinegar. Whether the yeast had anything to do with this or not, I don't know, but I'm happy that something is happening.

I can expect this to take a few weeks, at least, to make vinegar. I won't ignore it completely, though, I'll keep sniffing it from time to time because after the vinegar's made, with continued access to oxygen, the vinegar mother will eat right through the acid, leaving only water. I think that's happened to a batch I tried before, which was very disappointing. Now at least, I know to watch out for it, and seal my vinegar into bottles before it goes over.

A note on using homemade vinegar for pickling: Most guides advise not to. This seems over-cautious to me. With the quantity of sugar I had in here, I was aiming for about 12% alcohol. Converting the alcohol to acid actually increases its concentration (oxygen is added to each molecule, making it relatively heavier), and the minimum required for pickling is 5%, so surely this vinegar is going to be plenty strong enough, even if it does go over and lose a bit.

More uses for ground elder

I recently learned that the larger, tougher leaves of ground elder can be good to eat if you cook them the right way, and that some people consider the stalk to be the useful part.

I wrote a blog post about it for Selfsufficientish.com.

We have been eating a lot of ground elder recently.

What am I?

This isn't a riddle, it's a question I've genuinely been grappling with recently. Let me back up a little. I've been suffering from depression over the last month or so. I've found this quite hard to accept - I get seasonal depression, I can't be depressed in the summer! - or even recognise. When the sun is shining, spring flowers are out and the birds are singing, it can be quite hard to see that underneath my appreciation of all this, there are still some serious problems. However, it got bad enough to force me to face up to it when I just couldn't face going to an event that I'd usually enjoy a lot. I've been talking to my dear friend Sarah, who is a counsellor and has been helping me figure out what's going on in my head.

There are a couple of obvious things, like money worries and the general election result, but we've turned up some less obvious things too. One of these is loss of identity. I used to be a scientist, but I don't do science any more. It's been very hard to let go of; to accept that I no longer know what's going on in my field of research (or anyone else's, for that matter), that I'm no longer in a position to conduct experiments. If I'm not doing science any more, I'm not really a scientist, am I? I talked to Sarah about the difference between human being and human doing and, although I've come across the conceptual distinction before and it has intuitive appeal, if I'm honest, I just don't get it.

I am wedded to the idea that what one is is defined by what one does simply because I can't envisage a human who is not doing anything. If you take away all activity, what is left? If anything is left, I can't see that it differentiates between one human and another. I'll try another tack. Suppose we take a quality such as, kindness. It might be true to say that someone is a kind person even when they're not doing very much at the time. But isn't kindness just a disposition to act kindly? I can't find any meaningful qualities that don't come back to action in the end. I am a human doing.

So, what do I do? This a question that is often asked in social situations, when meeting new people. It's one I have trouble with; I don't really know what the answer is. It's not a bad question, and the person asking it is simply trying to find out a bit more about me. When I had a job that I felt reflected my personal identity (even, formed a big part of my identity), I had no problem with this question. Answering it would be a very concise way of conveying a lot of information about myself. Now, I don't have that kind of job. The occupation I've chosen is unpaid, but that's not the main problem. I'm not sure that self-sufficient is a very good representation of who I am, not least because I'm not very good at it. Competence is a big deal for me, but I'll leave that for another time.

I now have a disconnect. I accept the identification of a person with what they do, yet what I've chosen to do with my life doesn't feel like who I really am. What am I, then? I think I've found an answer that might work for me. I used to think of myself as a scientist, but if I go back a little further, to my undergraduate days, I had a dual identity. I studied both philosophy and psychology and at the time, was equally happy identifying with either. I pursued psychology as a career mainly because it seemed like a more realistic option. Now I've stopped doing that, perhaps I can re-identify with the other branch of my studies? I never really left philosophy behind. Look at this blog post: It's all about picking ideas apart. Human being vs human doing? What does that really mean? What's the point of asking, What do you do?

Rodin's The Thinker

This is what I do: I think about things. I am a philosopher. That's not an answer I'll give when people ask, What do you do? It sounds pretentious and is also misleading. I'm not doing philosophy at the highest level, and I'm not getting paid to do it. However, it is an answer that gives me an identity I'm comfortable with. An intellectual life has value, at least in my world view. I need no longer feel that I'm trying and failing to be self sufficient. This answer is for me. I still need to find an answer for other people, for use in casual social situations, but I hope that now the question won't be poking at an open wound. If I'm happy with my own view of myself, I don't mind too much what other people think of me.

Introducing George

Oh dear, I've left my blog unattended for almost a month with a rat marauding around the kitchen. Well, the rat is no more. We bought an old fashioned spring trap and after ten days of moving it around and trying different baits, the rat succumbed to the temptation of flaked almonds perched tantalizingly close to the edge of the bait tray. It was a swift end. We've heard nothing since, and no food has been taken from the kitchen counters, so we're pretty sure that rat didn't have a family. Step 2 is to discourage further marauding by* getting another cat :-)

Allow me to present George:

He hadn't been outdoors before moving here, so it's taking a bit of getting used to. I think he's getting the hang of it, though he's not really relaxed out there, yet.

We spent ages thinking about names for him. The lady looking after him for the Cats' Protection League had called him Frodo, but we didn't think that suited him, as the hobbit was a dutiful, stoical sort of character, and the cat shows no sign of being either of those things. We nearly settled on 'Du' (Welsh for black, pronounced 'Dee') but it's just too short. I'm not sure where George came from, but it's the first name we thought of that we're both happy with.

He arrived yesterday, and has spent a lot of time exploring, checking things out, and falling off things that are too slippery for a large black cat to land safely on (e.g. edge of the kitchen sink).

He's met the neighbours, both feline and human, and was surprisingly friendly towards the latter. In fact, I'm generally surprised by how friendly he is towards us, though it takes him a few moments to recognize me if I've gone out of sight and reappear. Hopefully he'll remember who I am before too long.

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* Also by moving the compost heap further away from the house. I won't change what I put on the heap because by the time you've excluded everything that might be tempting to a rat, you hardly anything left to make compost from, and you also have the problem of storing rotting food waste in the house until it's time to send it to landfill.

There's a rat in the kitchen, what am I gonna do?

We borrowed our neighbour's trail camera to catch photographic evidence of the little blighters who've been keeping us awake at night. Most of the pictures were greatly over exposed because I'd set the camera too close to the hole where I thought they were coming in, but we did get a few clear images.

Not a mouse

That step behind him is three inches high, for scale.

If we get a cat now, it had better be a battle-hardened bruiser. I'm certainly not getting a kitten (I wouldn't anyway, when there are so many cats needing homes) - I've read The Tale of Samuel Whiskers!

Playing with willow

I recently started helping out at the gardening club of the local primary school. It's a lovely little rural school with a lovely garden that includes, as well as raised beds for veg and a herb garden, a living willow structure for children to play in. This is a dome tall enough for an adult to stand up in, with two tunnel entrances, one of which is certainly NOT tall enough for an adult. When I saw this structure just before Easter, it also wore a crown of shoots, about twelve feet tall. I commented on this to Charlotte, who runs the gardening club, and she said, Yes, that really needs attention. We'll probably have to get Sam in to deal with it. Noooooo! Sorry for taking your business, Sam, but I have my eye on that willow. I'll do it, I said.

I spent a pleasant couple of half-days in the school garden, weaving in and cutting willow. That is, they started pleasantly enough, but were pretty tiring after a few hours, especially the first day, when I'd forgotten to put the time on my phone forwards by an hour, so stayed an hour longer than I thought I had. It's no wonder that Ian came to see what had happened to me. He then went back for the car, as my original plan of bringing the cuttings home by sack truck didn't seem all that realistic.

Elly the 2CV, proving her worth in the last few days before she comes off the road to await funds for major surgery

I had a couple of plans for the willow, but before I got round to starting on them I had an Idea. It was one of those ideas that's just too tempting to ignore, so everything else gets pushed back to make way for it.

Idea, manifest

Can I make a bench out of willow? Yes, it seems that I can. Can I sit on it? Um, no, not as such... The idea is that all those willow twigs will take root, and as they grow they'll get stronger, and then we'll have a really cool living willow bench that we can actually sit on. Although willow takes root very easily, it really should have been planted about a month ago, before the leaves came out, so I'm not entirely confident that this will work, but I'm reasonably optimistic. In the meantime, I've moved the old bench a bit further along, so we can still use that.

Once I'd made the bench, I turned to more mundane applications. I cut lengths of the sturdiest pieces to stick in a soft bit of ground below the driveway, where the roots should help reinforce the ground and prevent the driveway sliding into the stream when it floods. I should also be able to harvest lots of shoots from these, for either firewood (poor quality, but high volume) or basketry. The medium thickness shoots were used to make a fence around the terrace, to replace the one I planted originally, that subsequently died. I'll take more care with watering, this time.

Willow fence, second attempt

I still have the top pieces that I cut off the sturdiest shoots, which is just as well, because I'd forgotten another use I thought of a while ago. When we moved here there were two wooden arches over our garden path. One of them was old and rotten, and is no more. I'd like to replace that with a living willow arch. I don't think the pieces I have left are long enough to make an arch, so that will have to be a longer term project, but none the worse for that. In the meantime, I was quite glad of the rain yesterday, otherwise I'd have a lot of watering to do.

Things that go bump in the night

Two nights in a row, we've been woken in the small hours of the morning by the sound of something falling to the floor in the kitchen. The first time, we couldn't find what had fallen. The second time, I went to investigate and found the small hammer, which had been sitting somewhat precariously on the edge of a shelf, on the floor. Precarious though it had been, it wouldn't have fallen off all by itself.

The mice have lived in this house longer than we have, I think. We hear them scrabbling about in the loft and they don't bother us at all. So long as they don't get into the kitchen cupboards, I'm quite happy for them to live there. Well, I say that, but I may have to revise that statement slightly in light of what I found this morning. Under a chair, behind a box of beer bottles...

... one chewed apple. That'll be what fell to the floor the first night, then. Ah, we don't keep all our food in cupboards - there is the fruit bowl, too, and it seems that at least one mouse has found it. I guess it knocked the hammer off whilst searching for more goodies. I think it's time we got another cat.

Nearly there!

Since I last posted, I've made more progress on the solar panel project (which is just as well, as I'm not doing anything else!) One job that I had thought might be beyond me was fitting a new electric socket into the cupboard where the pump is. I've never tackled mains electricity before, and didn't really know where to start. However, browsing through the Readers Digest DIY manual (as you do), I found nice clear instructions for taking a spur from one socket to supply another. That's exactly what I needed - I could use the socket across the hall that we'd been plugging the extension lead into. Far better to have the wire running under the floor than over it. All I had to do was lift the floor...

In one way, that wasn't too bad as I'd laid that bit of floor myself, so knew where I was with it. On the other hand, the pipes set into the floor had been connected up since then. At least they were flexible plastic, so should cope with having the board gently eased up. I did just that and, after a slight setback when I discovered that the wires to the socket went up, not down (so no hole in the floor beneath them), the job went entirely to plan, and I now have a new double socket in the cupboard. I also tidied up the wiring in there and added a switch for the pump. First I had to find a switch, which came to light when I took the coats off the coat rack before soldering just above them. There was a thermostat on the wall, no longer in use (obviously). That must have a switch in it! I thought. I took it to pieces and discovered not only a switch that's normally on, push button for off, but also a wiring diagram. Perfect. This enables the pump to be switched off with the solenoid valve left open, which is necessary for draining the system. In addition to a switch, the pump now has a connected earth wire. Yes, I know.

Believe it or not, this is the after tidying photo.

I've connected up all the plumbing. This included a few solder joints, most of which were done twice, though in my defense, I was dodging hail showers at the time, and re-doing the leaky connector over the coat rack that I hadn't quite fixed last time I tried. I'd expected the compression joints to be relatively easy, but even they threw up a few challenges. One pipe running down the side of a radiator wouldn't go past the plug I'd put in the other corner, but luckily I had a flatter one in a different corner, so could swap them around. In spite of writing Make sure 1st and 2nd boxes are close enough together for flexi-hose on my list, they weren't, but I solved that by bending the solid pipe instead of cutting it to only just longer than the box. When I went to raid the old radiators for bleed valves, I found that most of them had the grub screws missing. I don't know how that happened - I don't remember taking them out. I used a cap in place of one bleed valve - it works almost as well. Finally, I nearly destroyed two nuts trying to tighten a joint that I'd failed to put an olive in. Luckily, I checked.

Having made all the connections, I needed to fill the system to check for leaks. That meant going up into the loft, which meant a ladder that I discovered, on first climbing it, wasn't very firm on the floor. That is, the floor is dusty and the ladder slipped. I caught it before it went too far, but came down quickly and resolved not to go up again without someone to hold the bottom. Ian being out at work, I called on a neighbour, who kindly came round and held the ladder for me, and was quite interested to see the rest of the system too. Much to my surprise, not to say delight, there were no leaks. Not one.

The next step was to replace the plain water in the system with an antifreeze* mix. I'd originally thought of mixing it up in a watering can then pouring it into the header tank in the loft. Unfortunately there wasn't enough headroom above the tank for that plan to work. When Ian got home from work I asked for his input on the problem. He thought a bit then said, I do have that 12 volt pump and hose that I used to use for biodiesel. Maybe we could pump it up there. I have a spare battery, too. While he went off to fetch those things, I continued to search for inspiration on the internet. Surely other people have solved this problem? Well yes, but most of them solved it at the design stage, incorporating charging valves into the system for this very purpose. Then I came across the following very useful advice:

you could try this "cheapskate" approach:

Make no connection whatsoever to the water main. Use a 5L house-plant sprayer (Hozelock). Remove spray head, fill container with antifreeze water mix, attach hose to system drain and pump. The pump will easily deliver up to 3 bar.

I wasn't sure whether our pump could deliver that kind of pressure, but filling through the drain would be a lot easier than getting the pump within reach of the header tank. It had to be worth a go.

Pump in a bucket of bright pink antifreeze, powered by car battery and battery booster

It worked, just about. We ran the system pump to help it, and there was lots of running out to open bleed valves, then close them again in case the antifreeze all escaped as well as opening and closing the drain to take liquid in, then not let it out again. This required a lot of coordination between the two of us. The pump didn't quite manage the last litre and a half, so Ian took that up to the loft in a jug, and I think we may need to top up with a bit more water, as there are distinct gurgling sounds when the pump's running. However, we now have all the panels connected up and full of antifreeze, ready to go. The controller is doing its thing, and reporting slightly more information than it was last time I wrote about it.

Controller display, now fixed to the shelf

In addition to sensors in the panel and in the tank, I now have one on the pipe just before it goes into the tank. Ideally, this should be at about the same temperature as the panel when the pump's running, but as you can see, it's considerably lower. That means we've lost almost 20°C between the panel and the tank. Not good. Insulation is needed.

I started insulating the pipes around the panels, but I need to improve on this. I'll do more when the weather's better.

More shiny wrapping will be added

For the next stage of their journey the pipes cross the conservatory. I had an idea that since they're running under a transparent roof, maybe they could absorb some more sunlight on the way. It's probably a daft idea, but I persevered. Using an offcut of the roof itself, I made thee sides of a box.

Bent polycarbonate roofing

It is possible to bend polycarbonate cold, but only if you can take it a lot further than the angle you need, to allow for spring back. I couldn't do that, so had to apply heat. This meant waving a blowtorch at a piece of plastic I was holding in my hand. I managed not to burn myself, which is quite remarkable considering how often I burn myself on the oven. The other day I even managed to burn my finger on one of the solar panels. Yes, it did get that hot!

To go inside the box, I taped up some of the thin insulation for behind radiators and pleated a few layers between the pipes, and some more around them. Just the top was left open to the sunshine. When I say open, I mean covered by twin-wall polycarbonate roofing.

Boxed-in pipes

I'm not entirely convinced by this, but it has to be better than it was. If nothing else, it's a lot tidier.

Items remaining on my list are: Insulate pipes and touch up paint on window frames, both of which are waiting for better weather, screw down window on first box, which I'll do when I'm quite sure the system doesn't need bleeding any more, fix blinds to boxes, which can wait, as it's only needed if we go away in the summer, and possibly not even then, figure out clock for controller and program data logging, the first of which I spent quite a lot of time on today, and one I added yesterday, calibrate sensors. When I checked first thing, the display reported that the panel was at -2°C but there was no sign of frost, so it's evidently not accurate. I had meant to do this before I taped the sensor to the back of a solar panel, but I forgot.

As for figuring out a clock, this is so I can record temperatures and keep track of when they occur. People usually use an external, battery powered clock for this, but it is possible to make the Aruduino keep track of time and date after taking a time signal from a PC to start it off. I spent a long time looking up how to do this (it's here, if you're interested), then this afternoon our electricity kept flicking on and off, reminding me why the external clock's a good idea. I guess I'll be getting one of those then. That means more soldering. Hmph.

So there we are, nearly finished. The only remaining job that's going to make a difference to the effectiveness of the panels is adding insulation, and I'm well on the way with that. All I need now is some sunshine.

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* I spent far too long considering what kind of antifreeze to use. Our system has the unusual feature of two walls of copper between the solar loop and the drinking water. This means I'm not constrained to use non-toxic antifreeze (if you have only one wall of copper separating them, you should use propylene glycol, which is food safe, in case there's a leak. Otherwise you might end up poisoning your drinking water), so could consider other alternatives. Methanol has a low freezing point, low viscosity, and an even higher specific heat capacity than water. It would be absolutely ideal if it weren't for - and I found this fact very frustrating - its tendency to evaporate, filling the space with poisonous, explosive gas. I settled for car antifreeze in the end, which is pretty much where I started from.