Sometimes I feel unbelievably proud to be of vague Irish descent. But sometimes I feel nothing but shame. When the girls of the national soccer team sing tribute to the IRA I am revolted. But it is Israel and the Jews where the Irish seem to score particularly badly right now. Is there something in the water turning so many folks into raging antisemites? Meet Dublin Senator Gerard Craughwell.
I now have four crab apple trees in my new upper orchard, there mainly to ensure the cross pollination of apple trees old and new around the farm. But they also yield their own fruit. Had I harvested a couple of weeks earlier I would have got around 8 lbs as quite a few apples have dropped to the floor and started to rot. Instead I came away with just over six lbs which were cleaned and then with the stalks removed cut in half and left to stew. The water could not get too hot as that would have destroyed the pectin on the skins which is the binding agent. Eventually the apples were soft enough to mush and that mush was left to drain through a muslin cloth overnight.
We have had a fine crop of beetroot this year and already enjoyed it with many meals. Now the last few plants have been pulled from the ground as you can see below. I reckon that is about five family meals with Joshua loving the stuff but Jaya refusing even when we tell her it is a pink carrot. She likes carrots and, like all little girls these days, all things pink.
The six children and step children of my late father are this week swapping emails about the annual pre Christmas meal and present swap we have with many of our kids in Shipston where Dad and his second wife Helen live and are buried. All will smile as I mention tomatoes and Dr Tom Winnifrith.
It is one of those chores that is a bit fiddly so I put it off again and again.
Each year the chapel gives and the village school forces us to buy for the kids, sunflower seeds in some sort of contest. I am sure it is rigged as our plants always go West. This year one of four such plants has survived but is a midget. On the other hand, I planted my own seeds, nurtured them in the office and transplanted them to the back garden in the summer.
My latest blood test results are in and things continue to go the right way but I shall be a lifetime burden on the NHS because I was fat. RFK is right: obesity will destroy the West and we must stop pretending otherwise.
The white flowers on bindweed are stunning but the plant is a pest. I do not know about where you are but in these parts it has been a bumper year for bindweed. It is everywhere. I try to control it, pulling it down as it strangles what I have planted and tossing it on a growing bonfire for November. But it is a losing battle.
With fresh raspberries and blackberries and strawberries frozen earlier in the summer, I was able to serve up a birthday treat summer pudding for Joshua. I have enough of all three in the freezer to do the same for Jaya on her birthday in November. The blackberry season is almost over but i hope to take the kids for one last big forage to add to our stores. I pick and free more raspberries almost every other day, the harvest has been enormous.
When you lose a lot of weight some folks say ”well done” but others are nervous. ls it is a sign that you are sick. I started the year at c17 stone, I ended August at 13 stone 4 pounds and it was deliberate. No booze, no biscuits: in fact my diet had become almost entirely rabbit food and fish. In an attempt to tackle cholesterol I was taking my coffee black and cheese, hitherto a great love, was out.
The preparations for an 1880/81 North Dakota style “long cold winter” continue. My wood shed may be bulging but what happens if President Putin cuts off the UK’s gas supply just as a blizzard sweeps up the River Dee making a journey across the farm yard to my wood stack both hazardous and chilling?
A very kind attendee at Sharestock sent me a thank you present of a hamper packed with wonderful Scottish food and a bottle of French wine for the Mrs. As Joshua helped unpack it yesterday his face lit up, “you can’t have that, diabetes,you can’t have that, more for me”..So the whole family is delighted. But the most delighted is pictured below.
The sister of the Mrs was around so as soon as the kids were in bed she was off to the Hare. Left home alone, I had a chance to catch up in the Kitchen. Joshua’s birthday looms and like that of his mother, it will be a four day affair with events each day to celebrate. So there is cooking for that to do plus the storing of other produce for the Autumn.
My hero, Charles Ingalls, would have been proud of me as I defied almost non stop rain to start harvesting. I also brought in stacks of wood for the stove in the living room as it really is getting cold and the gas heating seems to be on the blink, yet again.
Set in the winter of 1880 to 1881, The Long Winter is a fairly grim book in the Little House on the Prairie series. It really did seem at one point as if the folks huddled in the North Dakotan town of De Smet might not make it. But they did, and sixty years later, Laura Ingalls wrote down what she remembered of a time when she was just fourteen. But the Indian…
