Adventures in Food

Last weekend I went on a family outing to Sussex to see where my brother works at www.commonwork.org as they had an open day. It was fascinating and inspiring, I discovered: - nettle tea goes clear when you add lemon drops - how to bodge a rounders bat - when to collect woad for dyeing - a new drink called kefir - its fizzy yoghurt and its yummy. I have been craving it since trying the free sample - that all the sheeps wool in the UK ends in a single processing plant, I think its in Huddersfield - but do correct me - and from there it gets auctioned once a week to highest bidders. - how to make artists charcoal - that buddleia makes a good yellow dye even after the flowers are dead I also got some beeswax, a diblet, milk fresh from the cow, honey, sunshine, a delicious lunch of mutton, organic beetroots, a lesson in wood turning from a delightful man called Bob, some fresh willow charcoal, and a lift there and back from mum and dad. Super nice man who swapped c...

Apparently it's Be Nice to Nettles Week here in the UK and I have juct been at the notment manhandling some of my own. Not that I really claim to own the nettles but I am allowed at the moment to interfere with them if I want to. They sting! I am quite used to it from working on this plot and today I decided to see if the adage was true that if you grab them quick they dont sting. Also today Chris tells me on Facebook that he used to EAT them - raw - and that it doesnt sting either. And last week there were two kids at the art club and they said they ate the nettles raw and it didnt sting. All this not stinging...its almost as if the whole thing was just a myth spread around to turn people against nettles, and now there is a Be Nice week to restore the soured relationship between the two species, and get us all to realise that actually nettles are really nice. But let me tell you, they DO sting, even when you grab them, and I will be nice to them when they are nice to me! ...

I just picked up a little book in a charity shop the other day because it mentioned wildlife gardening and I wanted some wholesome retail therapy. I didn't expect much, I thought it would be very light and fanciful. But it turned out it was a fab piece of popular science writing, about a study done in Sheffield on the wildlife in ordinary gardens. It's charmingly written but I especially like it because it's based on scientific research and it declares the limitations of its own statistics. In summary it says that they found out that using 'native' plants in Britain has no effect on the amount of wildlife. Including nettles - which have a mythological status when it comes to wildlife gardening but apparently this is bunkum. Native is a very slippery concept anyway. But there are some things which make a huge difference, consistently in different locations. In summary, these are the top ways to maximise your garden biodiversity: 1. Grow trees (or at least s...

I brought camera on sunday and got some pics for you: A woolly blanket for the baby herbs, keeps down the competition and the slugs hate fur too: Nettle roots will be used to dye the rest of the fleece: Lepista sordida growing among nettles - and Alexander seedlings in the foreground: and at home waiting to be cooked: with red onions and butter: giving a simple meal with a beetroot and Alexander salad in the background:

how the notment is looking after a lot of nettle-clearing. I have cleared this area twice now, cropping the baby nettle and fat hen as it crops up so quickly. A pile of breeze blocks under the nettles has been partially dismantled to make small seats in a circle for the herbs - with the help of my Lovely Assistant Collecting fat hen (delicious! like spinach but nuttier) and dandelion using sheeps fleece to protect herbs planted out from my backyard pots. They are doing ok and the fleece also keep slugs away very effectively (they dislike hair!) The fox liked it though and came and dug at it when it first appeared. a large burdock - can be used in dandelion and burdock cordial... collecting the nettle tops pureeing the cooked nettle tops with the white sauce, a messy business. (My old kitchen, soon to be gone, a nasty steel cooker in its place.. it just wont look as good in the pictures any more :-( ) ooh a lovely meal, cheese makes anything taste good! All the details on cooking the ne...