Respect your Elders

Elder is one of my favourite trees. It has beautiful creamy flower umbels early in the summer which are a magnet for insects followed by deep purple berries, plates of juicy jewels which wild birds love, especially blackcaps. Maybe it's how the males top up the colour of their shiny caps.

When cut back, elder grows a multitude of dead-straight vertical new shoots which are perfect for lopping off and poking into the ground to become new bushes. Elder wood and leaves have a unique, indescribable smell which I love too. I don't know what the chemical is, but it's said if you poke a stem into a mole run it will drive the mole away - not that I'd want to do that. Elder twigs can be hung in fruit trees to deter insects and the leaves have long been used to keep flies away.

Elder is intertwined in folklore too, with strong links to witches.

But practically, the elder makes a great addition to the hedgerow, woodland or the forest garden. Where it is not quite so welcome is growing in the small space between my sheds and stable block. One has grown up and reached high above, up to about 20 feet tall. I left it as it was still doing more good than harm, but it has grown so much that the trunk is obstructing necessary repairs to the shed rooves.

So I was going to chop it right back and maybe even take it out completely until the turkeys had other ideas. They roost on the stable and elderberries have become their breakfast of choice.

The view from on top of the shed.
They are chopped elder branches on the ground below.

But with the berries finally ripe the easiest way to harvest them was to climb onto the shed rooves and dismantle the tree. Sorry turkeys!

In the early summer we use the flower umbels to make elderflower cordial and elderflower champagne, an excellent drink which tastes fantastic and packs a punch. The flowers are popular for fritters too, though we've always prioritised the alcohol.

We have plenty of elders splashed around the smallholding so every few years we harvest ripe berries too. These can be used for many things, though not eaten raw, but for us there is one product which is unique and trumps all others - pontack sauce.

Pontack sauce is a rich, aromatic sauce full of umami. It's like a fruity Worcestershire sauce and adds a wonderful depth of flavour to stews and slow-cook recipes. Like a good wine, it develops with age. The batch we made in 2017 is just coming to its best.

The downside to all this is that I now have no reason not to get on with fixing the two shed rooves. I also have a mountain of elder branches to process. They don't make great fire wood so most will be chipped and either spread on the perennial beds or added into the compost.

Nothing goes to waste.

May Daze

Come back Rain, all is forgiven

Hot sunny days and lockdown have meant that I don't particularly have to work around the weather or other commitments. I can relax a little more and still keep on top of things on the smallholding.

Having said that, our boom and bust weather patterns do make things more difficult. 7% of our usual May rainfall has necessitated watering in new plantings and watering where I sowed the carrots, one of only two crops which I now sow direct. The parsnips failed to come through this year, so did their replacements. Worse still, the water butts have run dry so I now have to use metered and treated water. At least hoeing has been easy.

The body and soul of the soil

I have steadily been moving last year's compost onto beds. The huge pile is now all gone, but the encouraging news is that I had enough to cover the majority of the 80 or so beds I have. 

It's amazing how much material we produce to feed the compost heaps. Hopefully I can persuade some to break down enough for a mid summer mulch. 

Bee-keeping Update

We have only had five swarms of bees this year so far. Three of them have been huge swarms. One we gave away, the other four we collected and created new hives. One of these disappeared again, so Sue is now left with NINE hives. Her ideal number is three!!!

It looks like a good honey year. Sue has already taken 60 jars of early honey. She is not one to rob the bees of too much and always leaves plenty for the girls. 

A welcome hair cut

The hot weather is hard on the sheep too, so it was a relief for them when the shearer came a few days back. Jason and his wife Chloe are really friendly and fantastic with the sheep. Not only do the sheep get rid of their uncomfortably hot fleeces, but they get their feet trimmed and a dose of Clik to protect against fly strike. It's also a chance for a health check by people who know much more than us and for us to ask any questions we have.

One of our ewes looks suspiciously fat. If she is pregnant, it will be a virgin birth as the three rams have been kept well away. I have my suspicions how it may have happened. We'll see if she really is pregnant and what the lamb looks like if there is one.

Rambo, our breeding ram, has lost a lot of weight and his stools are not solid. We have tried worm and fluke treatment but it has not made a lot of difference. Jason gave him a mineral drench (this is not as it sounds, but simply means given orally) and says that often cures unknown problems. Let's hope.

Respect your Elders

Another feature of this time of year is that the elders come into flower. This is the cue for Sue to make elderflower champagne. The process is very simple. Just dissolve sugar in water, est and juice lemons, add elderflowers.

Stir daily until it starts to bubble from the natural fermentation. Then bottle and burp.

Sue has also frozen about 50 heads. Don't worry, there are absolutely loads left for the birds and insects.

Birdlife on the Farm

These two swallows ended up inside the house.

One found the exit and I caught 

and released the other.

Swallows are now swooping in and out of the stables, robins, blackbirds and starlings are already feeding young. Blue tits and great tits are busy collecting food for young families. A pair of pied wagtails loiter around the stables and often fly out of there as I approach. A couple of years back they nested under some pallets by the polytunnel. Woodpigeons, chaffinches and goldfinches breed in good numbers here and we have a thriving colony of house sparrows. Further down the land there are meadow pipits nesting in the rough grass and skylarks rise high to blast out their song. Wrens sing loudly and are dotted all about the smallholding. We have thrushes breeding on the smallholding too, both mistle thrushes and song thrush. But they are outcompeted in the song stakes by our blackcap which hasn't shut up for weeks now. I saw the male carrying food into a bush in the front garden yesterday.

Above: The rewilded front garden

Below: Native hedgerows as they should look, planted by me 7 years ago.

The Little Owls are incredibly secretive at this time of year. I rarely even hear them. Excitingly though, tawny owls have moved in and I hear them almost nightly. They may have driven the barn owls out though.

Finally we have summer migrant warblers back. Our first singing sedge warbler and whitethroat appeared earlier this week. We had a reed warbler singing from the hedge for a couple of weeks, but it needs to move on and find the right habitat. 

I've probably forgotten a few of our breeding species, but every year we seem to get more and more which is a fantastic result of all the work I've put into creating a nature friendly smallholding.

It's a Rat Trap

One species not so welcome on the farm is rats. The traps are working well and at the moment I am catching young ones. The traps are not live traps but are very secure in terms of not catching non-target species. I leave the dead rats on a post and something takes them.

A few weeks back I was just checking and resetting the traps when one of our geese got trapped inside the brassica netting. In my rush to free it, I misplaced the rat trap (not set to spring) and have been searching for it ever since. Well yesterday I found it as it go mangled by the mower blades. It fought hard though, so I now need to get the blade mechanism fixed.

Poultry News

On the subject of the geese, they are still laying and we are still trying to steal their eggs. However, one is now permanently settled on the nest so we'll leave it to fate whether or not we get goslings this year. 

The glut of goose eggs means Sue keeps busy making cakes. We freeze these and they are an extremely good way of storing a surplus of eggs. Goose eggs make the best sponge.

In other poultry news, one of our turkey hens managed to hatch out three healthy poults. We put them in the poultry cage as protection against crows and they are all doing well. The other hen is desperate to sit on eggs but the crows keep finding her eggs. Hopefully she'll find a good spot somewhere in the veg plot or soft fruit patch before it's too late. We are happy to leave this up to fate again.

We have two Silkie hens sitting on Muscovy duck eggs and now one of the Muscovy ducks herself has made a nest in the corner of the chicken house and is sitting. Hopefully we'll end up with a few ducklings. Two of our Muscovy girls are now missing in action. We don;t know if they've been taken by something, moved away or are secretly rearing clutches in some forgotten part of the smallholding.

Clearing the seedling log jam.

Planting out beans. The climbing structures are made from coppiced willow rods

which the sheep strip for me.

With the last frost gone (a really late one would be a bit disastrous) I have been busy clearing the logjam of young plants in the polytunnel. I have moved most of them to benches outside as temperatures have stayed in double figures day and night for quite a while now. 

Corn, beans, tomatoes, courgettes and squashes have all gone into the ground outside. We had a couple of very windy days which was a challenge for the newly planted beans, but on the whole I've never had young plants settle in so well. They usually suffer a setback for a week or so but not this year.

The Rewards

At the other end of this process, we are already starting to get some decent harvests, particularly from the polytunnel which is yielding delicious new potatoes, carrots and mangetout. Once these are harvested their space will be required for tomatoes, peppers, melons and cucumbers. In fact, they are already underplanted. Outdoors we have now stopped harvesting the rhubarb but we have a couple more weeks of asparagus left. The gooseberry bushes are bursting to overflowing and we'll very soon be thinning out the early picking for the sharp gooseberries. The rest are left on to sweeten. 

We have salad leaves coming out of our ears. We have so many different types of salad leaf and can always spice them up even more with edible flowers or herbs such as fennel or oregano.

So, that's about all for now. As you can see, we're always busy on the smallholding. 

Stay safe.

ROAD CLOSED - time for a bit of tree pruning

Monday 12th March 2018
ROAD CLOSED - that's what the sign read outside our house. I had been waiting for this, my chance to take off the last few top branches from a willow tree.
This willow is supposed to be a small weeping willow, but it has shot up from the base and turned into a full-scale tree.

But first I decided to move sixteen elder cuttings to their final position. I am creating an elder copse on the edge of the orchard. I think elder is a wonderful plant. It's bird friendly, the berries and flowers are great for cordials, wines and even champagne, as well as pontack sauce. It is easy to take cuttings and the older bushes grow back even stronger when cut.

My new elder copse. It will be impressive in the summer.

I was on Plan B today, for it was too wet and miserable for rotavating the area where I want to sow the butterfly and bee meadow. The soil was too wet and heavy to continue digging the duck pond either.

Our lovely empty road, complete with 

new posts for a new electricity line.

So back to the willow. The branches were rather more high than I remembered and thicker than I thought too. This is probably why I left them last time! But with the catkins coming out, they would soon be in leaf and even harder to deal with. Left for another year they would just be even bigger.
Luckily I had taken off some branches last year, so when I got to the top of the ladder and had to move off it and into the tree, there were plenty of secure places to plant my feet.
I took the job slowly, lopping off the fresh growth first, the wonderfully straight and long poles which had sprouted and reached for the skies from where I had cut last year.
I had three big branches to take off, but did one at a time, stopping for breaks in between. For it is when you are tired and pushing yourself too hard that accidents happen.
This was one job that I was pleased to get out of the way.

The rest of the afternoon was spent sorting the wood I had cut. Logs for the fire, poles and whips for plant supports in the veg garden and the rest for the sheep.

Rambo and his friend appreciated the 

willow I threw in for them.

They especially enjoyed nibbling off the catkins.

Oooooooooh, Saucy!

 

Sue has been getting saucy. At the back, from left to right, we have Pontack Sauce, Sweet Chilli Sauce and home-made Brown Sauce. At the front is Spiced Plum and Port Jam, a revelation in taste!

 

I was chopping down an elder bush, which has been somewhat smothering a fig sapling, and it seemed a shame to let the bountiful bunches of deep purple berries go to waste. So they appeared in a basket on the kitchen bench.

 

Sue dug out a recipe for Pontack Sauce. I must admit to never having heard of this before. I've certainly never seen it on the shelf in Tesco. It is in fact a traditional English spicy elderberry sauce, served with duck, venison or game. It can also be used added into stews and supposedly gives them a wonderfully rich flavour. It was, however, invented by a Frenchman, Francois-Auguste de Pontac (1636-1694). In 1666 he came to London and opened what was to become a trendy society tavern frequented by the likes of Danuel Defoe and Swift.

Sue used Hugh F-W's recipe, but you can find plenty of recipes on the net. The kitchen filled with deliciously spicy and rich aromas as the sauce was boiling down. I would tell you that the sauce tasted delicious, but it needs to store for at least two months to develop its full taste. Apparently it will last for years and just keep getting better and better. A bit like Sue!

 

Not such a traditional recipe up next. We have plenty of chillis from the polytunnel this year, so Sue decided to turn some of them into chilli sauce. As the chillis, chopped onions, vinegar and sugar boiled up, this did not look too promising, though the vapours it was giving off certainly had a punch to them! However, once it was whisked up it began to look like the real deal and it tasted, well, like sweet chilli sauce. But there's something special when you make it yourself using ingredients you've grown.

 

Third up, and definitely available in Tesco, came brown sauce. I remember when, to enjoy brown sauce, you had to tip up the thick glass bottle and tap, tap, tap the bottom until out came a dollop of rich, spicy sauce. But something has happened to brown sauce. It now comes in an upside down squeezy plastic bottle from which squirts a slightly runny brown liquid. You would certainly be hard pushed to detect the main ingredients.

So Sue started off with a pile of apples and plums, malt vinegar, Worcester sauce and a handful of spices. The cauldron bubbled and spat and the kitchen filled with the smell of good old-fashioned brown sauce. That night I had sausages (our own) liberally dolloped with brown sauce. Perfect! And you know what, I had to tap, tap, tap the bottom of the bottle to get it out.

 

Lastly on Sue's list of alchemy came her Spicy Plum and Port Jam. All I can say is wonderful smell, wonderful colour, amazing taste. A wine connoisseur would really go to town on this one, for it has layer upon layer of tastes, ending with a rich, exotic hint of dates. Certainly one to make again.

 

Cheers!



Friday 20th July 2012
My birthday!

I have not mentioned this before, but I do in fact hold the secret of eternal youth.
For last year I spent the whole year convinced I was 45, only to realise as my birthday approached that I had been 44 all year! Now this mistake could be forgiven once, but I've only gone and done it again this year. All year I've been 46 in my mind, so when I reached my real 46th birthday today, I did not actually get any older!

So that's now two birthdays without getting a day older!!

To celebrate we cracked open the cider which we started making back in April and I have to say we were very pleasantly surprised. I remember drinking the roughest of scrumpies back in my student days and I was expecting a repeat.
But no. The lid of the recycled Grolsch bottle popped up to reveal a clear, bubbly and sweet liquid which really was very refined. Beginner's luck I guess.

Not so the elderflower champagne though. Although the taste was delicate and summery, the fizz was disappointing. But worse than that, it had a strange, gelatinous texture, almost snotty! Most offputting. So we decided to turn it into sorbet, that is until we finally tracked down the reason for the snottiness... bacterial infection... no cure.


Ah well, one out of two wasn't bad, and neither experiment cost very much at all.
There's always next year. And we'll make enough of the elderflower champagne to turn some into sorbet too. I'm already looking forward to it.

A country kitchen

Wednesday 20th June 2012
Summer Solstice.

Rhubarab, rhubarb, rhubarb...

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb! Rhubarb crumble, rhubarb and custard, rhubarb and ginger jam, rhubarb and vanilla jelly, rhubarb chutney. Yes, Sue has been busy plundering Don's rhubarb!

And the latest? Rhubarb vodka and rhubarb leather. The last of these is thin sheets of rhubarb juice and puree dried on a low heat in the oven. The end product is packed with flavour and the tartness of the rhubarb adds a tangy bite.

Sue's been getting boozy too. The cider has been siphoned out of the demijohns and is all bottled up ready for consumption. It just needs a gorgeous, hot summer's day to provide the perfect opportunity to christen it.

Then there's this...

Elderflower champagne.

It's best to pick the elderflowers on a hot, sunny day, but if we waited for one of those there'd be no flowers left! The potion was mixed in a large cauldron (aka large, plastic bin) and left for a day. Then into bottles to ferment. We did try some of the liquid and it was pleasantly refreshing. Another drink for a hot summer's day.

We now wait a week and hope the bottles don't explode. We'll keep an eye on them and release some pressure if need be. We've tried plastic and glass bottles to see which work best and they're all packed in a bin with pillows on top just in case they blow up! We'll let you know how it turns out.

Meanwhile, this could just be the beginning of the next glut...

Strawberry wine anyone?