"How can I justify my lifestyle?"

I made this comment in a conversation with EcoCatLady about why I feel a lot of pressure for the garden to produce food, and she pulled me up short:

OK... just playing devil's advocate here, but I personally think that no one should have to "justify" a lifestyle of "pottering* around the garden and playing in the kitchen." at least not in a moral or ethical sense.

This has prompted a great deal of thought on my part, and I've already attempted and deleted one post on the subject (I rambled on and didn't get anywhere). After sleeping on it, I think I've worked out what I meant by that comment, and why I was wrong.

Although at the time I wrote it I did indeed mean it in a moral sense, I don't think that's actually where the pressure (in me) is coming from. It matters to me a lot that the garden produces food, but why?

My last job was quite a high-status position, as was the one before that. People asked my opinion and listened to what I said, and whatever I may think about the system in which that status mattered, that was how it was. What I do for a living has always been a big part of my identity – my own image of who I am – so having status inevitably ended up being part of my self-image, too.

I was very happy to give that up in exchange for a better life, but when I take a long, hard look at myself, I realise that my sense of self-worth may have taken a bit of a battering. In place of that status, I feel the need to have something to show for what I've done. I've put a lot of work into the garden, and I want it to give me something back so I can say, Look what I've done! Look at all these veg - I did that!

Now, I'm well aware of the things that can go wrong in a garden, and allowing my sense of self-worth to depend on the vagaries of weather, slugs, caterpillars and tomato blight is obviously not a good idea. More to the point, focusing on outcomes is generally not a good way to engage with life. Learning from EcoCatLady's recent, inspirational blog post, if we spend all our time focusing on what we've done, we miss out on the experience of doing it in the first place (read her post - she says it better). By getting too hung up on what the garden produces, I'm in danger of forgetting that the point of this new life is that I get to spend my time doing gardening.

I need to learn to value the doing, and give less weight to what I can acheive.

... I'm trying to compose a suitable conclusion here, but struggling. I think this is because this issue is something I need to give a lot more thought to. Maybe I'll come back to it when I have something more to say.

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* I looked it up and yes, puttering is American for pottering, or vice versa if you must ;-)

Rhubarb cordial and things to do with the leftovers

A friend we visited the other day, having noticed from my blog that my rhubarb is rubbish this year, gave me a big bag full of hers. How kind!

Rhubarb, cleaned and resting on the big mixing bowl. It's huge!

I'd had my eye on the rhubarb cordial recipe over at Colour it Green, so that was what I planned to do first. I started by chopping all the rhubarb into the jamming kettle, which took a while, then cooked it without water (I was surprised it didn't need any water, but it didn't). It really did need an hour for all of it to squish down, and it needed stirring fairly frequently, too.

Having stewed all the fruit*, I then needed to hang it up overnight to strain the juice out. The tricky bit is finding something to hang it from. Our kitchen is the old fashioned kind that has cup hooks everywhere. It also has a wooden beam running along the middle of the ceiling, so I thought there was a fair chance the two might come together. Sure enough, when I looked for it, there it was!

Cup hook in beam in the kitchen

Having found that, I had to get the stuff up there. I didn't have a jelly bag, but I do have a big piece of muslin, which just about went round the fruit as I had it folded. Several scalded fingers later, I had the bundle tied up with string and stood on a stool to tie it to the hook. Thankfully, the hook was strong enough to take the weight.

Bundle of stewed rhubarb hanging over a bowl

It was amazing that such an uninspiring brown sludge produced such pretty pink juice. The next morning it was still dripping slowly, so I left it until I'd done various other jobs, then took it down, drips or no. I was surprised to find that the juice was already quite syrupy at this stage. Then it was just a matter of adding sugar (to taste - I can't be bothered with measuring and weighing) and drinking some - to test it, of course ;-)

Green isn't the best colour of bottle for such a pretty pink drink,
but it's what I had

So what about the leftovers? I still had a huge quantity of stewed (if unsweetened - important not to forget that bit) rhubarb sitting in a bowl. Crumble is the obvious answer, but Ian doesn't like it. I fancied having a go at fool, with a vague memory of a gooseberry fool recipe that was basically just fruit and cream. I though I'd better check this, though, and consulted Delia. She said that there were various ways to make fool, but this was the best, and proceeded with a complicated recipe involving egg custard. I ignored Delia and tried Rose Elliot, who said that fool can be made with custard, cream or yoghurt. That's more like it, and I didn't really need a recipe.

I did need cream though, which I didn't have... as such. I'd read on the 'ish forum that it's possible to return butter to its original state (i.e. cream) by melting it in milk and whizzing up in a food processor. The proportions vary from half as much butter as milk for single cream to equal quantities for double. With this in mind, I'd bought some unsalted butter last time we went to the supermarket, about three weeks ago (the usual salted would be OK for savoury things, but not sweet) as they don't sell cream in the local shop. This unexpected rhubarb bonanza entirely justified this decision!

I whizzed up the warm milk and butter in the food processor** then added the stewed fruit and some sugar. The machine didn't mix it very well as it was too gloopy, but with a bit of poking it got there in the end.

Rhubarb fool. Don't comment, please.

It's really not pretty, but it is very tasty. Even Ian liked it :-)


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* No, not technically fruit, it's stems, but it's used as fruit, OK?

** In the interests of reducing electricity usage, I would mix up the cream with a whisk - which works, but probably not as well as the blender - and putting up with lumps from the stewed fruit. Ian, on the other hand, doesn't like bits in his yoghurt and as he hasn't tried fool before, I didn't want to take any chances with the texture.

First harvest: new potatoes

This afternoon I decided that I can't wait any longer - I'm going to dig up new potatoes and eat them for dinner, even if they're so small that I have to dig up half a row to get enough for a meal.

I identified my victim:

I didn't choose this one just because that's where I'd left the fork, honest

I dug it up...

Yep, there are definitely potatoes in there

... and harvested several actual potatoes! After I'd forced Ian to be impressed, then washed them, I weighed them to see how much I'd got from one plant.

Eleven ounces of very white new potatoes

I'm not sure whether or not I'll keep this up, but I would like to have a record of what yield I get from all the veg in the garden. In the meantime, this is the first harvest of a crop I've planted in this garden, and I'm very excited about it! I'm also very much looking forward to eating my fresh new potatoes for dinner. Yipee!!!

How not to get eaten alive

I've never been much bothered by midges and other biting, flying things before. I think I've usually managed to hang around people who are tastier than me, so get off lightly. Here, though, we have Welsh monster midges, and I tend to be out in the garden in the evenings, so my arms have ended up covered in itchy spots. Time for action!

We have a huge wormwood bush in the garden, which, apart from providing absinthe with its mystique*, is reputed to repell insects. It was the latter property that I intended to use.

I cut a bundle of branches of wormwood and stripped the leaves off into a basin (pudding basin, not the kind you wash your hands in). This was very tedious. I then added enough olive oil to coat all the leaves, mashed it about a bit, and left it to infuse, poking it from time to time. The next day, I separated the oil from the leaves with the help of a bit of old net curtain, i.e. I bundled the mixture into the net and squeezed all the oil out. The last bits were very dark brown, but I reckoned they'd probably have most of the scent in. I also added a couple of drops of lavender essence, as I happened to have a bottle.

I could have left it at that, and just applied the oil to my skin, but I fancied something a bit nicer, so I made it into moisturiser. This required first heating the oil. I had some chicken stock on the go, so rather than heat another pan, I stuck the basin in the top of the stock. A bit sticky, but effective!

Scented oil and beeswax stealing heat from chicken stock

The reason for heating the oil is that beeswax must be melted into it, so I added a bit. Once that was melted, I took it off the heat and whisked while it cooled down. Here I discovered the difference doing this in summer rather than winter. In cold weather, it very quickly reached the creamy stage and I had to act quickly before the whole lot went solid. That didn't happen this time. In fact, it didn't reach the creamy stage at all. I was aiming for body butter but got cold gravy.

More beeswax needed, then. I repeated the process, adding a bit more wax then whisking as it cooled. I also added a bit of water when it started to thicken, which it did this time. I'm not particularly fussed about the moisturising properties of this - the water was mainly to help reduce the resemblance to gravy. In this it was successful, and once it was in a nice glass pot, the finished cream didn't look too bad at all.

Insect repellant cream

The important question, though, is does it work? I tested it this evening, applying it to face, neck and arms, and going out to brave the midges. I did a bit of weeding round the onions and carrots, from where I've been driven indoors on other occasions, and... I didn't get bitten! It's possible that with today being a bit cooler and windier than other days there weren't so many of them around, so it's not a definitive test, but so far so good! I'll keep using it and let you know whether it's any good.

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*Wormwood is used to flavour absinthe. It contains a chemical called thujone which is hallucinogenic, which did much to bolster absinthe's reputation as a dangerous drink. In fact, if you drank enough absinthe to get hallucinations, you'd be dead from the alcohol.

How does my garden grow?

I keep telling myself not to be complacent about the garden. Yes, things seem to be growing well, but there are all manner of catastrophes that might befall it yet. Things could die of drought, or be drowned by too much rain, or be flattened by high winds. They could be eaten by slugs or snails or caterpillars or aphids or birds or one of many other pests out there. They could catch one or many of various deadly diseases. And let's not forget the potential for destruction by one small, lunatic cat.

It was only when I was showing my neighbour round the garden and said, Of course, it might all die, that her startled look brought me up short. Is this pessimism really warranted? More to the point, why am I being so pessimistic? It's completely out of character. Maybe it's because it's so important.

I'm giving myself a year's trial. If, at the end of a year, the new lifestyle isn't working, I'll have to abandon the dream and go back to my old life (by which I mean, try to get a job). A lot hangs on whether the garden produces a good harvest or not. It might also be that I've been very stressed about other things recently, so less inclined to optimism generally. Either way, it's time to stop being so negative about it all and appreciate what's actually going on in the garden.

The potato plants are huge...

Potatoes. Beans in the foreground.

... and flowering...

Flowers on the first early potatoes. The maincrop aren't flowering yet.

... as are the tomatoes (just)...

I had several goes at getting this tomato flower in focus. It's not quite there, but you get the idea.

... and the broad beans...

I think all of the broad beans have flowers on them now.

... and the earliest of the peas (the ones I sowed directly outside, then thought they'd died of cold).

This is the second pea flower I've found. I don't mind so much that the sweet peas didn't germinate when the edible pea flowers are so pretty.

These peas are quite big and already flowering (I just said that, didn't I?) and I also have medium-sized, just-germinated, and only-just-sown peas. I finally got the last of them in the ground a few days ago, which I believe is the very latest you can get away with. It remains to be seen whether I have, in fact, got away with it.

The runner beans my neighbours gave me last weekend (I must take some plants round in exchange!) are climbing:

Runner beans, just starting to wrap themselves round the canes

The carrots and onions are looking quite convincing:

Carrot and onion seedlings. And the odd stray potato.

Several red cabbages have so far survived slug attacks:

Young red cabbage. Small stones have been gathered from the surrounding flower bed to deter slugs.

There are many strawberries, taunting us with their pale greenness:

We wait with eager anticipation for these to turn red.

and the blackcurrants are rapidly ripening:

Soon I'll be making blackcurrant jam and cordial and wine. Possibly not all of those, and possibly not in that order of priority.

When I look at it, there are many things to be happy about in the garden.

Cutting down on waste, one thing at a time

I've been reading a few blogs recently in which people record all the rubbish, particularly plastic rubbish, that they dispose of in a week, or maybe in a day. I thought about doing this myself, then wondered what the value of such an exercise would be to me. I could pile up all my rubbish, document and photograph it, and think, Whoa! That's a lot of rubbish! or alternatively feel smug and think, That's not as bad as I thought it would be. Either way, what do I acheive?

If I ended up feeling smug, that obviously wouldn't be a very constructive outcome, but the other alternative is far more likely, and presumably this is the point of doing it. Would I then be motivated to cut down on how much stuff I throw away? Ignoring for a moment the fact that my main problem is bringing myself to throw anything away, ever, I'm not sure it would make that much difference. I'm already aware of the issues of excess packaging and I already have an almost pathological aversion to waste. However, we do still buy things that have some packaging, and a lot of this gets thrown away.

I think that rather than looking at packaging as a whole, a more productive approach for me is to pick on one item at a time and find an alternative way of doing things that doesn't involve throwing that thing away regularly. A little while ago, I switched from disposable sponge scourers for the washing up to homemade, washable discloths.

I make my own bread and I've been bothered by the piece of oiled cling film I use to cover the dough while it's rising, which gets thrown away with each loaf. I've long been aware of what they did in the days before cling film - they used a damp cloth - but I was a bit nervous about this method. What if I couldn't dry it out quickly - wouldn't it get smelly? What if it stuck to the dough - wouldn't it be horrendous to get the sticky dough out of the cloth? Recently I decided to get over these worries and just try it.

Rising bread dough under damp cloth

It actually sticks less than the oiled cling film, and when it does stick it's easier to peel off, so that's an improvement. As for drying it out, whenever I need to dry it, I have the oven on, almost by definition, so I can always hang it over the warm air vent at the top of the oven and it always dries. No doubt this is the way it's always been done.

Liquid soap for cheats

It is possible to make liquid soap from scratch, using potassium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide, and I intend to try it someday. In the meantime, we've run out of shower gel and I have no potassium hydroxide. It's pretty easy to make solid soap into liquid; just grate it into hot water and stir.

Soap in hot water

You can stop there if you like, or you can add glycerine if you feel like it, and anything else that seems appropriate. For the first attempt, I added a very small amount of glycerine, because that was all I had, and a bit of shampoo, which turned it pink and scented it surprisingly strongly. This shower gel was rather drying on the skin, probably also due to the shampoo. That one went into a handwash bottle and a second batch attempted. This time I just added glycerine, but quite a lot of it (having bought some more in the meantime*) - probably about one fifth of the total quantity.

This soap-in-water is most peculiar stuff. After it's cooled it remains the consistency of water for some time. It's only about 24 hours later that it becomes a gel.

Yes, this picture is supposed to be this way round. I'm showing you the jelly-nature of the shower gel.

This one is much less drying, though I did get complaints of 'tackiness' on the skin. Maybe not quite so much glycerine next time.

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*Glycerine is sold in Boots as budget cough medicine, at £1.69 for 200ml. It is also sold in supermarket home baking sections, from 65p for 38ml, which is twice the price and much more packaging.

Another tour

To go with the tour of the village, I've written another tour, this time of my garden and associated bits of hillside. I've posted this as a page, just in case you feel like referring to it when I'm talking about some bit of garden or other and you wonder where that is. Look to the right - there should be a link just there, A tour of the grounds, May 2011.

A tour of Devil's Bridge

I'm pinching this idea from Susie, who wrote a lovely post on the ordinary, day-to-day aspects of where she lives, which is Cambridge... except that when it comes to it, I'm not really pinching her idea at all. Her post is all about the non-touristy, boring bits of Cambridge. I started thinking about what I could say about where I live if I left the touristy bits out and frankly, I got a bit stuck. The thing is, whereas Cambridge has plenty of things that are not at all touristy, Devil's Bridge is built around tourism. This isn't a recent phenomenon - there was a grand estate that posh people used as a summer retreat, and the village developed from that. So here it is: The ordinary, everyday bits of living in Devil's Bridge, tourism included. I won't show you the bridge, though.

Bilingual signposts

So... Welcome to Devil's Bridge, or Croeso y Pontarfynach - take your pick. This really is a bilingual community and we're going to have to learn Welsh. We've encountered no hostility from the locals at all - quite the opposite, people here are very friendly and pride themselves on their lack of racism against the English - but the fact is that conversations go on in Welsh. For example, meetings are conducted in English (if English people are present - very generous of the locals, really), but as soon as people relax (which they tend to do quite readily), they slip into Welsh.

It's not an easy language. Quite apart from the double 'L's and the different sounds for some of the consonants (e.g. Welsh single 'f' sounds the same as English 'v'), there's the spelling. The village name, Pontarfynach, means 'Bridge of the monks' but 'monk' is 'mynach' - so why the change of consonant? Here's a close-up of that footpath sign:

If I was in Borth I might think it worth walking 18 miles to get here,
but not the other way round

Notice how the village name is spelt two different ways on the two signposts? I'm told this isn't random - there's a right and a wrong way to do this, depending on context. I can see that learning Welsh is going to be quite a major challenge. I'm not very good at languages in the first place.

Another thing about the village name is that the English name isn't even a direct translation of the Welsh. In English we have the devil whereas in Welsh we have monks. My theory is that monks actually built the original bridge, but when the English arrived here, they were so amazed at this technical achievement that they said it wasn't possible that any mortal could have built such a bridge (even if he did have God on his side) - it had to be the work of the devil! So we have Devil's Bridge in English and Monk's Bridge in Welsh. From this I conclude that it would be unwise to underestimate Welsh monks.

We have a community woodland, planted as a millenium project.

There are many signposts to the woods, in various languages

Coed y bobol is my favourite Welsh phrase so far - Wood of the people - bobol/people - do you see the connection? I love spotting links between languages, even if I'm rubbish at learning to actually speak them. I think this woodland is a lovely idea, but it's also quite amusing, as it's tiny in comparison to the acres of woods all over the surrounding hillsides.

Here's the local pub:

Hafod Hotel, Devil's Bridge

The front of the tea rooms were given a lick of paint this spring, ahead of the tourist season, but the pub sign remains illegible under moss and algae. The buildings you can see in this picture are all connected, and are the remains of the country retreat - Hafod - that the village grew up around. It's now a hotel, but there's a strong community focus. They run events like regular quiz nights (which we've yet to go to - we need some friends so we can make up a team) and live music. It's a great pub, even if we can't understand half of what people are saying.

We're very well catered for tea-rooms here. As well as the hotel, there's the station cafe and Y Caban.

I've done these establishments great disservice by not photographing them when they're open, but I get a bit embarrased taking photos of tourists. I don't know why - they take photos of my house all the time*

As you may have guessed from the picture, this is not a mainline station, but the terminus of a lovingly preserved steam railway.

We don't wave at the trains every time any more

The railway line goes right past our house - railway empolyees even have right of access down our driveway to the railway line - and the train goes past four times a day (twice in each direction) during the summer, and eight times on busy days. The train punctuates our days; we hear the whistle as it echoes around the valley - at one point we hear the echo before the original sound - and turn to look out of the window, or over the garden hedge, as the train goes by. The passengers are mostly looking at the view in the other direction, but sometimes they look our way, and sometimes we wave.

Sadly, the train is no use at all as a means of transport. The first train of the day starts in Aberystwyth, so that's no use, and similarly the last one ends up there. We could catch the second train into town. It would take an hour to get there (vs. 20 min by car), then we'd have half an hour in town before we'd have to get the next train back again. It's not even long enough to buy fish and chips!

Bus shelter, used mainly for displaying posters.

We also have a bus shelter, but don't try to catch a bus from there. There is a bus that goes into town three times a week. If you want to catch it, you have to phone up the day before and let them know, and when it turns up, it's a car.

Plane with propellers. I don't know what it is. Ian probably knows.

Planes are quite a big feature of living here, too. We quite like these ones with the propellers. They're not too loud, they're quite cool, and they're slow enough to photograph. We're less keen on the military jets that weave in and out of the mountains, low enough that you wouldn't want to be in a double-decker bus when one flew over (that's if there were any buses round here). These are way too fast to catch on camera and are very, very loud. Every so often one goes directly overhead and so low that the noise is just overwhelming. I can understand why dogs don't like fireworks when those go over.

I can't finish my tour of Devil's Bridge without mentioning the village shop.

Village shop

They don't actually do B&B. They did for a while, but stopped. The sign predates the current owners and their period of B&Bing. Maybe they'll have another go sometime in the future, and the sign will be true again.

We go there frequently, usually just to buy milk, and we're on first name terms with the people who own it, and their daughter. They're very keen on supporting local producers, so they tend to have high-quality produce. Our neighbour who keeps bees down in the valley somewhere (too high for them up here) sells her honey there. The owners have chickens of their own and if they have a surplus of eggs, those will be for sale, too. If I have a glut of veg in the summer, I may try to sell some of it through the shop. The owners also tell us about local events they think we might be interested in. It's a proper hub of the community.

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*Not because my house is particularly picturesque, but because if you stand on a certain footbridge to take photos of the steam train, my house is in the background. Ian even found a picture of the house in a book on steam railways in an antique shop. Naturally, he had to buy the book.

Recipe for wild green pies

By popular demand (OK it was just Louisa who asked, but I'm sure she's very popular!) here's the recipe for wild green pies. First, though, a note on equipment. My love of pies (making them, that is) began when I bought this:

Diablo toasted sandwich maker. Leaves a lot of offcut corners if used for sandwiches, but excellent for pies

I've since learnt that a similar item is being sold on ebay which is a better shape, cheaper, and appears to be handmade. I wish I'd found that first! Anyway, this nifty little gadget means I don't have to heat up the oven just for one little pie as it can be cooked, albeit rather slowly, on the hob. The downside is that when the filling gets hot and boils, it tends to come out of the sides, which makes a terrible mess of the cooker!

Back to the recipe:

First, make pastry. I generally allow 2oz (bog standard white) flour per pie, but I often get some left over. For the fat, I use whatever meat fat I have in the fridge - usually lard - though I have to admit butter tastes better. Quantity is half as much butter as flour (i.e. 1oz per pie) though butter's not 100% fat, so if I'm using meat fat I use less; 3/4oz per pie. Rub the fat into the flour with your fingertips, then add water, very little at a time. I always use a knife and mix it in with a cutting action. I don't know why, but my mum taught me to do it this way. Add water until you get a soft dough, or until it's sticky, in which case you've added too much water (easily done), then you need to add a bit more flour until it looks about right. If I'm organised enough, I leave the pastry to rest in the fridge for a bit before rolling it out.

Now, the bit you really wanted to know about was the filling, wasn't it? There are two ingredients here: cheese and wild greens. I've tried several variations on this, with different degrees of success. In the first version, the greens were entirely ground elder because that's all that was in season at the time, and the cheese was local, fresh (i.e. young) goats cheese that I'd bought, expensively, at the farmers' market. The cheese was light and lemony and the result was delicious. For the second version (the rolls pictured in the previous post), I tried to buy a similar cheese again, and got something from the supermarket labelled, Welsh soft cheese, which turned out to be more like brie. There was a greater mixture of greens this time, though I had trouble getting ground elder. Ironically, as the leaves grow bigger, it's harder to harvest, because the youngest, tenderest leaves get hidden amongst the older, tougher ones. This mix was about half nettle, and quite a high proportion of sorrel, to make up for the lack of citrus flavour in the cheese. I also included what ground elder I could find (not very much), some chives and Welsh onion leaves (essentially the same thing) and a few leaves of sweet rocket, which is not the same thing as salad rocket, but is also edible and has a strong flavour. That mix was also delicious. The third version, yesterday, used a similar mix of leaves but cream cheese - one Philadelphia mini tub - and that wasn't so good. The quality of the cheese is evidently important here.

Quantities: You really need a lot of greens, as they squash down a lot when they're cooked. I gathered a large colander full for the little rolls, and I think it was the same for two pies the first time I made them. Yesterday I didn't gather quite so much, and only had enough for one pie. The cheese should be just enough to stick this together. I used half of one of those litte rounds, which I think is 50g, for two pies/five rolls.

Method: Chop the greens finely. If you're using nettles, it's a good idea to wilt them first by cooking briefly in a little boiling water. You're much less likely to get stung this way! Once the greens are chopped, mix in the cheese thoroughly. With the brie-type cheese, I settled for chopping it into small pieces, but with the goats cheese I really mashed it up. There you have your pie filling. Wrap in pastry in whatever way seems best, and cook. I think I'd give it about 15-20 min in the oven at gas mark 5 or 6, but I'm sure you can figure it out. If you want to make the rolls, it goes like this:

Pie filling on pastry, prior to rolling up, trimming off excess pastry, and cutting into pieces.