Cultivating plants: Willow

This is another plant for the terrace, but not ground cover, obviously. When I first planted up the terrace, I included some plants lower down to help support the sides, namely willow and buddleia. Unfortunately, there was a dry spell shortly after planting, I failed to water these plants enough (at all? I can't remember) and most of the willow cuttings died.

Last summer, I noticed a couple of saplings coming up in places where I don't want trees, and my friend Gill identified them as willow.

A just-visible willow (salix something) sapling growing by the woodstore

These will do to replace some of the willow cuttings that died. I don't know what kind they are - probably goat willow (salix caprea) which doesn't root from cuttings as easily at the other species, but if I'm lucky it'll be something else, or a hybrid with something else, and will take like wildfire. I pulled up both saplings - the ground's so wet at the moment that it doesn't take much to pull up the roots of just about anything - and took a few cuttings from each. All of these - rooted pieces as well as cuttings - went around the terrace. There were six, maybe seven pieces altogether. They didn't look much when I put them in, but with luck they'll take, and then I can take more cuttings from them next year and eventually willow reinforcement holding the terrace up. It hasn't collapsed yet...

Other garden tasks this week

• Continuing to move soil and plants to the terrace.
• Clearing space and making a stone and tile platform for a new gas bottle, to replace the big gas tank, which is almost empty. This included moving a couple of acquilegia plants.
  
  
  Gas bottle sitting on its new platform. I have since lifted this and added more stones underneath, but it's still lower than the surrounding soil. Oh well, it'll have to do.
• Cutting back the elder tree and taking some cuttings. Hopefully the old tree will regrow from the stump to produce flowers and fruit that I can actually reach.
• Bramble reduction, and cutting back a hazel tree, both on the steep bit by the oak tree. There are many more brambles still to reduce.

Also harvesting this week
Brocolli
Bay leaves
Rosemary
Leeks
Ground elder
Bittercress
Sorrel

Also eating
Potatoes (last of)
French beans (from dried)
Ceps (last of), birch boletes and blusher mushrooms, all from dried
Honeysuckle ale (as gravy)

Also drinking
Beech leaf wine
Oak leaf wine
Honeysuckle ale
Blackcurrant cordial

Cultivated plants challenge summary page here.

Cultivating plants: Sagina subulata

I'm using the Latin name for this plant because the common name, Irish Moss, is doubly confusing. Firstly, it's not a moss and secondly, there's a seaweed that's also known as Irish Moss. I am not attempting to cultivate seaweed, though we have enough water at the moment. In fact, we've had so much weather this week...

Too much weather

... that it was only the prospect of writing this blog post that made me get of my backside and get out into the garden for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon. Excellent! That is the point of the blogging challenge.

I've written about this plant before, amongst others, in the context of ground cover for the terrace. Well, sorry to be boring, but I'm doing the same again. About a year ago, I wrote about feeding the terrace - adding a thick layer of mulch to top up the level - and at that time I was waiting anxiously to see which plants would survive the treatment. Suffice to say, I now know how to kill buttercups. I spent last summer with a brown terrace.

The terrace has continued to sink down so this year I've fed it again, but this time I'm topping it with a thin layer of soil and replanting. I haven't got very far with this job, and I'm not sure how thoroughly it will get done, but I have made a start.

Replanting the terrace

The scrubby-looking plants in the middle are Sagina sabulata. There are some buttercups to the right and in the foreground, there's Germander speedwell. It's a well-established plant with long runners that I've tried to pull up through the mulch and soil as I've applied it. Hopefully all three will spread over the surface of the terrace, with or without the top layer of soil.

Other garden tasks this week
While I was outside I finished weeding the second asparagus bed (of three and a bit) and spread some seaweed over it, plus some compost from the heap. This should have been done in the autumn, but better late than never.

Also harvesting this week
Leeks
Parsnips
Ground elder
Celery

Also eating
Potatoes
Hazelnuts

Also drinking
Dandelion wine
Oak leaf wine
Beech leaf wine
Hopped ale

Cultivated plants challenge summary page here.

Alternative radiators

The stormy weather led to a power cut here last night and for most of today. Whilst feeling smug that we didn't have damp down the fire (water from stove to tank doesn't require a pump, designed this way in case of power cuts), I had to concede that the heat wasn't circulating from the tank around the house very effectively without the pump. However, the hot water doesn't depend on electricity, as it's just mains water running through a coil in the hot tank. Therefore we could spread the heat around by putting hot water into lidded pots to make temporary radiators.

Cooking pot pressed into service as a radiator

An extra layer of clothing helped, too.

A much bigger challenge

My blogging challenge for this year is to do and write about some gardening each week, and I'm not expecting it to be a particularly difficult challenge. That said, the weather is keeping me indoors at the moment - the wind is making it dangerous to go out - so I'm not sure what I'm going to write about this week. Anyway, there's a much bigger challenge ahead of me: It would seem that now is the time to learn Welsh.

We've lived here for over three years, now, and there's a limit to how long you can keep saying, Yes, I am going to learn, before you actually have to do something about it. Our friends next door have signed up to Welsh lessons and another friend, who is Welsh, has started a new class in which he talks about local history in both Welsh and English. This seems to be excellent practice for those who know a bit of Welsh, but at the first one I felt totally out of my depth. Rather than chickening out, which is tempting but shameful, I need to pull my finger out and learn at least a few words, so I can catch some of what he's saying in Welsh and not feel totally at sea. First, I need to stop panicking whenever someone speaks Welsh to me.

To this end, I've found a couple of teach-yourself courses to have a go at. I went to the local library and searched until I found one that doesn't insist on just listening without having anything written down - it's so much easier to hear the breaks between words if you can see them written down as well - and includes some instruction in grammar, instead of insisting that it's unnecessary. The library courses were all for the southern version of Welsh, from which I conclude that this is the appropriate form round here, bang in the middle. Then I was talking to someone at a wedding on Saturday, and she said that we're in the north here. Help! I resorted to Google and, unsurprisingly, the question has been asked before. One answer was particularly helpful: I live in the North and their accent/language sounds very much like the South Wales accent to us. ... Having said this someone from, say, Carmarthen, might think it sounds more like the North. That at least explains why I'm getting conflicting information - the young woman at the wedding was from Carmarthen. I'll take my cue from the library and learn the southern version.

The second course I've found is provided by the BBC. Called the Big Welsh Challenge, this course claims to teach Welsh in 12 months. This sounds optimistic to me, but I'll give it a go. It has nice little videos with subtitles available in both Welsh and English, and plenty of supporting materials. Now all I have to do is commit the time and effort to working through these courses. Maybe one day, when people are talking Welsh around me, I'll be able to follow what they're saying. Who knows, I might even be able to join in!

Cultivating plants: Roses

Considering the time of year, I was surprised to find I had a choice of plants to feature this week. With a bit of brighter weather, I did some moving around of plants - various plants. However, the roses in question have not been moved, but strung up.

There was a pyracantha growing against the wall in what I've now labelled Veg patch A. You can see it in the second photo of this post. It didn't contribute much to the garden, apart from providing a hiding place for bindweed roots. I decided to get rid of it, to increase potato-growing space, so earlier this week I did just that. The task was made slightly more difficult by the presence of roses growing through it. This wouldn't matter if I wanted to take them all out, but I like roses so I was cutting one thorny plant into small pieces while trying not to get scratched by another thorny plant that I had to avoid cutting.

Once I'd got rid of the pyracantha, I was left with great long rose stalks waving about trying to catch me if I went near them. Fixing them to the wall seemed like a good idea if I wanted to regain that growing space. I went out and bought some rings for screwing into the wall, then came home and had a good look at what I had, and realised I didn't need any fixings. I already had two sturdy posts, one holding up a handrail and another that must have been put in for the purpose of holding up plants. They're a bit further apart than I'd ideally want, but much easier than putting up new fixings. I simply tied a few strands of indestructible string between them and wound the roses round them.

The strings are most visible but I assure you, there are roses there too.

I'm not sure what variety these roses are, as I've never really noticed them in amongst the pyracantha. They might be wild dog roses - I'd be quite happy with that - or they might be something more cultivated. I'll have to wait and see.

Other gardening this week
Apart from the above-mentioned removal of the pyracantha, I have been mostly clearing leaves from paths this week. I've also done a bit of work on the terrace, moving soil and plants there. The trouble with freshly sifted soil is that it's very attractive to a cat. Not all the plants I put in are still there.

Also harvesting this week
Parsnips
Leeks
Hairy bittercress
Sorrel
Rosemary

Also eating
Potatoes
Crab apple jelly, both plain and with rosemary
Rosehip vinegar
Fir cone vinegar
Xmas pudding
Crab apple and rosehip toffees
Hazelnuts
Honeysuckle ale (in stew)
Sloes pretending to be olives

Also drinking
Beech leaf wine
Oak leaf wine
Blackberry wine

Cultivated plants challenge summary page here.

New Challenge: Garden Plants

As I got to the end of my foraging year, I started wondering what to do next. That challenge focused my attention on foraging to a greater degree than I expected. Whilst I'll certainly continue foraging, I could do with shifting the focus onto something else. The first year we were here, I put a lot of effort into the garden and got reasonably good returns from it - enough to reassure me that this new lifestyle is realistic. The second year, it rained a lot and I gave up. The third year, I pushed myself to do some, even if not very much, so the giving up wouldn't stick. I sowed too few peas, and no carrots or onions at all, but I got good crops of potatoes, parsnips and leeks (still going strong now). I've learnt a few things over those three years, and I now feel at home on my bit of land. I'd like to make an effort to improve my gardening this year.

I've been trying to think of a blogging challenge that will support this and I'm not sure if what I've come up with will do it, but this is what I'm going to try: Last year, I ate and told you about a different wild food each week. This year, the focus is on gardening, so I'll tell you about a different cultivated plant each week. I've focused mainly on vegetables in my garden so far and I'd like to extend that to flowers, so this challenge won't be restricted to food plants, not least because I don't think I'm cultivating 52 food plants! I won't allow the same plant twice but I will allow different varieties of the same plant, though I'll try to avoid any that are too similar. The activity last year was eating; this year it will be some gardening activity relating to that plant. I could be sowing seeds, planting out (or just moving plants around), cutting back, harvesting... there may be other activities I can't think of right now. This is how I'm defining cultivated: Any plant that I do something to in order to encourage its growth in my garden, that's a cultivated plant.

For my foraging challenge, I was very open about what kinds of foods could be included; not just plants but seaweed and mushrooms ended up in the list. For this year's challenge, I'm restricting the scope to plants just because I think it's unlikely that I'll be cultivating anything that isn't a plant. This does of course include trees and bushes as well as smaller plants.

Here's a tour of the garden as it is at the moment. For the purpose of crop rotation, my vegetable beds are divided into three sections, which I've labelled A, B, and C. I would have four, but I grow so many potatoes that they take up one-third of the available space, so it has to be three. Two of these are large beds but the other (labelled B) consists of one medium sized bed and six small ones. Apart from potatoes, my rotation groups are, Legumes, and Other.

Starting downstairs, here's the large bed nearest the house, which I'm calling A.

This will have potatoes in it this year.

Backing up, we can see the first three of the smaller beds, B1-B3. I hope to get rid of that LPG tank quite soon and replace it with a much smaller one, nearer the house. About a week ago the gauge on it dropped suddenly from 15% to zero, so we now have no idea how much gas we have left.

These will probably have a different variety of bean in each, or possibly peas. The heap of stuff in the far bed was supposed to be a bonfire, but I couldn't get it to light. The near bed on the left still has some celery in it. It's very small, but tasty.

Turning round to face away from the house, we see the next three small beds, B4-B6.

There are still plenty of leeks in the far bed, and parsnips in the middle bed, though you can't see them. I've yet to get anything useful out of the bed on the left, or the strip at the far end. Perhaps I'll try flowers there this year. The other two will contain more beans-or-peas.

Going out of the gate and round the garden fence, there are some steep bits. These are also part of the garden, but not terraced and cultivated.

There used to be a leylandii hedge running uphill along that fence line. You can see the remains of it scattered across the hillside. I have plans for a replacement.

Back within the garden fence now, at the upper level looking back towards the driveway, here is the other large veg patch, C.

There's a plum tree and a lavender bush in the foreground, and some more flowers along the edge by the path, but most of this will be for Other veg - brassicas, squash, leeks, parsnips, etc.

Turning towards the house again, we come to the final B bed, the medium sized one.

Currently home to broccoli, this will probably be filled with peas. Along by the fence at the top there are asparagus plants.

Next to the greenhouse there's an odd bit that I haven't yet made good use of, partly because the heather and shrubs harbour many weeds amongst their roots.

I had planned to use part of this for a herb garden. I managed to get sage, oregano and a bit of thyme established, but the slugs and the cat between them saw off everything else. I'm not sure what I'll do with it this year.

Next, of course, is the greenhouse itself.

Many plants will start off in here, then make way for tomatoes. I now have the heated propagator back in there, after it spent a week being a cat bed heater for next door's cat.

Looking back along the path, there's my flower border to the left.

It's a mess. Moving swiftly on...

Turning back again and continuing past the greenhouse, we get to the conservatory. This is huge, but not as light as you'd think, so I'm not sure it's much good for gardening.

On that chest of drawers to the left I have potatoes chitting.

Finally, beyond the conservatory and up a flight of stairs, we get to my favourite place for sitting out, the terrace.

As you can see, it's currently rather brown.

I've set up a summary page here which will collect together links to all the weekly posts. As well as the featured plant, I'll write about what else I've been doing in the garden each week. I enjoy keeping track of what I'm harvesting as well as the preserved food and drink I'm consuming, so I'll keep the Also section of the weekly posts going.

Foraging challenge review

One year ago, I challenged myself to eat a different foraged food every week for a year, and I did it! I may not have hit the Friday of every week, but I found fifty two foraged foods and reported on them more or less once a week throughout the year. In fact, I did much better than that; I had so many extra foraged foods that I wrote a fifty-third Friday post with an additional fourteen foods, bringing the total up to sixty six for the year. Now, sixty six foraged foods isn't much variety for the serious forager, but I've substantially exceeded my target and I'm feeling very pleased with myself.

What about the experience of doing the challenge, though? Well you'll notice that the blog has become dominated by foraging over the last year, and that's not just the effect of writing the weekly posts; my life has become dominated by foraging. I've really enjoyed learning about new plants and it hasn't been at all difficult. Although some weeks have been a bit, I suppose I'd better find something to write about this week, even in my most uninspired weeks, I haven't had to go far to find another plant to eat and tell you about.

What's pleased me most has been learning about seaweeds and mushrooms, which aren't even plants. Well, there seems to be some debate about seaweed, but mushrooms belong to an entirely different kingdom of life: They're fungi. Whatever they're classification, these are completely new to me, so it felt like a big advance in my knowledge to learn anything about them. Whilst I'm satisfied to be able to identify a few species of seaweed, I've got completely hooked on mushroom hunting. I never used to even see them, but now I've trained my eyes to pick them out from the background, I can't resist seeking them out and when I find a new one, looking up resources that will help me solve the riddle of what it is. It's satisfying to identify even the inedible ones.

I'm not sure what I'd expected regarding deliciousness of wild food; I think probably that most would be so-so and some not worth the bother. I was pleasantly surprised with my assessment of what I found:

Delicacies	Useful	Worth knowing	Won't bother with again
Heather	Dandelion flowers	Dandelion roots	Dandelion leaves
Wild garlic leaves	Hairy bittercress	Fennel	Goose grass leaves
Bracken fiddleheads	Rosebay willoherb leaves	Rosebay willowherb stalks	Rosebay willowherb flowers
Elder flowers	Lesser celandine leaves	Pignuts	Hawthorn leaves
Wild strawberries	Ground elder leaves	Wild carrots	Plantain flowers
Fairy ring champignon	Garlic mustard leaves and seeds	Speedwell leaves	Shepherd's purse seeds
Ceps	Nettle leaves	Kelp
Chantarelles	Sorrel leaves	Gutweed
Oyster mushrooms	Vetch	Oak moss
Field mushrooms	Carrageen	Honeysuckle flowers
Laver	Green laver	Fir cones
Hops	Dulse
Sloes	Japanese knotweed
Blackberries	Evening primrose roots
Chestnuts	Hazelnuts
Beech leaves	Oak leaves
Marsh samphire	Greencracked brittlegills
Rowan berries	Blusher mushrooms
	Brown birch boletes
	Scarletina boletes
	Fat hen
	Crab apples
	Rose hips
	Bilberries
	Bullaces
	Elderberries
	Common hogweed leaves and seeds
	Black mustard
	Navelwort

Of course this is entirely subjective and it's quite possible that I'll change my mind about some these, but the Delicacy column, containing foods and drinks that I can get quite excited about, is longer than the Won't bother column and even than the Worth knowing about column. The largest category is the one I've labelled Useful, things I'll turn to again and again, even though I don't get terribly excited about them. These are on a level with potatoes, carrots or spinach, whereas the delicacies are up there with olives and asparagus. The Worth knowing about category includes foods that might be useful if it weren't for some other factor. For example dandelion roots are a good coffee substitute, but I don't drink much coffee. Pignuts are delicious, but it's illegal to dig them up. Some of the delicacies take quite a bit of processing before I can get excited about them. For example, I wouldn't eat bits of heather straight from the plant, but it does flavour a very nice ale.

With this focus on wild foods, I've learnt to more about preserving food and adapted my cooking to use these new ingredients. I never used to use dried mushrooms and seaweeds, though at least the mushrooms are readily available to buy, but now do, regularly.

Jars of dried mushrooms and seaweed on top of my kitchen cupboard

What really made me happy, though, was my home brew.

Wine brewing in the store room

Having foraged various plants, it's not necessary to make alcoholic drinks from them, nor is it necessary to forage in order to brew your own drinks, but I enjoy both activities and find them happy bed-fellows. Not all of my home-brew experiments have been successful, but most are good and some are truly excellent.

Foraged Food Friday: Beech leaves... and the rest

There's a traditional drink, similar in process but less well known (at least in this country) than sloe gin, called beech leaf noyau. I had the opportunity to try some at a festival last summer and... well, it tasted of gin. All the same, it got me thinking: Having had such success with my sloe wine, perhaps I could try the same trick with beech leaves, i.e. skip the gin and just make wine with them?

Beech leaves (Fagus sylvatica)

As I have a beech hedge, I have no shortage of leaves, and the task of picking them can be combined with tidying up the hedge. This meant I ended up with quite a lot of twigs in with my leaves, making the volume difficult to estimate. They filled my jamming kettle, which has a capacity of 15 pints/ 8½ litres. I thought it was probably about twice as much volume as the oak leaves I picked (but much quicker to pick!) I stuck to my usual simple recipe of boiling the leaves for about 45 min and then putting leaves and water together into the bucket with just shy of two kilos of sugar (I'd used a little from the bag already) and topped up to about two gallons of water, then added yeast (kept from the bay herb ale). After four or five days, it was strained into demijohns and left alone. This was in early June, so it's had about seven months to ferment and mature.

I wasn't sure it would be ready as there are still some bubbles on the surface, which is why I left it to last, but with a bit of de-fizzing it was fine. What looked in the demijohn like a light brown colour appeared in the glass more as a pinkish tinge - very pretty. And the taste - wow, this stuff is good! It's rich and smooth, slightly nutty, maybe a hint of vanilla... am I getting pretentious? I'm not very good at describing wine, you'll just have to make some and try it for yourself.

When I wrote about dandelions in the last post, I thought it was nice, at the end of the foraging challenge, to return to the beginning of my foraging journey. In a way, this one represents the challenge even better. I drew on information and brewing skills that I've learnt, tried an experiment, and the result is surprisingly good. Cheers!

Also harvesting this week
Parsnips
Leeks
Evening primrose roots

Also eating
Potatoes
Crab apple jelly
Rosehip vinegar
Ceps (from dried)

Also drinking
Oak leaf wine
Hopped ale

As for the rest? Well, this is my fifty-third post in a fifty-two week challenge, and I have lots of foraged foods still to tell you about. I did wonder about continuing the series, as many of these foods are preserved, but I'd like to finish the challenge and move onto something new. As a compromise, here are some brief notes on a selection (i.e. the ones I've remembered) of foraged foods, mostly seaweeds and mushrooms.

Green laver
Thanks to a field guide that told me laver is green when young, I picked a load of this thinking it was black laver. It was only when I got home and did further research that I realised I'd picked a differnet seaweed entirely. However, this is also used in oriental cuisine, as a condiment, and that's how I've been using it. Dried and toasted (it only takes a few seconds) it can be crumbled over food and has a strong, savoury flavour. I find it goes particularly well with slightly sweet dishes, such as pumpkin soup.

Gutweed
Another green seaweed, this is the kind you get deep fried in Chinese restaurants (if it's not cabbage standing in). It's tricky to clean all the sand out of the fine fronds, though. I have some dried, but it's gritty so I think I'll probably throw it away.

Dulse
This seaweed is distinctively pink. I dried quite a lot of this and intended to include it in the foraging series, but kept eating it, so I had none left to write about. It tastes a bit like shellfish and simply dried, it makes a very nice, crisp snack.

Kelp
The last of my seaweeds, kelp isn't something I'd want to eat on its own. It's reputed to add a savoury depth to soups and stews if you put a piece in while cooking, rather like a bay leaf. I've been using it in this way, but John Wright has tested the theory in leek soup and found it makes no difference. I'd like to do my own test before I'm entirely convinced, because I think meat or beans would be a more appropriate flavour. In the meantime, I still have a tin full in the cupboard.

Fairy ring champignon
Being late summer mushrooms, these were amongst the first I learned to identify, and they're delicious.

They generally grow in grassland, but two patches came up in my terrace. Actually, I have no idea how to classify that environment for the sake of mushroom identification, so I just have to be extra careful on the other features.

Blusher mushrooms
It's important to be able to distinguish these from panther caps. As well as subtle differences in colouring, there's a key distinguishing feature in the ring: The blusher mushroom has grooves on its ring and the panther cap doesn't.

I'm pretty sure the one on the left is a blusher mushroom and the one on the right is a panther cap, but I'd want a good look at the ring before eating one.

Grooved ring of blusher mushroom.

Although I've now seen enough of both of these to recognise them by sight, if I can't find those distinguishing grooves, I won't eat it. Even then, blushers need cooking before eating, and once cooked, they're a pleasant, if unremarkable mushroom. They're common, so I picked quite a few and dried them, making a useful contribution to the winter store cupboard.

Brown birch boletes
Rated by some mushroom hunters as worthless - sludgy and 'orrible, according to Hunter Gatherer Cook, I think these are quite useful for adding a mushroomy depth to stews. It's true that they do dissolve into a dark, sludgy mush when cooked, so I wouldn't fry them to eat on their own, but in my opinion the flavour is not very different from an elderly cep, and they're so common it's a shame to let them go to waste. Like the blushers, I have a jar full dried.

Scarletina boletes
I'm really sorry I don't have photos of this one, or even better a video, because the colours are great fun. It has a dark brown cap, but the underside and stem are bright red and when you cut the flesh it's bright yellow, then quickly turns dark blue. Once cooked, it all turns a boring brown, but the flavour's good. I didn't find enough of them to preserve, so I'll just have to look out for these again next year.

Oyster mushrooms
It says something about how well this challenge went that oyster mushrooms didn't warrant an entry of their own. Not only did I find the semi-cultivated ones at my sister's, I applied my new-found knowledge of their habits to find them in the wild. I learnt that they grow on beech trees and often emerge shortly after a sharp cold spell. We had a few days of freezing weather... it warmed up... I waited a couple of days then went to a patch of beech woodland nearby... I searched, and found them! I picked about three quarters of a pound of young mushrooms, and they were delicious. I loved the feeling of competence I got from applying knowledge like this.

Garlic mustard seeds
Having read about Atomic Shrimp's experiment making a condiment out of these, I collected and dried some with a view to trying the same. In the end, I used them in pickled samphire instead, and the result was very good.

Oak moss
I was very excited to learn that this lichen is edible, as there's not much else going at this time of year, and it's also high carbohydrate, which is rare in wild food. Someone mentioned it on a forum, then when I did some research I found one other article online about eating it, which was presumably the source for the first one I saw as the cooking instructions were identical but the second one I found explained how she arrived at this technique. OK, so I've found two people on the internet who've eaten it and survived. It's not the most ringing endorsement, but it probably means it's safe to eat. (Looking again, I've just found it in a River Cottage recipe and several other place. It's amazing how much difference it can make to use slightly different wording in a google search.)

There's loads of this on the trees around here and recent storms have blown a lot down, so it's easy to gather a handful just from what's fallen. For my first attempt, I followed the cautious cooking instructions that involved boiling in two changes of water before deep frying. By the time I'd boiled it twice it was a soggy mess. I squeezed the water out and fluffed it up before frying but even so, I'd cooked the life out of it. The final crisps could have been anything. For a second attempt I tried the traditional method of steaming before frying. It certainly held its shape better but when I ate it there was an edge to the flavour - the word acrid came to mind - which put me off eating very much of it. There may be a happy medium, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find it at the moment. On the plus side, this lichen that's mostly used for perfume left the cooking oil scented pleasantly. That's been quite nice on rice salads and suchlike.

Fir cones
This one was an impulsive forage. On the way to pick bilberries, I spotted what looked like chopped apple, scattered over the forest floor. On closer inspection, these turned out to be large, fleshy fir cones of a kind I'm not familiar with that had been taken apart by animals (presumably squirrels) to extract the kernels from the middle. Hmm, thought I, I like pine kernels... I picked one out and tasted it - wow, that resin's strong! OK, so I wouldn't eat these nuts as they are, but that fir cone resin is an interesting flavour...

I picked up a couple of cones (they're big) to take home. The first thing I did was try to identify the tree (tip: It's easier if you have more than just the fruit to go on) - I'm pretty sure it's Abies alba, the European silver fir - then tried to find out whether it's safe to eat. The only relevant information I could find was about its use in cough medicines, so I concluded that it's reasonably safe.

That done, I had to decide what to do with it. I reckoned I'd need an organic solvent to extract the flavour and chose two; vodka and vinegar. I thought that once the resin was soaked out, the kernels might be good to eat, so I separated out the cones into kernels and fleshy parts and soaked the kernels in vinegar, then divided the flesh between more vinegar and some vodka. I also added hogweed seeds to the vodka.

Bits of fir cone in solvents

Some months later, I tried a couple of the kernels. They're far too tough to be worth the effort of preparing like this. What about the liquids? They were both an encouraging shade of brown/red and smelled of the fir cone resin.

Fir cone vodka

Disappointingly, although it smells good, the vodka tastes mainly of, well, vodka. Oh well, I suppose I haven't lost anything. The vinegar - which turned dramatically black shortly after decanting - is another story. That is packed with flavour. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to use it for yet, but I have successfully extracted the fir cone flavour into a condiment.

Bilberries, and foraged Christmas pudding
Bilberries are similar to blueberries, but smaller, and very fiddly to harvest even when they grow in huge quantities, as they do around here. I quite like them, but can't get that excited about them as a fresh fruit. On the other hand, they're small enough to dry quite easily, and make a good substitute for currants. With this starting point, I decided to have a go at making a foraged Christmas pudding this year. In addition to the bilberries, I had a few dried blackcurrants and some old, dried rosehips. I felt the latter would benefit from soaking in brandy, so I did. Adapting a Delia Smith recipe, I came up with:

• Bilberries (mostly), blackcurrants and (rosehips soaked in brandy) - together 4 oz
• Sloe puree, from sloe wine - 3/4 jam jar
• Tallow - 2 oz
• Hogweed seeds - 1 tsp
• Nutmeg - ½ tsp
• Cinnamon - ½ tsp
• Flour - 1 oz
• Baking powder (this seemed an unlikely ingredient to me, but I put a bit in anyway)
• Dark brown sugar - 2 oz
• Bread soaked in damson jam - most of kilner jar full (I wanted dried damsons, ideally, but the closest I had was jam)
• Breadcrumbs - sprinkle
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tblsp dandelion and honeysuckle ale

It's not entirely foraged, but number of actual bought ingredients is quite small.

I also quite liked the idea of cooking this in a cloth, the old fashioned way, mainly because this was August and I didn't fancy having one of my pudding basins tied up until December. I found and followed instructions for doing this, but I note two things: If you boil a sugary thing wrapped in cloth, much of the sugar will end up in the water. If you hang a sugary thing up, even in a cool place with good airflow, it will go mouldy. I tried to mitigate the latter by soaking the cloth in brandy, but it was already soaked in sugar solution, so didn't absorb the spirit. After a few weeks I saw the first signs of mould, and decided another strategy would be necessary. I scraped the mould off the outside then microwaved the whole thing to kill it. I then unwrapped the by-now soft pudding, which promptly disintegrated. I packed the squishy mess into a Kilner jar as tightly as possible, added a thin layer of brandy for good measure, and sealed it up.

My intention was to eat this at the conventional time, i.e. Christmas day, but we had an unexpected invitation to join friends for Christmas dinner, so I ate their pudding instead (and very good it was too) while mine stayed in the cupboard. This week, in celebration of completing the foraging challenge (OK, it's January, I feel the need for sweet and stodgy food), it is pudding time! It was actually firm enough to hold its shape, but the jar didn't allow for turning out of the pudding, so I scooped it out, added an egg white (I'd used the yolk for mayonnaise), mixed with a little flour and sugar, which should stick it all together pretty well, packed it into a well greased pudding basin, and microwaved. In spite of all due preparations, I was quite surprised when it actually turned out of the basin.

It's nice, too. Not exactly like a traditional pudding, of course, and there's some room for improvement, but not at all bad. That, I think, rounds off the foraging year nicely. Happy New Year!

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Dandelion Flowers

Having covered dandelion leaves (too bitter to eat as salad, but good in beer) and dandelion roots (a surprisingly good substitute for coffee), I now come the most valuable part of the plant, dandelion flowers.

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale), complete with flowers

These flowers were my first step into foraging, not counting blackberry picking as a child, and feature in my very first blog post. They're still one of my favourites, if only because dandelions are such a ubiquitous weed, it's nice to have a use for the flowers. In fact, there are several uses - I dip them in pancake batter and fry them to make fritters, I dry them to make a herbal tea, and, of course, I make wine out of them.

The traditional date for picking dandelions for wine is St George's day, 23rd April. This year spring was late and I picked the flowers over the course of two weeks, Apr 30, May 1, May 2 and May 6, somewhere around four or five pints of flowers in total. I added one orange and one lemon (both elderly, say my notes) at the beginning, and 4 lb of sugar in two stages (Apr 30 and May 6). I assume I must have added some yeast as well, though my notes don't mention this. As usual, I made two gallons. Even when I wrote the notes, I couldn't remember what date I'd strained the liquid off the flowers and fruit and into the demijohns - I guess around May 12.

Dandelion wine. I need a photo is
a good enough reason for pouring another glass, isn't it?

As you can see, the wine is a very pale yellow colour and reasonably clear (actually, with a plain wall behind it, you can't tell how clear it is. You'll have to take my word for it.) Drinking this, I can see why I judged oak leaf wine to be quite similar to grape wine, because this isn't at all. On the other hand, it is delicious. Light and floral (unsurprisingly), the nectar gives it a sweetish hint of honey. Of course I'll be making it again. Don't tell any proper gardeners, but I have reached the stage of actively cultivating dandelions in my garden.

Also harvesting this week
Broccoli (one of my broccoli plants has got confused about what season it is and put out flower shoots. I'm not complaining!)
Hairy bittercress
Mustard leaves
Leeks
Parsnips
Evening primrose roots
Celery
Oak moss

Also eating
Knotweed chutney
Crab apple and rosehip toffees
Rowan jelly
Pumpkin, including seeds (not mine)
Blusher mushrooms
Birch bolete mushrooms (both from dried)
Green laver
Black laver

Also drinking
Hopped beer
Blackberry wine
Beech leaf wine. I was saving this until next week, the final week of the challenge, but I got impatient. You'll still have to wait, though.

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Hops

I found some! We were staying in the Cotswolds at the beginning of September and whilst Ian was talking to people about cars, I went for a foraging walk and found lots of lovely things, including magnificent hop bines growing in the hedgerow. Sadly, I don't have any photos. I took some, I'm sure, but can't find them now. This is the danger of borrowing someone else's camera - that person may not check whether you've saved all your photos before clearing the memory card. So, a photo-free post, disappointingly.

It's the flower of the hop plant that's used in brewing (I've gone for the obvious use this time), also known as a cone. It's similar to a pine cone, but very light and papery. Since I also had quite a lot of fruit to process, I didn't want to start the beer straight away, so I spread the hops out to dry. This had the added advantage of converting them into a standard ingredient; dried hops can be bought from home-brew stores and appear in recipes. Yes, I thought I'd actually look at a recipe!

I thought that using hops, it would be easy enough to look up how to use them, and how much. It turned out to be not quite that simple. People who brew beer and share information online about their recipes do not simply use hops. Oh no, it's all about the varieties, and each recipe called for several. Neither do they simply use malt extract - similar complications are included for that ingredient. There's a lot of heating to specific temperatures, for specific durations, with the various ingredients being added at different times during the process. What these recipes do not tend to specify is the total quantity of beer they're making. The simple information I sought - weight of dried hops per gallon of beer - was not easy to find.

Eventually I concluded that the usual amount of hops is between half and two ounces per gallon (British gallon I hope, but I'm not sure I checked). Have you any idea how much a dried hop cone weighs? No, I don't have clinical-grade scales, either. Half an ounce is a lot of hops. I thought I'd picked plenty for multiple brewing experiments, but in fact the one ounce I needed for my two-gallon batch was most of what I'd picked. Of course I ignored pretty much all other aspects of the standard recipes as well, such as boiling the malt with the hops in it, and stuck to my own method, i.e. I treated the sugars and flavourings separately.

As in my heather ale recipe I used two 370g jars of malt extract and 350g sugar for two gallons of beer. Since the hops are serving two purposes, bitter and aromatics, I divided my ounce in half and steeped one half in hot water for half an hour to extract the aromatics, meanwhile boiling the other half for bitters, then after straining the water from both into the bucket, boiled the whole lot together for another hour. Water topped up to two gallons, yeast added (from blackberry wine, I think), then the bucket was left alone for a few days. At this point I tasted it... eugh! That was way too bitter!

Since the quantity of hops I used was right at the bottom of the range I found in online recipes, the reason for the bitterness can't have been too many hops. It could be that I don't like such bitter ales as other people, but I think that's fairly unlikely - I drink a lot of beer. It's possible that the wild hops I found happened to be very bitter but again, that seems fairly unlikely to me. More plausible, I think, is the possibility that something about my unusual method made the difference. I think it's very likely that boiling the hops in plain water, rather than malty water, would extract more flavour. The point is to transfer flavour compounds from the hops to the water - to dissolve them. If the water already has a lot of sugar (malt extract) dissolved in it, then it will have less capacity to dissolve anything else.

The excess bitterness was easily solved with dilution. I made up another two gallons of sugar and malt extract solution, and steeped the rest of my hops - probably about a quarter of an ounce - in hot water to top up the aromatics. I then mixed the whole lot together in a bigger bucket and left for a few more days. This meant that the total time from start to bottling was probably about ten days. After bottling, it was only a week or two (sorry, my notes aren't so good on the leaving it alone parts of the process) before it looked clear and ready to drink.

I'm so glad I made a double batch of this beer - it was excellent! It's a fairly light, crisp, beer but there's plenty of body to it. I know I could make a darker beer by boiling the malt (or adding a little treacle) but I'm not sure I'll bother. This is really good! Now all I have to do is find a more local source of hops.

Also harvesting this week
Navelwort
Celandine leaves
Ground elder (the first tiny leaves are poking through. It's spring!)
Mustard leaves
Parsnips
Oak moss (lichen - who'd have thought that'd be edible?!)

Also eating
Sloes pretending to be olives
Sloes and elderberries puree (in sloe tart - one of my more successful baking experiments)
Rosehip vinegar (I'll tell you about this shortly)
Lactofermented French beans
Pickled samphire (have I already said that chestnut biscuits topped with mascarpone cheese and pickled samphire is just about the most divine food on earth? If so, sorry, but it bears saying again.)

Also drinking
Sloe wine
Honeysuckle ale
Blackberry wine

Foraged food challenge summary page here.