Adventures in Food

At Kew Gardens on Saturday there was a fab event showcasing various kinds of ethnobotanical research that goes on here and there. I went along and met various friends from life and internet, and discovered some really great new plants to eat from the weed-bed. I've also got all interested in collecting english plant lore for Ethnomedica so if you have some ancient plant remedy to tell me please do. I met some really great people with weeds to eat so I thought I would mention it and then I will go and find the weeds for myslef and report back. One particularly cool thing was eating thistles, speficially in this case, Sow Thistle. Anna showed me how to cut away the spines and gave me the stem to try. Its crunchy and juicy and fresh tasting, vaguely in the same food bracket as celery I suppose. A lot of the plants at the stand were things you know very well from the garden, little hairy things that grow in the grass or along the cracks in the paving. In fact hairs and spines are a g...

I don't have photos this time but have been bee-servicing again. This time we were just scraping honeycomb wax from the wooden frames so they can be reused for the coming year and the new bees. Bees are in a bad way and unlike other creatures in a similar, or worse, situation, People are notcing. This is because a) bees are quite cute b) people like honey c) bees pollinate fruit crops, and the fruit crops are suffering. I saw a little while back a Haagen Daaz campaign to help honeybees - because the bees are not there to pollinate fruits, and this is making it harder for the ice cream manufacturer to source and pay for fruits. It is a very serious problem in the US and also I have rumours from China and the Ukraine that they are losing fruit crops. One of the main threats to British honey bees is a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor. Originally confined to Asian honey bees, it has spread across Europe and reached England in 1992. It now infests 95 percent of hives. You can get...

Monday was a day famous for Snow, but for me it was also about honey. I visited Linda who has recently started keeping bees. We processed some honey and she very kindly gave me a pot of golden sweetness at the end. I learnt about mites, and deaths, and bee dancing and pollen and nectar and propolis (the red stuff in the pot - very sticky and it stains the hands, the bees make it from tree resin), and how the bees tenderly care for the grubs and feed them bees milk, and how the worker bees come out of the growing chambers and do housekeeping first for a few days, and then nursing, and then they guard the entrance, and then they start foraging only after all that. The pics show how we scraped the honey out of the combs, avoiding letting pollen and nectar into the honey, and let it drip through a net to separate it from the wax - collecting the was crumbs for melting down and further separation from the honey that is left; propolis; and the honey pots that were filled. 20 in total, from a...

Last Friday I went to a Kew Wassail in aid of making the apricot tree fruitful for the year. It was very exciting because I also met a woman with a sheep, and another woman who has a spinning wheel - and knows how to use it - so I think it was a very fruitful occasion already. AND I met a woman who keeps bees there (its called Pensford Fields and its a hidden gem of a kind of naturalness, behind some houses in Kew) and she wants help looking after the bees, so one day I might know enough to have my own honey. If there are any bees left , that is. Anyway the Wassail is meant to be around Twelfth night, when we know we are safely through the dark Solstice, and its time to get things going again so we have food for next winter. So we all pile down to the orchard and sing a song to the tree to ask it to be fruitful - and make it a toast - and make a lot of loud noise to chase away evil spirits ("and pollution" - maybe a reference to the pending expansion of Heathrow nearby), and ...

I do sometimes think "is it ok for me to collect wild food" because surely there are lots of wildlife who cant go to tesco if they dont find any nuts in the woods that day. And generally people like the guys at River Cottage and other proponents of wild food collecting give the answer more or less of "yes its fine, there is plenty to go round, so long as you always leave a bit of it ie dont dig up ALL the truffles you can find in one spot." Now I know the deer in Richmond Park are not a "naturally occurring" species in a "natural" environment but even so I found this interesting. I was up there on an early morning to photograph the deer with a friend and saw this notice. I hadn't seen that sign when I collected the chestnuts last time. I have taken an interest in the past in the idea of eating invasive species so will start to investigate that as an alternative. We could act as a biological control agent, enhancing the biodiversity rather th...

I have just become a publisher - with the production of a book about the English Christmas Pudding under the publishing name 'Spiderbooks'. The book is a tasting sample of some of the stories behind the ingredients of the Christmas Pudding. it will be in some local shops in the Kew and Richmond area, and should be on Amazon soon too. Your feedback is welcomed! Find out more at http://www.spiderbooks.co.uk