Blogging challenge: One post a day for a month

Having got out of the habit of blogging frequently, I'm finding it hard to get back to it. I have ideas that I want to write about, but they tend towards rather long posts, and I want to spend time getting them right, and I end up not writing them at all. Or if I do get something written, it's so long that I can't imagine anyone would want to read it.

To tackle this, I'm going to try to post something every day, but keep it short. If I miss a day, so be it, I won't beat myself up about it, but just carry on trying to post something each day until 8th Feb, which happens to be Chinese New Year. With brevity in mind, I'll stop there. Here's a picture of George, being optimistic about dinner:

New Year Ramblings

As I started typing this post the sun came out and shone in through the window*. This feels like a rare treat and I'm tempted to jump up and go straight outside to appreciate it, but Ian's just made a cup of tea, and it's too wet out for sitting and drinking tea. It's been raining almost continuously since I wrote about the beautiful autumn weather we had in September and October. Apart from three or four days, we've had variations on light rain, heavy rain, and that kind of closed-in weather we get here where it's not exactly raining or foggy, but you get wet when you go outside anyway.

Since I usually suffer from seasonal depression, with my mood strongly affected by light, I'd expect to be feeling pretty dreadful about now. I'm glad to report that it's different this year. I'm certainly not enjoying these dark days, but they're making me feel grumpy rather than listless. I feel like a reasonably active human being who could get stuff done if only it wasn't so cold and wet. And if I didn't have a cat sitting on me.

As I've mentioned previously, I've had depression throughout this year, and I've been working through several issues. That is to say, instead of looking at depression as an illness in need of a cure (or treatment of symptoms), I've tried to find the underlying causes and address them directly. I know that for many people, depression doesn't have identifiable, psychological causes, but I suspected that in my case it did. That's not to say it's a straightforward response to currently depressing events, but that there are things buried in my psyche that are causing me problems. Some of the things I found were well buried indeed, relating to the death of my mother twenty seven years ago.

Without much in the way of responsibilities this year, I had the luxury of space to deal with my mental health. Time will tell how much healing has actually taken place but, cautiously, at this point in time, I feel that I've made a great deal of progress. I feel ready to start again with the garden, ready to reconnect with friends - I've been a hermit this year. If I said to you, You must come and visit! I really meant it, I just couldn't quite manage the necessary to make it happen - and ready to put my life back on the internet in the form of intermittent blog posts. In short, it feels like new year, and that looks a lot like a set of new year's resolutions. That makes me a bit nervous, knowing how such resolutions usually go, but hey ho, let's roll with it and see what happens.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of starlings coming in to roost under Aberystwyth pier, on a day of actual sunshine that we took advantage of, shortly before Christmas:

Here come the first of the starlings

Looking south along the seafront, there was a beautiful sunset

and in the other direction, the moon.

More starlings heading for the pier...

... and down to roost under it.

One more picture of the moon, with lamps and a few late starlings.

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* This event was remarkable enough to make the news. I say news - this is a joke news site, but still, they were very quick to report this remarkable sighting!

How much CO2 does fermenting wine give off?

We have a couple of demijohns of elderberry wine bubbling away noisily in the sitting room. They were in the kitchen, but that's next to the bedroom and the bubbling was keeping us awake, so I moved them. As we sat down for the evening the other day, Ian asked me what gas it is that's bubbling out so vigorously. Carbon dioxide. Hmm. That does seem to be rather a lot of carbon dioxide. I wonder whether it's enough to be a health risk?

My attempts to find the answer to this question via Google led to one Daily Mail article about a couple of Frenchmen dying of suffocation while treading grapes, but not much else. I decided to measure it for myself, so here is what I did:

1. Find a piece of plastic tubing and bend it into an S shape using hot water to soften. This was not easy because it kept buckling.
2. Take a graduated jam jar (I marked lines at 100ml intervals) and completely fill with water, then invert in a bowl of water. This was not easy because the jar was taller than the bowl, so the whole lot had to be submerged in a bigger bowl to get all the bubbles out.
3. Faff about for ages trying to raise the jar off the bottom of the bowl so that it wouldn't squash the plastic tube, before realizing that it wouldn't squash it anyway.
4. Recognize that the jar wouldn't need to be horizontal all the time, just when the measurement was taken, and I could hold it for that bit. Considered a spirit level, then decided that would be going a bit far (!)
5. Bring a small table (for the bowl/jar), blu tac (for sealing), and mobile phone (for timing) through to the sitting room.
6. Assemble the apparatus, connecting the plastic tube to the air lock with blu tac, and start timing.
7. Notice that the tube has filled with water again, reseal the blu tac, and hope not too much gas was lost.

The tube takes the CO₂ into the water-filled jar, hopefully catching it all

Here's a closer view of the jar-in-a-bowl assembly. If you look closely, you can see a bubble rising between the two marks on the jar. Please do look closely; it took me several attempts to get this picture.

Look, a bubble! More to the point, lots of gas collecting at the top of the jar.

The idea was to see how long it would take to produce 100ml of CO₂ and then work out volume (or weight) produced per day, and compare that with what a human breathes out, or maybe a cat. I did wonder whether the extra pressure of the water might slow down the bubbles, but they were still coming out at much the same rate as the other demijohn, so that was OK. Holding the jar horizontal was a bit of a challenge, as everything else in the room, and particularly the cupboard behind, is on the skew.

And the result was... about 20 min for 100 ml CO₂. It took 22 min for the first 100 ml, then the second 100 ml, which I expected to be slower due to the extra weight of water, was actually quicker and I missed it. At 43 min, there was already more than 200 ml gas in the jar. This may be due to a bit escaping when the seal broke at the beginning, so approx. 20 min will have to do. That's 300 ml per hour, or 7.2 litres per day.

I found a few different figures for the amount of CO₂ breathed out by a human, of which this page includes the lowest estimate: An inactive person (as they would be, in a sitting room) breathes out 350 litres of CO₂ per day. That's 48.6... almost 50 times as much as my gallon of fermenting wine.

I couldn't find any information on other mammals, still less on cats, specifically.* If amount of CO₂ exhaled is proportional to body weight (which it probably isn't) and cats are about one twentieth the weight of an adult human, one cat would be breathing out about two and a half times as much CO₂ as a gallon of wine. Even with two demijohns, George is probably still breathing out more CO₂ than the wine is. Daily Mail notwithstanding, I'll stop worrying about suffocation from fermenting wine.

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* Though apparently there is a myth that cats breathe in carbon dioxide, and this is linked to the myth that they smother babies. Surely if they're breathing in the CO₂ that would be a good thing for the baby? Not only does that myth take no account of biology, it's not even internally coherent.

Autumn colours and crazy weather

We had cold weather very late this spring, which caught a lot of gardeners out, then a cool, damp summer, which led some gardeners to give up altogether (ahem). After all that, we've been compensated with the most glorious autumn. We've had a lot of sunshine in September and October, and yesterday the highest November temperature since records began was recorded at our nearest weather station. That's not just the highest temperature here, but the highest for the whole of the UK, at 22°C (72°F). We had another fine, sunny day here today, while much of England was buried under a blanket of thick fog. It's more like summer now than it was in July.

The autumn colours have been wonderful this year, so I went out and attempted to capture them this afternoon.

Foraging vs. gardening, and our place in nature

A discussion on a facebook foraging group the other day has prompted me to write about something that I've been thinking about for some time, now. The discussion started with,

Not to open a can of worms as it were, but I thought this site was to help promote the sustainable collecting of wild produce, as well as edible plant identification. By sustainable I mean taking enough for us humans to enjoy as a treat but leaving enough for wildlife to eat as an essential to survive winter. Some of the posts though show such large quantities being collected which will quite possibly impact on wildlife survival, including birds, squirrels, mice, voles etc. Do we humans always have to be greedy at the expense of other creatures?

and towards the end included suggestions about heating up the can of worms on a bonfire, but being sure to leave some worms in the can for the blackbirds, and whether it's best for a blackbird to learn to use a can opener, or simply train a human to do it as and when required.

Chestnuts. Should I leave these for the woodland animals?

While I'm all for respecting and supporting wildlife, I have several problems with this position (the original post, not teaching blackbirds to use can openers). Firstly, while this point of view is common amongst foragers, it's very rare amongst gardeners. It may just be that there are two groups of people with very different standards, but I suspect that the concept of ownership has a lot to do with it. In my garden, where I have toiled and nurtured, the plants are mine and I'm entitled to harvest all of them, with no regard to what the wildlife might want. Indeed, gardeners go to great lengths to protect their crops from being eaten by other animals, and it's very rare to hear any disapproval of this behaviour.

Squash. How about these? Should I have left these too?

It's not just the inconsistency that bothers me; this highlights what the alternative to foraging is. Gardening is akin to farming: Deliberate cultivation of crops on land designated as being for that purpose. One viewpoint expressed in the facebook debate was that we don't need to forage if we can afford to buy our food from shops, implying that this is the default, neutral position.

Let's think about that, shall we? Food bought from shops is farmed, almost universally. There's a spectrum of farming practices, but they all involve identifying pieces of land as farmland and making efforts to keep wildlife from eating the crops on that land. People may debate the methods used, but does anyone say to a farmer, You must leave those caterpillars alone, they have as much right to the cabbages as you do!? Actually, it's possible that some people might say this, but I think you'll agree that this is an extreme point of view. It's generally accepted that farming involves keeping as much of the crop as possible for humans, not caterpillars.

If the default, neutral position involves, at the very least, displacing wildlife, what then of foraging? Taking wild food certainly deprives other animals of it, but otherwise doesn't disturb them much, unlike farming. Foraging, then, surely has a lower impact on wildlife than farming.

The next question has to be whether foraged food supplements or replaces farmed food. In other words, do we eat just the same amount of farmed food when we forage, or do we eat less? The answer to this is not straightforward. One possibility is all the food that is necessary for survival and good nutrition comes from farmed or home-grown sources. In this scenario, any foraged food is additional to this, treats and luxuries that we simply wouldn't have if we didn't forage.

Another possibility is that when we forage, we reduce the amount of food we eat from other sources. Even if the type of food we forage ends up as luxuries, for example sloe gin, we would have bought some equivalent luxury, perhaps another liqueur, if we didn't have the foraged food. This second possibility also covers cases where foraged food replaces more essential food items, such as foraged nettles or fat hen substituting for spinach or spring greens.

If the first possibility was mainly the true situation, then foraging really would be an additional impact on wildlife. There would be a simple choice between taking wild food and not taking it. However, I think the second possibility is much more likely to be true. We do not add to our diet with foraged food, we replace some of the farmed food with wild.

The person who started the recent debate, who is far from alone in this view, considers wild food to be treats for humans, but essential for wild animals. Even for those whose foraged food is only sloe gin or blackberry and apple crumble, which are certainly treats, I think this misses the point if - as I suspect is usually the case - these treats are substitutes for alternative treats. Even with treats, foraging is an alternative to farming, not additional to it.

What really bugs me about this point of view, though, was expressed by another member of the facebook discussion. It reflects a view of human beings as separate from the natural world. The bounties nature world are not for us, they are for wild animals. We have other sources of food, other than what we might forage.

This treats the farms where our food is grown as being apart from nature; as having no impact on it. Of course, people who express this view are not thinking about the farms, but that's part of the problem. When you think about it, farmland obviously has a huge impact on wildlife. Everything we do interacts with nature, because we are part of nature. Just like all the other wild animals, we have to eat, and that food has to grow somewhere.

From the point of view of being one animal amongst many, and needing to feed myself as much as any other animal does, I feel that I have as much right to nature's bounty as the next animal, especially when the next animal happens to be a slug.

One mushroom - a cep, I believe - that I didn't get to first.

Thoughts on gardening

Today marks the fifth anniversary of us buying our house here. I was going to write a post about what I've learnt over the last five years, but failed to get my thoughts in any kind of order, so here's a more focused post on gardening, that I started a little while ago.

I have gradually come to the conclusion that I'm not much of a gardener. Or, to put it in a more positive light, I'm more of a forager than a gardener. My foraging challenge was a huge success, overshooting the target of 52 wild foods by some margin, whereas my gardening challenge fizzled out after a few weeks (I just mistyped that as a a few weeds. I was tempted to leave it.) If we go back to the beginning, it was elderflower champagne that inspired me to try this lifestyle. The tree may have been growing in my garden, but those were foraged flowers, not cultivated. The part of gardening that I really like is harvesting.

Elder trees also produce berries, if you don't pick all of the flowers

I've tried to embrace the idea that I should garden for the sake of the activity, not the end result, but without much success. If I'm honest, I only really enjoy gardening when I see results. Digging over a patch of ground is very satisfying because it completely transforms it (the workout is good, too). Planting out seedlings can be good, if the bed looks tidy and full of promise at the end of the job. Weeding too, to some extent, but only if the bed was very untidy to start with, and really, that's just housework outdoors, and housework is not my forte. Ultimately, though, it's all about the harvest. Try as I might, I can't see the point of sowing carrots if I don't get to eat carrots. I did sow carrots this year, but saw no sign of them. I can only assume that the slugs got them all as soon as they appeared. I find this very demoralizing.

After writing the previous paragraph, I went back and re-read Eco Cat Lady's The Mythical Land of Done (part of an earlier conversation on the subject of my garden anxiety), which puts the Do things for their own sake argument very clearly. She uses the example of doing the dishes, which is a task you can never get done because there are always more, so it's futile to think in terms of getting the job out of the way. I think I get it. The other day I chose to do a bit of gardening before going out, and reflected that I'd be enjoying it a lot more if I hadn't given myself a deadline for getting the task finished. Indeed, I have learned to stop hating the dishes, and accept the task as part of my day. Still, though, I don't do the dishes for the sake of doing the activity; I do them for the sake of having clean dishes, in the same way that I plant vegetables for the sake of eating vegetables.

OK, trying to make sense of this... There are very few things we do for their own sake; eating and drinking, singing and dancing, you can probably think of one or two others. Most things we do for the sake of the end result, be if we focus too much on the result, we risk rushing through trying to tick things off without appreciating that all that doing is what life is made of. Yes, the point of doing the dishes is to get clean dishes, but try to accept that the task is part of life and engage with it, rather than wishing is was done. How does this relate to gardening? Well, it leaves harvestable veg as the main point of growing veg. If I'm not getting a harvest I'm happy with, it's a waste of time trying to grow the plants, even if the activity is fairly enjoyable. At the same time, it shouldn't feel like a terrible chore going out into the garden. If I'm having to really push myself to do it, I should either change my attitude, or stop.

There's another thing: Slugs. They eat tiny seedlings with no regard for letting plants get bigger. If only they'd leave them to grow a bit, there'd be enough to share, but they won't. Four years after my first asparagus seedlings, there's just one plant left. The slugs ate all the spears as soon as they emerged and didn't give the plants a chance to build up their strength, so they all died. I had forty; I now have one. This upset me a lot. Even so, I will not use slug pellets. It's not a nice way to die and, whatever the manufacturers say, I can't believe they won't end up poisoning animals that prey on slugs, which I'd much rather encourage. Instead, I stamp on the slugs, which I hate doing. I really, really hate it. This does not make it pleasant to be out in the garden.

Looking back at blog posts from previous years, I see that gardening has caused me considerable anxiety from the start. Maybe I should just give it up.

No!

No, I really don't like that idea at all. Why not?

Yesterday, I picked a few green beans and some peas, and that made me happy in the same way that foraging makes me happy. I really do like the harvesting part, and I'd be sorry to lose it. In that case, I need to find a more positive attitude to gardening so I can carry on doing it. Firstly, I have to deal with those slugs. I've tried copper wire, I've tried beer traps, I've tried ash and egg shells, and none of these have much impact. I can't bear stamping on them and the current approach of staring at them in resignation isn't doing any good at all. I went out to pick a couple of leeks this evening and found a dozen baby slugs on one leaf. One leaf! In the absence of better alternatives, I shall return to Plan A and relocate them. This time, though, I won't be assuming that a railway is sufficient barrier to stop them coming back. No, I'll relocate them just a little further away, into the stream. Just upstream of the waterfall. It may be less humane than stamping on them, but better than many of the alternatives. They may even survive (slugs don't drown. Putting them in a bucket of water has to be the worst way of getting rid of them. Zombie slugs!) but surely won't come back up a waterfall? Surely not?

OK, that's my plan for dealing with slugs, now how about the demoralizing lack of results? I think I can divide veg into three categories: A few, namely potatoes, peas and green beans, seem to grow reasonably well in my garden. I might not get a huge crop, but I'll almost certainly get something from them. Leeks, broccoli and parsnips can be nudged into this category with a bit of TLC (mostly slug defenses). These are the veg I should focus on, those that will almost certainly reward my efforts with some sort of a crop. There are others that I haven't yet managed to get a decent crop from: Carrots and onions fail consistently (I had some success with shallots, but the price of sets made that far too expensive as an alternative to onions) which are so cheap to buy that I don't mind too much if I can't grow them. More disappointingly, I've yet to get a decent tomato crop - I just can't give them the consistency of care that they need. Occasionally forgetting to close the greenhouse skylight on a chilly night does tomatoes no good at all. I've decided to stop trying to grow these crops, as it's just setting myself up for disappointment. Finally, there are those that are less predictable: Cabbages, courgettes, pumpkins, sweetcorn, broad beans. These might produce large amounts of delicious food, or might fail completely. If I'm going to grow these, I need to accept that it's a gamble. I'm not a gambler by nature, so this isn't easy for me, but I'll give it a go. These will be the ones to go by the wayside if I'm finding it all a bit much, and if I do get them in the ground, it'll be a bonus if I get anything from them.

This, then, is my plan for re-engaging with the garden. Focus my efforts on things that are fairly reliable, don't bother with things that never do well, try to accept the unpredictable nature of those in between, and throw slugs over the waterfall.

A few updates

I'm not doing very well with regular blog posts this year, so here's a bit of a catch up on some things I've left hanging.

Solar panels
The big project. When I last wrote about these, I was waiting for sunshine to see how they'd do.

Well, they work, but they don't put a huge amount of heat into the tank. I found this very demoralising at first, but Ian pointed out that it takes quite a few hours to put a significant amount of heat into that tank with fire, so I should feel too bad about modest performance from a couple of old radiators. There are one or two more things I could do that might improve performance. In the meantime, we've had warm-ish water out of the taps this summer, instead of cold, in spite of weather that barely qualifies for the name, summer.

Shower
It turned out that we really do want a different temperature in the kitchen than the shower, so we were forever turning the valve up or down, and trying to remember where we'd left it. Also, the temperature at the shower head wasn't entirely determined by the valve in the cupboard across the hallway; whether or not the underfloor heating was on made quite a big difference to how much heat was lost between the two. Added to that, the valve started to get sticky. I think maybe these valves shouldn't be treated this way. We needed an upgrade. One new thermostatic mixer valve was purchased, plus a connector or two, and plumbed in.

We now have one temperature for the shower and a slightly higher temperature for the hot taps. Perfect.

Wine yeast
At about three months old, the blackberry wine made with bread yeast was still pretty sweet, but pleasant and quite drinkable. That made with wine yeast, in contrast, was horrible. It was really rough, exactly like every home-brewed gutrot you've ever tipped into a potted plant when your enthusiastic home-brewing friend isn't looking.

Well, they look pretty similar

Now, at one year old, the bread yeast wine is no longer sweet at all, though still quite fizzy (correctable with a vacuum pump), and has quite a decent flavour. The wine yeast wine is surprisingly a little sweeter. It has mellowed and completely lost the rough edge, and has a more complex flavour than the bread yeast wine. In conclusion, then, both are fine for older wines, though wine yeast is better, but bread yeast is far superior for a very young wine, if you're happy to drink it fairly sweet. Before you decide that bread yeast is all you need, though, I also used it for my other wines. The dandelion wine was very good, but the oak leaf, beech leaf, and blackcurrant wines are still fermenting now, and still very sweet. It seems that bread yeast doesn't stand up well to tannin.

Vinegar
My too-sweet beech leaf wine remains resolutely sweet. I chuck in a bit of yeast or some more vinegar from time to time, but nothing doing. I think I may have discovered the solution to the antibiotic time-bomb, as this stuff kills everything I throw at it. It's a new multi-purpose sterilising solution.

Pickled mushrooms
These are very nice.

Perhaps a little stronger on the vinegar than I'd ideally like, but that has to be good for storage. It feels odd to be eating preserved mushrooms right in the middle of mushroom season, but I had to try a few, and yep, they're good.

Willow bench
Is mostly still alive. Many of the thinnest pieces died, but most of the thicker, more structural pieces have survived, and are putting out thin shoots of their own to replace the ones that died.

It's still not strong enough to sit on, but I'm sure it will be in time.

Crocosmia
In our first February here, when I was carrying out a serious assault on the garden to get it ready for my first year of planting, I moved some crocosmia from a flower bed to a steep bit of hillside. It was hard work. While not yet the dazzling display of colour that I have seen from these plants, they're getting established nicely and give a good show of orange flowers scattered across the hillside.

A smattering of crocosmia

In the background you just about be able to see the willow fence alongside the terrace. That's doing quite well, with almost no losses, and may yet provide valuable support if the terrace does start to break down.

Second attempt at spinning

Four years ago, after taking a spinning class, I wrote,

I very much enjoyed the class and think this is something I'd like to do more of. I also think I learnt enough to get started on my own, provided I don't leave it too long before trying again. Once I've got started, I suspect I could make a lot of progress with just practice, though there's probably a lot I could learn from other people, too.

At about the same time, a dear friend of mine offered to lend me her spinning wheel, as she hadn't used it for some time. As it happened, the next time we met was at her son's wedding, and she kindly brought the wheel with her to the wedding and handed it over to me there. Chatting to her daughter Polly on the same occasion, I lightheartedly promised that I'd wear something handspun to her wedding, at some unspecified time in the future.

Once home, I found the wheel a little daunting. I looked at it nervously from time to time, noting its lack of drive belt or connection between treadle and wheel, and the bits of half-spun wool tangled around the wheel's axle. I picked at these occasionally until eventually the wheel ran freely, but didn't get much further, and the wheel gradually retreated to an out out of the way corner.

Provided I don't leave it too long. Hmm...

Just over a week ago, Polly got married. Some weeks before that, I started thinking about my promise to wear something hand spun. I was quite sure she'd have forgotten about it and even if she remembered, was hardly likely to care. All the same, it was a reminder of just how long I'd neglected the wheel and it was a shame to leave it unused, especially considering the effort taken to get it to me. In the meantime, I had got as far as buying some carded wool, with the best of intentions to use it. I had a little bit of cheap brown wool to practise with, and some gorgeous purple merino to make something nice.

As at the class, if I started with beautiful purple fluff, surely whatever I made would end up looking nice?

With the deadline of Polly's wedding to spur me on, I brought out the spinning wheel and gave it a bit of a rub down with furniture polish (wax and oil) because it looked a bit dry. I then turned my attention to the flexible parts. The treadle wasn't too difficult; it was fairly obvious how it needed to be connected, so I tied the two parts together with a bit of string, leaving it just loose enough to allow movement. I then consulted the internet to try and work out what kind of wheel I had, and therefore how it worked. The closest model I could find was the Kromski Polonaise:

Do check out Spinwise.co.uk, where I pinched the photo from. They have many nice things.

Having found a similar wheel online, I could see that it differed from the one I learnt on in a key feature: Instead of having a break (an element I found to be of utmost importance to my spinning attempts), it is a double drive wheel. This means that the drive belt goes around the wheel twice, once to drive the flyer and once to drive the bobbin. The drive wheel on the bobbin is smaller than the one on the flyer, meaning that the bobbin turns faster, and the difference between the two is what gets the yarn wound onto the bobbin. There are two things going on here: First the yarn is twisted, then it is wound onto the bobbin. All very clever, but the fixed ratio made it feel like I had less control than with the brake.

It seemed that string was an acceptable material for a drive belt, so I made a belt from string. First though, I had to find out how to adjust the tension. This involved twisting knobs that didn't want to be twisted - most nerve-racking on someone else's wheel.

String? What string? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Once I had the wheel working, with a little help from George, I had a go at spinning my cheap brown wool. It wasn't easy. To start with, I couldn't get it to wind onto the bobbin at all. I spent ages adjusting the tension until it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't spinning the yearn fine enough to go through the orifice, and it was just getting stuck. As well as working on my spinning technique, I did quite a bit of polishing of various parts of the wheel, and eventually got going. By the time I got to the end of the 50g of brown, I was feeling reasonably confident that I could make a useable yarn. It was still very thick - so much so that I decided not to ply it (twist two together) but use the singles directly, as I didn't want super-chunky yarn (nor was I entirely sure the bobbin would take it).

I crocheted up the brown practice yarn, both to check that it was actually possible to crochet single ply, and see what size piece I'd end up with following the pattern I had in mind. I say, follow and pattern as if it was all written down. It was just an idea. Crocheting it up gave me a chance to see whether it was a good idea or not.

After reasonable success with my test piece, I started work with the purple fluff. George like this very much. I managed to persuade him not to get into the bag of fluff, but he kept getting as close to it as he could.

George liked the purple fluff.

My spinning wasn't very even...

Lumps and corkscrews

... but I'd seen beginners' guides offering the advice that first attempts usually end up being fancy yarns like this, so I didn't feel too bad about it. Also, I discovered that it's possible to improve it after the event with careful twisting and drawing out, though there was a risk of breaking it every time I did this.

I crocheted the yarn straight off the bobbin, without bothering to wind it into a ball in between. This meant I was alternating spinning with crocheting, which I quite enjoyed. Since I was using singles, I could join one bobbin-full to the next in exactly the same way as I'd join yarn when spinning, so I have a piece crocheted from a single strand of yarn, which is quite pleasing. The second time I did this, I failed to take the bobbin off the spinning wheel before joining, leaving me with a bobbin-full of yarn on one side of a small hole, and a half-crocheted scarf on the other. The crochet work was somewhat less portable than it might be until I'd finished that bobbin.

Here is the finished garment, modelled by George:

George serving as a black velvet cushion

It's a little too short to be a scarf, and a little too narrow to be a shawl, but at something between the two, it's quite wearable, and I did indeed wear it to Polly's wedding.

With my brother-in-law, nephew and niece, who played their parts as page boy and flower girl excellently

The next step is to start from a raw fleece and learn how to scour and card it. This may require the purchase of equipment.

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