Herby Crackers

Fresh turnips and beetroot from the polytunnel
and a selection of herbs plucked from the herb patch

Sunday was Veg Group day.
On the menu was a propagation masterclass by Steve, including the dark art of grafting, as well as a barbecue lunch. Top of the crops this month was strawberries. The sun hadn't shone enough yet on my own strawberry patch to rustle up something strawberryish to take along, so instead I concentrated on the discussion topic for the gathering which was herbs.
I started the veg group at the same time as the blokes baking group, under the general umbrella of the Fenland Smallholders Club. Over a year later and both groups are still going strong, which pleases me. The idea of the veg group is that we gather once a month at someone's place and discuss growing. We usually end up going off topic and discussing all sorts of other things, but one aspect which I am keen we hold on to is how we use our food once we've grown it. We all bring something along for the table and I encourage people to incorporate the Top of the Crops.
But with no strawberries, I was damned if I was going to go out and buy some, especially knowing that within a couple of weeks we will be facing a glut of the things. Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the pavlova which somebody brought along.
But I opted to go down the herb route. I knew that somebody would bring along a herb bread. The cheesy herby scones that I made for the last blokes baking would work, but for some reason I got into my head the idea of making herb biscuits, each with a different sort of herb to try.
I eventually settled on a recipe for herb crackers, which I started making at 8.30pm on Saturday evening. If they didn't turn out well, I would be up late thinking of something else to make!

I adapted the recipe I found quite a lot, so here's what I came up with.

To make 1 small ball of dough, enough for about 20 small crackers:

75g flour
1/4 tsp salt
about 3 teaspoons of your chosen fresh herb, finely chopped

Mix the above ingredients together in a bowl.

Add 1 tbsp. oil and 35 - 40 ml water.
Quickly mix up with a wooden spoon until it forms a ball of dough. Knead very briefly to bring it into a ball, adding more flour or water as necessary to make it the right consistency for rolling.

4 different versions ready to be rolled and cooked

Roll the dough as thinly as you can on a sheet of silicone or parchment. Dip a knife into flour and score the dough to make individual crackers. You can go right through to the silicone.
Finally prick each cracker several times with a fork to stop them puffing up. Sprinkle with coarse salt if you wish. This gives the crackers a pretzelly taste, but the salt does mask the herby taste a little.


Rolled and scored, ready for the oven.

Place the silicone / parchment onto a baking try and bake at 180C (fan oven) or 200C (non fan) for about 15 minutes, until lightly browned.

Et voila!
The end result was so tasty that, by the time it occurred to me to take a photo, there was just this one cracker left!

My favourites were the rosemary crackers, but the others were popular too. This time I made mint, sage, lemon balm, sweet yarrow (English Mace) and oregano.
How much herb you add to your recipe is completely up to you. It's a ridiculously cheap, easy and quick recipe, so feel free to experiment.

Rocket stove

Rocket stove kits

No, I have not entered the world of rocket engineering.
A rocket stove is a small but powerful cooker which runs on small sticks. Astonishingly it can reach white hot temperatures, despite its simplicity. And because it burns so hot it is incredibly efficient, burning everything in the wood which is combustible and leaving very little waste indeed.

The rocket stove was invented back in the 1980s and looks deceptively simple. It's basically an elbow shaped tube, which can be fairly simply knocked up out of tin cans, which sits in a bigger can full of insulation. The ratios though are important. Without boring you with the measurements and engineering theory, the airflow and height of the flue need to be just right to ensure that just enough oxygen is supplied to the fire, not too much and not too little.

The rocket stove has big implications for developing countries. Wood is a precious and declining resource across much of the world, so the more efficiently it can be used the better. Every move towards making wood sustainable is a move in the right direction. Cut the amount of wood needed for fuel, cut the time and energy used in collecting it. The fact that only small sticks are required is a bonus too.
The rocket stove is now used extensively in disaster zones. It is cheap, easy to produce, portable and green. A triumph of alternative technology. The central flue, the most important part, can be cheaply manufactured from ceramic, which is the best material.

So when the chance came up to make our own rocket stove at the Green Backyard in Peterborough, for free, well we jumped at it. I am not pretending that we will replace our gas cooker, electric oven, microwave and kettle all with a rocket stove, but I find the Green Backyard an inspiring place to go and if I could come back with my own rocket stove, all the better!




We arrived to find out that we didn't need to improvise the whole thing out of baked bean tins, which need regularly replacing as they disintegrate under the phenomenal heat produced within. For we were getting specially made stainless steel elbows. Posh ones! - which should hopefully last several years.
Our tutor for the day, Bob, clearly knew more than we needed to know, but he kept himself to giving us a very interesting history of the rocket stove and just enough technical information to be of interest.
I'd never used metal nibblers before, but I want some now. They made short work of cutting holes in the outer can to fit the flue. A few adjustments and we were ready to fill the void with vermiculite. The three bolts coming out of the top are for the pot, kettle or griddle to sit on. They are adjustable but basically need to sit about an inch above the top of the flue.

Anyway, enough of the technicalities.


Renee from the Green Back Yard
chats to 2 of the course participants
as they head home, rocket stoves in hand.

Enough to say that we had a lovely day and came away with not one but two rocket stoves. I feel some outdoor cooking coming along.

Shorn!

Mutton inspects my new haircut

Shetland sheep are supposedly self-shedding. This means that their winter coat drops off leaving them nice and cool for the summer. That's the theory. However, most of our Shetland sheep have shown very little sign of this happening. They have rubbed against whatever they could find to rub against but still most of their long winter coats stay attached - which means that they have been starting to get rather hot. Not only that, but long wool, especially at their back end, can get a bit messy. With more and more warm muggy days on their way, this leads to a severe risk of flystrike - maggots! At best, this makes a sheep very ill. It is often fatal if not caught early.

Rambo and Doc, pre-haircut

One of last year's lambs is sporting its summer coat after virtually all it's fleece came off in my hands in one go. The ewe who had twins has turned into a patchy mess, which can be a problem with self-shedding breeds - this sometimes leads to misinformed calls to the RSPCA from well-meaning members of the public. Finally, Rambo has enjoyed me plucking his wool from his neck - a practice known as rooing. However, most of his wool is just not ready to come off yet.
But the rest were showing very few signs of losing their coats.



Last weekend was the Fenland Smallholders Club sheepy day. We enjoyed a demonstration of shearing, dagging, foot-trimming, injecting (I looked away) and applying flystrike chemicals. There was a great turnout, with many new members which was encouraging.

I felt totally inadequate as the two shearers turned the sheep onto their rumps and the sheep just became totally docile, sitting there as if in a comfy armchair. Whenever I handle the sheep, they have a habit of kicking and squirming, which makes it quite a tiring process for both them and me!

Sue had arranged for the shearers to come over to our smallholding later that same day, so at 7 in the evening I found myself driving the sheep up to the top paddock. Luckily this went smoothly, given that we were being watched by professionals. I was also encouraged by that fact that, in the hands of these experienced sheep handlers, our feisty Shetlands still kicked and struggled. It certainly made me feel better!

Anyway, after about an hour our sheep were sporting new haircuts. They also looked about a third the size.

I was so impressed that I had my roughly biannual shearing myself. So no flies on me!

After

Before

 
 

Tree Sparrows

 

When I was young, tree sparrows were still pretty common. Sadly they have suffered a disastrous decline in numbers and nobody seems to be doing much about it. Birdwatchers knew it years ago. Birds which we'd expect to see on a day out suddenly became missing items on our day lists. Places where they used to be no longer held them. Before we knew it, we needed to visit special sites to see them.
To the list alongside tree sparrow, I can add grey partridge, corn bunting, lesser spotted woodpecker, willow tit. The same happened to red-backed shrike a generation before, but that's gone now.
We all know it's been happening for decades but no-one in power starts talking about it until the decline is steep and no-one starts doing anything about it until long term studies show that it is almost too late.

So it was with some joy that, when we moved onto the farm, we discovered a small population of tree sparrows visiting the feeders during our first winter. That was, however, a very cold winter. We had up to 13 at one point. Over the next year or so, we still saw them, but in smaller numbers. After two years, we no longer saw them regularly. In fact, I only saw them on three occasions in two years, each time on migration and only briefly.

Then, four weeks ago, I was surprised to look out of the window in the morning and find a pair of tree sparrows on the feeders (I presumed it was a pair. Male and female look identical.) Even better, they were still there in the evening, and the next morning, and the next. Not only that, but they definitely seemed to be collecting bits and bobs of straw, grass and feathers. Could it be that they were building a nest somewhere close by?

A few days later and only one bird was visiting the feeders. (Or was it that they were taking turns?) I hoped this meant that the other was on a nest, but I had no way of telling until...

A couple of days ago there were FOUR tree sparrows at the feeders. Yes, mum and dad had brought their babies!

 



And the winner is... cuter than the goslings... cuter than the lambs...

BORIS!!!

Boris is the reason why there was a two week gap in posts to this blog, for he is pretty full-on! He has been in the occasional scrape and still doesn't quite understand the rules, but he is already proving to be a very good companion for me while I am beavering away in the garden, even if he does somewhat slow me down.

He is absolutely adorable and turns the toughest of old blokes into a complete softie. Boris has everything he could want. He is spoiled rotten, but his favourite toy is a black garden pot which is rather too big for him. He is rapidly acquiring a taste for sticks too, so the gale force winds of the last two days have brought a bounty of branches crashing to the ground. Today Boris made a major misjudgement, jumping through his doggy gate while holding a stick which clearly, to the trained eye, did not fit through said gap!

Anyway, the pictures say it all.

The wooden spoon for cuteness goes to... the turkey poults.

Before I announce the winner, the wooden spoon in the cuteness competition goes to these guys (or gals?)

I'm sorry, but turkey poults just are not cute. Goslings, yes. Chicks, yes. But poults? Even the word is not cute.
I guess I'm slightly swayed by the fact that we buy our turkeys as very young chicks and then have them in a broody box stinking out the entrance porch until they are big enough and ugly enough to go out. Most of our other poultry we now prefer to hatch under proper mums, or at least surrogate mums.


But young turkeys - lets call them turklets rather than poults - do have the advantage that, as they grow up, they become rather endearing creatures. This is not always the case with chickens and definitely a matter of opinion when it comes to geese!

The turklets had their first taste of grass and fresh air today.
It won't be long before they can roam free and roost in the stables.

For the moment, though, the turklets remain the ugly ducklings, so to speak.

Celery powder

I'm not sure what we'll use it for yet, but we've just made some celery powder, christening our recently purchased food dehydrator.

I am trying to make more use of the polytunnel over the winter and one such use is to hold crops in a state of virtual dormancy until they spring back to life in the spring. I tried this with celery this year and we had some lovely early celery stalks.

But now the celery is flowering and taking up valuable space, so I have pulled all but one plant up. This plant I shall use to produce celery seed.
As for the rest, it seemed a shame to waste them so Sue patiently chopped them up and dehydrated them.

A few minutes in a blender and we now how a wonderfully aromatic potful of celery powder.

Second place for cuteness goes to..... the lambs.

It's a month now since our Shetland ewe kept us waiting for 41 hours before giving birth to two gorgeous little lambs.

The girl lamb, who was first born, has always been much smaller than the boy, but she makes up for this with her boldness. She is always the first to investigate new things, the first to go straight up to new people or animals and the first to find a way out if there is one!
This occasionally results in her coming face to face with unexpected threats.











It wasn't long before I let the lambs outside with mum. They moved into a small paddock with just one other ewe, their aunty, whose motherly instincts had been heightened since she lost her lamb.
And there they have frolicked and played for the last few weeks. They still feed greedily from mum, but have started grazing too and nibbling the bark off willow branches.

They have also learned to run and jump and spring and leap and climb. In fact I'm sure they have spring coils hidden in their back legs. To watch them gambling around in the paddock is a joy.

They have names now too. Mutton and Geoff! The boy, obviously, is Geoff. The girl is Mutton... and at some point she will be!

So, if the goslings and the lambs couldn't claim first place for cuteness, just who or what does take the title?