Wine

Cider Day

Margaret Lear Autumn, Cider & Ale, Fruit, Wild Food & Wild Things, Wine Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In between the days of heavy rain and wind and almost-sleet, Sunday was a fine, sunny day; cold, but nice to be out. So we made cider. We hired the electric crusher and big press from the Carse of Gowrie, Stuart brought his hefty home-made press and I had our little mini-press too, which did Catherine’s juicing apples nicely. Apples arrived in wheelbarrows and crates and plastic bags. We congregated under James’s Folly – which is a handy covered ediface erected principally for barbecues and resembling the Alamo – and got to work. Between 11 of us we processed roughly 30 gallons of cider-to-be and a gallon of juice in two and a half hours. Guess where the party’s going to be in a few months!

James did a couple of single variety gallons using his Golden Spire apples. Geoff brought some very pretty little red eaters – possibly Discovery; whereas most of the juice at this stage is an unappetising brown sludge (but delicious), Geoff’s was a lovely pinkish-red sludge – reckon that will be a handsome cider rose. One jar came out alarmingly clear – eerie! Our apples were the usual collection of weird and often unidentified subjects collected by Andrew over the past couple of months that have been gently festering around the house.

After we’d cleaned all the kit, we discovered another bucket of as yet unprocessed apples. And then a hard frost took all the leaves off the local apple trees, and beside roads and in gardens across Perthshire, there are strange Christmas trees of apple, with the late fruits hanging on like green or golden baubles….. More to do yet!

snowed under…

Margaret Lear Berries, Cider & Ale, Firewood, Fruit, Nuts, Pickle, Pudding, Wild Food & Wild Things, Wine, Winter Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

There is a lot of snow. Several inches over the week or two before Christmas, and a couple of massive falls in the past four days. 30cm last night. Temperatures: -11.2 the lowest so far recorded in the garden, -8.5 today. It went up to -4.2 and felt quite warm. Small birds are suffering. I have been feeding them; especially on apples. There are still two crates of random apples in the back porch and birds and possibly small mammals have helped themselves. The apples have frozen and thawed a few times, but seem still usable. Blackbirds love them, and I have had two fieldfares coming to the bird table every day, beautiful, fluffed up creatures looking for fruit and seeds. Sparkly speckly starlings come, too and a wood pigeon joins the collared doves who are resident. James over the road has had a spotted woodpecker.

There is no foraging to be done but we reap the rewards of a year spent squirreling away wild foods. At Christmas we broached the cider – it is sparkling, and not at all bad, but think will be even better in a couple more weeks. Got freshly pressed apple juice out of the freezer, too, and had plenty of rowan jelly for the turkey (yes, succumbed to a turkey even though we have home raised cockerels in the freezer), chutney for the sausage rolls, blaeberries and raspberries for the trifle and more home made wine and sloe gin that we can decently drink. Roasted hazelnuts from the copse, and a late jarring of rose hip syrup to keep up the vitamin C levels. Log foraging has sort of paid off – plenty of fuel for the stove but would be a darned sight more useful had Someone agreed with my desire to build a new log store out the back – wet logs in plastic fertiliser bags that fill with snow are limited in value.

My nursery is covered in snow. I cannot do anything about it and probably will lose a lot of plants in the extreme cold. I am going through the seed catalogues half-heartedly but not counting on an early start to production!

Drowning in Pomes….

Margaret Lear Autumn, Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Cider & Ale, Dishes/Comestibles, Flora, Fruit, Hedgerow, Jam, Nuts, Pasture, Wild Food & Wild Things, Wine Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s not that we haven’t been foraging, just that Andrew KEEPS BRINGING HOME MORE APPLES AND PEARS and I think we are drowning in them, so have scarcely had time to blog. (plus lots work on at college at present).

The worst is, they are all different varieties which he’s trying to identify or photograph or just moon over and there are crates and crates of the b**gers I’m not even allowed to touch, then all of a sudden they are fermenting all over the floor and it’s all a bit mind-boggling really. I am an apple widow.

Anyway that aside I’ve foraged and made these since I last wrote: rowan jelly, rowan berry wine, hazelnuts, elderberries for freezer, brambles, elderberry wine, quince jelly (using japonica quinces) and Andrew has permitted a small selection of the apple bing to be made into cider. It is a disgusting, thick brown soup of a cider at present, emitting a sludgy foam from the top of the demijohn. It is to be regretted that before we made it I had been suffering from a gastric bug (NOT from wild food!), which has affected the way I view the cider jar. Nevertheless, I am sure the end result will be as good as it was last year, and am optimistic His Lord High Appletreeness will eventually permit the remainder of the bing to be thus processed. Maybe even some of the pears.

The biggest problem we have with cidermaking is crushing the apples. We have a lovely little press, but unless the fruit is well mashed you don’t get the juice from it and it is a long, slow process. A 10lb weight into a bucket is OK but broke the bucket; James’s mechanical chip-maker is a start but we really have to get a proper mincer. The off-putting brown colour comes from tannin, and won’t do any harm, some apples just have lots in them. Keswick Codlins made up the large amount of the apples we used, but there were others – James Grieve, Lord Derby, Grenadier, Bramley and “various Laxton type things” (quote). No real cider apples – told A he needs to develop a Scottish cider apple.

The Quince Jelly also benefitted from a dose of Bramley for setting quality – and it is an exquisite jelly. I know Japonica quinces aren’t strictly wild food but they might as well be, as so many people grow the things as ornamental shrubs with never a clue they are cultivating a valuable food source.

Not been much on the fungi front – we have had a few weeks of dry weather and haven’t found anything new or in remarkable quantity or quality for a while. A very interesting mushroom is developing on a log in the garden; yet to be identified. More later!

PS. Sloes about ready to pick….

Wet wet wet…

Margaret Lear Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Fungi, Hedgerow, Summer, Wild Food & Wild Things, Wine Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It has rained so much and so heavily since our return from holiday that I’ve scarcely been on a walk, and when I have I’ve got too drowned to hunt for wild food very much. Plus the weather which makes foraging tricky makes the garden grow prodigiously, so that we in the midst of a glut, of salads, courgettes, broad beans, tree spinach, spinach spinach, soft fruit, cultivated burdock, sugar pease and goodness knows what else – mammoth chutney and freezing operations, and more winemaking have been required.

Some summer fungi like the wett, of course, and there are probably more out there than we’ve managed to get to so far, but this will be remedies soon I hope. Andrew found some field mushrooms at work, unfortunately, so did some little flies who laid eggs in them. We picked an impressive bag of chanterelles yesterday, enough for a meal, and there were a couple of Yellow Russulas (Russula lutea) and Tawny Grisettes as well. There was one Cep (Boletus edulis), but it stayed where it was because again the flies and slugs were already there.

We also laid into some wild gooseberries, raspberries and a selection of cherries that hadn’t yet been blown or washed off the trees – they vary so much in sweetness and flavour Andrew decided to collect the pips of the nicest ones and grow them…. you can see how readily Homo sapiens went from a foraging lifestyle to deciding it would be easier to grow your own, and carrying out a bit of selective breeding…

PS. He managed to get to some field mushrooms today before the flies and before the man with the mower – very tasty.

Elderflower Time

Margaret Lear Broadleaved Woods, Flora, Fritters, Hedgerow, Pasture, Salad, Summer, Vegetables, Wild Food, Wine Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

We are having ideal weather for wild food to grow – rain, sometimes heavy, alternating with warm sunny days. Elderflowers are out; this means elderflower fritters first of all, and drinking last year’s elderflower wine. Then it will be making cordial and wine – just as soon as the rain stops for long enough to collect some nice fresh flowers. Fritters are delicious – I make a batter with one egg, some milk, beer or cider and enough flower to make a sticky batter, plus a teaspoon or so of baking powder. Last week I tried half a can of Guinness in it, but think it was maybe a bit heavy – cheap lager is better. If the oil is hot enough, it takes less than a minute to turn each one golden and fluffy. I like to sprinkle them with lemon juice and sugar, which isn’t very self sufficient, but good.

I’m very caught up with Hogweed just now. Such a common wayside weed, but absolutely delicious. Peel the young shoots or young leaf stems and cook like asparagus, toss in butter if you like. We had our first Plants with Purpose Foragers’ Ramble last Saturday and there was plenty of hogweed, out of bravado I chewed on a raw stem (you do these things when you’re being watched) – and it was rather good! But better as a cooked vegetable.

I won’t try to list all the edible plants we found on Saturday – there were far too many. But everyone had a good munch on the immature seed pods of Sweet Cicely, and plenty of wild salads were collected and sampled. I learned a new trick – one of the youngsters on the ramble demonstrated how to eat stinging nettles – so what you might say – but  raw?? Well, you grasp the nettle and roll it up tightly into a ball (I got slightly stung finger and thumb but if you get it right this shouldn’t happen.) You place the rolled up nettle leaf precisely between your back molars and chomp, without engaging the tongue. Scary, but it works!

The high point for me was finding Monk’s Rhubarb, a garden pot-herb that has escaped and naturalised but is not too common, and I’ve never seen it before. It’s another member of the dock family, also called Alpine Dock (Rumex alpinus), which has massive, heart-shaped leaves and long, purplish, rhubarb-like stems. There were several big specimens between the rivers Almond and Tay, no doubt deposited by river alluvium during some flood. Yesterday we went back to pick some to try – it was good, quite tough and on the bitter side mind. I was expecting that as it is apparently better through spring and later in the autumn, but becomes less enticing during summer. I did the usual “cook like spinach” trick, standard procedure for many wild greens; possibly will try next lot for longer cooking.

Another find which is easy to spot just now was Pignut. This umbellifer has very delicate flowers, is about 30cm tall, and has very very fine leaves, almost hairlike. If you are more skilled and fortunate than we are, you can trace the brittle stems down to the edible tubers. Be sure you have the landowner’s permission to dig it up though because otherwise it’s illegal.

Weeding the garden at this time of year produces lots of plants of Wood Avens, or Clove Root (Geum urbanum). The roots smell strongly of cloves and can readily be dried and crumbled to use as flavouring – or use them fresh of course. I do like this plant, but it is a bit of a thug in the garden so this helps control it!

Our next Foragers’ Ramble is the second Saturday in July.

And more wild garlic…

Margaret Lear Broadleaved Woods, Dishes/Comestibles, Flora, Fungi, Hedgerow, Nuts, Salad, Sauce, Seashore, Seaweed, Spring, Uncategorized, Vegetables, Wine Leave a comment

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) is commonly called Wild Garlic, even though several other wild plants also have this name. It’s the broad-leaved, glossy plant that carpets old woods in April and May, and bears heads of starry white flowers. Both the leaves and the flowers are edible. Last night I made Ramsons pesto with a bucket of leaves.

I just liquidised the washed leaves with the water that clung from washing, together with a packet of pine nuts, a small bag of other undistinguished wild nuts that needed using up, and olive oil. I don’t know how much olive oil went in because I just slurped it in till the consistency was right, but couldn’t have been more than a couple of eggcupsful, maybe less. Then I tasted it, and decided it needed a wee bit of Maldon Sea Salt (this isn’t advertising, just supporting a local industry from way back home, being an Essex Girl). Andrew said it was too bitter and to add some honey, but I didn’t – these days I can’t stand anything to be too sweet and I thought it was perfect. He added some honey on his oatcake but still didn’t like it, so it’s all for me. Excellent! Strange how the garlic flavour comes through really strongly – individual leaves in salad are very mild, but this is good and strong. The colour is absolutely beautiful too.

What else? Lime leaves are nice now, before they start to lose that spring-green flavour. Wood sorrel remains magnificent, and ground elder has reached the point where it’s better steamed/cooked rather than raw. Flowers appear in salads – cornflowers, violets, broom buds, chives and of course ramsons. We were down at the coast in Fife last weekend and failed to collect because we forgot to go back for it lots of the seaweed Enteromorpha intestinalis, which is rather nice. However my stomach rebelled against a rich diet badly enough on Monday, so maybe it was just as well.

More St. George’s Mushrooms made their way to Saturday’s breakfast, and burdock stems onto dinner. I have only so far eaten the fleshy leaf stems of the Great Burdock (Arctium lappa), although I am assured other parts are edible too. It’s delicious. What you have to do is carefully peel away the slightly hairy outer skin on each stem – it doesn’t matter if you don’t get all of it. It’s a bit like peeling rhubarb. You’ll notice the interesting, musty but rather pleasant smell. Cut into sections and steam or lightly boil. You can serve it as a vegetable; I used to add butter but don’t feel the need to these days. My tastes really have changed!

Noticing the buds on elder bushes; the rowans are out and may (hawthorn) about to blur the distinction between late pear and early apple blossom. Eyeing up this year’s wine and cider sources. I racked off last years elderberry and sloe and blackcurrant wines this weekend – the last before bottling. As usual the elderberry tastes the more promising!

More Dock Puddings and some wild onions

Margaret Lear Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Diary entries, Estuary/Wetlands, Flora, Hedgerow, Mountain, Pudding, Salad, Spring, Teas & Tisanes, Vegetables, Wine Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Oddly enough now I don’t have to drink herbal teas, I’m really enjoying some of them! Mints are growing  now, so lots of choices – chocolate, basil, apple, eau de cologne… or shall I just have peppermint? All taste so fresh, so green and lively. Mind you I am inundated with orders for mints that are really hard to keep up with given the slow start into growth – must be the herb of the year. Bistort is everywhere just now, and I’ve been making more traditional dock puddings, using oatmeal and a little chopped bacon with the variety of wild leaves around now.

River floodplains throw up some odd edible plants at times – in an old orchard next to the River Tay at its tidal extent Andrew found not only Ramsons (Allium ursinum), but also Three cornered leek (Allium triquetrum) and what we think was Field Garlic growing wild. They went into a salad to go with the first barbecue of the year last weekend. On a field trip with my countryside students this week, we enjoyed snacking on fresh lemony-sharp leaves of Wood Sorrel – a real appetite stimulant. We harvested a few juniper berries from the wild trees near Rumbling Bridge; they add a fantastic aroma and taste to game dishes. It was nice to note the pretty, bell-shaped flowers of the blaeberry or bilberry up in the hills, promising a harvest to come. Had another taste of bracken shoots, but I remain unconvinced. I don’t like the texture and the taste is woolly and bitter. Better wayside snacks are brand-new lime leaves, hawthorn shoots and the first broom buds, tasting of new pea pods, all available now.

Blackthorn, along with cherry blossom, seems to be very floriferous this year – I have noted where to go for sloes, but must find something other than gin to make with them, as we never seem to drink it all! Andrew’s explorations of relict orchards have identified potential pears in the autumn; we are looking forward to apple blossom time – just beginning here with our James Grieve wonder-tree against the shed.

Who else is back? HIRUNDO! the first swallows were spotted in Bankfoot on Sunday……. and an orange-tip butterfly…….. the ospreys are home, to and busy breeding…… St. G’eorges Day tomorrow – look out for St George’s Mushrooms! (and the dragons who got away).

Two Hours to Easter….

Margaret Lear Fauna, Flora, Vegetables, Wine Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

…but I’ll break my fast after the early morning service held up at little Glenshee, a point that geologically sits on the Highland Boudary Fault, and geographically on a ford at the start of the hills that mark the beginning of the Highland landscape. The last day has been every bit as trying as the rest;  yet taken on its own it would seem like a pretty good day’s eating: an omelette (hens eggs) with pak choi donated by Janet; 2 hard boiled eggs (ducks, just for variety!) for lunch plus a munch of some of the Bucks Horn Plantain, Chervil, Garlic Chives and Chives I was selling at the time (I was at Blairgowrie Market) washed down with a flask of luke warm herbal liquid, and for dinner a cross between a Spanish Tortilla and Scottish Stovies, made from fragments of venison recovered from boiling the deer bones from the banquet 6+ weeks ago and kept in the freezer, mashed rather small seed potatoes, half an ancient chilli, an onion from Andrew and parsley from the greenhouse – bound together with yet another egg. That was it, last challenge meal.

After market we went shopping. My children are cooking for me tomorrow and have all sorts planned (including some pizza at some point!), but I felt rather odd going round the supermarket with them. So many things no longer appealed and I certainly didn’t feel inclined to plan a binge. I am looking forward to the organic bread and hot cross buns I bought at market, and some yoghurt. Fresh mushrooms appeal, as do crisp apples (as opposed to shrivelled ones) and grapes.  Strong mugs of rooibos tea, with milk. Ah – and some real ale, and the Cairn O’Mohr Carse of Gowrie apple juice and cider that’s waiting for me in the cupboard. Nothing particularly exotic or fancy – simple foods and the choice of having them is what I crave most.

I shall be foraging for fun now, but intend to keep wild food as a large part of my diet; and go for local produce wherever I can. Where I can’t, fair trade. Can’t afford to be totally organic, but what we produce is organic enough and this year I’ll try to produce more of the foods that would get me through another fast in late winter/early spring – not that I’m intending to repeat the experiment!

Not sure how much money I’ve raised yet, but work has begun to get the gardens and orchard at Bankfoot Church off the ground, I’ve found new friends and feel it has been worthwhile. Changed my outlook on food for sure….. and there’s the small matter of rediscovering my waist and being a stone and a half lighter – an unexpected benefit! Chocolate eggs and freedom to eat notwithstanding, I don’t want to put it all back on, so some of the changes in my eating will be lasting ones.

But less eggs and a moratorium on herbal teas!

March 1st

Margaret Lear Fauna, Teas & Tisanes, Tree Sap, Uncategorized, Wine Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Severely put to the test last night. Friends of mine had a joint birthday party, with food. Johanna offered to cook for me one of the mackerel we had caught together in the Firth of Tay last summer, with veggies from their garden, and the event was to kick off at 7pm. That sounded great and didn’t break any rules! So I didn’t eat too much all day – just one of the potatoes I dug from James next door’s garden in return for the digging, for lunch about 1.30pm.

What I didn’t realise was that dinner was preceded by two hours of the most succulent and delicious-looking “canapes”  – which of course I couldn’t eat! I sipped at the home made elderflower wine I’d brought and realised I was getting light headed, and my stomach was making funny noises, so I went back to water. All the while this table full of food beside me…. anyway, I perked up considerably after wolfing down my mackerel, cauliflower and peas – and Johanna insisted on donating me the other 2 mackerel fillets they had defrosted, so I had one for breakfast. Had to disappear to the loo when the birthday cakes and the After Eights came out – more than the heart could bear.

Mercifully the hens have decided to start laying again, so I shall have some hard-boiled eggs to add to the slowly drying apple rings as snacks. I think I will just use the hazelnuts as snacks, too, rather than try to make them into a meal. Rose wanted rid of another cockerel yesterday who was brutalising her bantams, so I think I have no problem really with protein, and the hazelnuts are just a treat at times.

I had the cockerel hung up to pluck and draw this morning when I discovered the cupboard under the sink was full of water so was distracted by the need to do some filthy plumbing. By the time I had got that fixed, the cock in the freezer, tonights dinner (pheasant, leeks and a potato) in a slow cooker, and tomorrow’s vegetable stew for the food flask (I work a 12 hour shift on Mondays at the college), not to mention cleaning and drying the kitchen, it was late afternoon. So much for foraging! I’d have loved a pot of tea (how I LOVE tea), but had to settle for a wild strawberry leaf tisane, which is… acceptable.

I have my curd cheese hanging up in muslin to drain; and another pan of sycamore sap on the stove, and the house is tidy but I’ve had no time to relax this weekend. So pretty exhausted tonight, craving chocolate, or a mug of Horlicks, a biscuit…. I think I’d better go to bed.

September and October Catch-up

Margaret Lear Autumn, Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Fruit, Fungi, Hedgerow, Jam, Nuts, Pine Woods, Pudding, Soup, Uncategorized, Wild Food, Wine, Winter Leave a comment

September passed in a bit of a blur, to begin with – as always the start of this month dominated by the Dundee Flower Show and its pre-math and aftermath, coupled with the start of a new term at the college, which was more complicated than usual!

So what follows is by way of a summary for a month that is actually a good one for foragers usually – just needed a bit more time in our case.

On 10th, I foraged along Crieff Road in Perth for fruits and nuts for purely educational reasons, but noted some excellent elderberries on campus, and some tedious municipal planting yielded a nice bag of Japonica quinces (Chaenomeles japonica). These fragrant fruits (they are pomes to be exact) make a lovely addition to fruit pies and puddings. Blackberries ripe trailing over our back wall from the neighbours – started to harvest and freeze them.

angels20wings20web

 

On 14th, we went fungi-foraging and netted some Slippery Jacks, one Cep, Bay Boletes and several Angel’s Wings. Angel’s Wings are Pleurotellus porrigens, related to Oyster Mushroom but subject to some doubt in internet circles as a couple of folk in Japan once were ill on them. We’ve eaten them regularly for quite a while, and so have many others, so I am suspicious about the identification in the case in question. Worth bearing in mind, though that people can react differently to individual species, hence the confusion when one book says “edible” and another says “best avoided” or similar ambiguous verbage. The other find on the 14th comes into this category – Plums and Custard (Tricholomopsis rutilans). It’s easy to identify because Plums and Custard perfectly describes the colouring, so is good to eat on that score. Can be slightly bitter, but we eat it anyway. Braised it with shoulder of lamb and cranberries from our garden.

 

On 19th, it was rowan berries day. Collected a big heap of them and made rowan jelly – delicious. That week, the boletus and chanterelles I dried in July and August were put into jars for winter use, and noted the rose hips were looking good. Shaggy Ink Caps were spotted at the college, but turned to ink before I could pick them. On 26th, we raided one of our usual haunts and found, apart from the usual fungal suspects which we rounded up, a new one – Hydnum (or Sarcodon) imbricatum – a type of Hedgehog Fungus. They were tea-plate sized, scaley fruiting bodies by the edge of the path, quite spectacular. As we had never seen it before we only took one for identification, and I’m glad because they are apparently quite rare, pinewoods in Scotland being the preferred habitat. Edible though – and delicious!

Puffballs were taken with roast beef on 28th, and a dessert of blaeberries, brambles and cranberries completed Sunday Dinner.

October

Now I look at it, October is also at an end!

On 4th, we harvested a large crop of wild hazelnuts from the plantation, and so did our friends. There were plenty left for the two wild food workshops we held this month, but I seriously think it is time to coppice the hazels – the nuts are getting too high to reach! We gathered rosehips too and made syrup, and brambles continued to provide sustenance and desserts.

Removed a large Sweet Cicely that had seeded itself in the wrong place in the garden, and turned the large fat roots into soup, along with other vegetables. The aniseedy flavour when cooked is mild and enticing, blending well with other tastes.

The two workshops found plenty overall to forage, but fungi were not so thick on the ground as we might have hoped – a cold dry snap had temporarily put a halt to fruiting. Nevertheless, one high point was a massive fruiting body of Grifola frondosa which our neighbour Geoff served as a starter on the evening of the first workshop. Andrew and I squabbled over identification, I thought it was Cauliflower Fungus (Sparassis crispa) to start with, but we all realised it was just too “chunky”. Next week we found Cauliflower Fungus as well and were able to compare them side by side. Geoff found a very young Beefsteak fungus (Fistulina hepatica) – this is significant because it didn’t have any maggots in and we all got a small mouthful. Yum. A range of other edible fungi have been eaten – some good – no excellent – crops of Honey Fungus in the Forest Enterprise wood, plenty of Lycoperdon perlatum puffballs and when all else fails, Common Yellow Russula. (All else did fail, for a brief spell last week and I bought some chestnut mushrooms, reduced. Then honey fungus appeared on the lawn). We normally get a reliable crop of Shaggy Ink Caps in the hen run, but not this year, I suspect the ducks of eating them.

 

Nut front – Bankfoot chestnuts produced niggardly little nuts, no use to man nor beast, but James next door brought back some fat Surrey ones from Bisley, which we are roasting on the stove merrily, with the hazelnuts. Andrew went on a cider making course and has been scrumping furiously the apple crop of our other neighbours (with permission!), along with any others he can find. I went to Northumberland and found a great apple tree right in the middle of the sand-dunes at Bamburgh. We have got out our old cheese press and are also producing fresh apple juice, which is astonishingly good. Pete, who came on the second workshop sent us a tiny, but perfectly formed, pear to identify that he had found while scrumping. We were stumped, but Andy my colleague at college identified it as the Plymouth Pear, Pyrus cordata.plums20and20custard20web

On 19th, I gathered elderberries and made a gallon of wine, and froze two boxes of them. Fished some out last week and made Elderberry Muffins. More Plums and Custard found on 26th.

Wild weather has seen off the rest of October – firstly howling gales and cascades of rain, then snow, followed by a big freeze. Time to stay by the stove and roast chestnuts!