Peeling chestnuts - the easy way

Chestnuts turn out to be a lot of work to prepare, and the paucity and vagueness of the advice on the net suggests that very few people actually do it, so following one unseccessful session I had to work out a method for myself.

One telephone call to an ex royal chef and twenty minutes of experimenting later, it's sorted. Cut an X into the top of each chestnut (the end with the little tuft of spikes on), and drop into a shallow panful of simmering water. WEARING RUBBER GLOVES, a minute or two later take two or three out with a slotted spoon. The shell peels down from the top, and if the skin doesn't come with it, it will soon follow with a rub from your gloved fingertip. Don't peel the shell right down to the bottom until you've done all four sides (you don't want it to cool) and then rub any remaining skin off. Any skin caught in the folds can be tweaked out by a helper (non glove-wearing), or with a knife, or rubbed off gently with a toothbrush. If the nut cools down too much and the skin readheres, pop it back into the boiling water for 30 seconds.

The nuts go floury if they're cooked for too long, so about six nuts at a time in the boiling water is about right so you can do two or three batches of peeling.

Still labour intensive, but you get beautifully clean nuts (matron), don't waste so many, or burn your fingers.

Witchypoo wimped out of using the cauliflower fungus I'm afraid, but that bay boletus were lovely!

An Opportunity Squandered

... and I don't much care! Yesterday afternoon had an unforcast bright period in the middle of it, and I managed to bully the family into the car and took them all off for a short mushroom walk. We were not finding a great deal until we discovered a stand of pinewoods which were absolutely full of bay boletus, so I took as much as I knew that the drier could cope with. Bay boletus aren't a brilliant mushroom taste-wise, but they do make good mushroom powder and are OK in stews, so I take them when I get the chance. Witchypoo also found a decent-sized cauliflower fungus, a new species for me this year which we have yet to eat. That's being remedied today, as we collected our biannual "beef box" from Glebe Farm, and it's beef and cauliflower fungus stew for tea...

The first time I found cauliflower fungus was only a few weeks ago, when I took Harry with me. I wish I'd stuck to what I said after that walk, which was that the next time I'd take a shopping trolley into the woods with me. It's about as maneuverable as Harry, but it would complain less. Both times Harry whinged continuously, except when taking time out to scream about getting his spiderman gloves dirty, and contrived to fall headlong into muddy hollows. I should have known better, especially when Harry refused to help pick up chestnuts on the grounds that they were "dirty and smelly"!

This is the smaller of the two weevils responsible for the grubs in sweet chestnuts. In fact, you might say it's the lesser of two weevils.

The drier has been working overtime this week, so from the back left in rotation these are Black Magic, mixed wild mushrooms, beta III carrots (and yes they ARE that colour even when dried) and dos mercados tomatoes. The other smaller beans in the front are the incredibly prolific Trail of Tears, which cooks easily and is pretty much like chinese black beans in cooking. It's worth remembering that anything you don't blanch before drying, such as beans, should be briefly heated in the oven to kill any insect grubs that might be eating them from the inside!

Weather Woes

I can't believe it. Connor the Destroyer, domesticated? He's just spent six hours podding all the Trail of Tears, despite me telling him not to as I had a quicker way... says he likes doing it! Well, far be it from me... mind you, he is on a computer ban at the moment.

Quite a lot of the chestnuts (probably about one in ten) turn out to have been infected with a maggot. A bit of research suggests that the damage is done by two species of weevil, and while the nut is still on the tree; the things pupate in the ground so raking up all the chestnuts would be an option to break the cycle if we weren't so close to oaks, another host. I can't deal with all that! That leaves me having to pick over them and dispose of any visibly infected ones, and then store them in sand (which apparently stops the bugs moving onto other nuts when they emerge). The article says dry sand, but I only have wet - I'll try that with half the nuts, and store the rest open to the air, and post the results when the storage time is up (around Yule).

I also can't believe the weather report, nor my reaction to it. It's going to rain every day for the next week, apparently, which is a damned shame as I need to dig to bury in the... irrigation! Oh yes, timing's my speciality all right.

Season of mist and mellow... hang on, whoever wrote that didn't have to prepare his own food for storage. Keats, I think. Probably would have brought on a coughing fit anyway.

The "beta III" maincrop carrots are up, and they've done really well. Each one is huge, and we were able to fill two tote boxes with them (layered in sand) and the damaged ones (splits mainly, due to uneven watering from their errant gardener. Mulching next year, methinks) have all been blanched and dried, minus a few that fell into Sunday's dinner. The high betacarotene levels really show, since the carrots are such an improbably deep orange that they're almost red. They're wonderfully sweet right now, but I'll see how they do on storage.

More impressive still was the single parsnip we couldn't resist pulling out of sheer nosiness. This was only Avonresister but it clocked in at about 600g and was superbly flavoured. It's been a good year for roots! We worked over all the vacant beds, and sowed rye as a green manure.

The kitchen worksurfaces are currently covered by two inches of chestnuts, and I'm mushrooming whenever I can. The maincrop carrots are all up, and the drier has been working overtime. The "Black Magic" runner beans are a HUGE success as a drying bean - they're just like mammoth kidney beans and look so striking, being an inch long and midnight black.

I can't face podding 300-ish trail of tears pods, so I'm going to have to dry them to crispness in batches in the airing cupboard and then beat them mercilessly in pillow cases. Then I'm going to learn to winnow!

Finally managed to dig over the last of the areas I want to green manure this year, and sowed more forage peas. All the seeds are in for this year, and does that feel good? Yes, it does. There's still lots to do (of course) but I can relax a smidgeon now; some transplanting to do in the tunnel, but the only other pressing jobs are the strawberry beds, the suspended shelf in the tunnel, and digging in the irrigation - all that's got to be done by the first frost, but I reckon I've still got about three weeks. Ahhhh.

Poo to you too

Collected my first load of horseydoodles today, nicely rotted and with a fair few worms in it. Which was nice. It was then, though, that Hedgewizard realised he's hopelessly confused about the new bed rotation. This year was so easy - four rows of two beds, so that's spuds, brassicas, roots and onions, peansenbeans. Couldn't have been easier if I'd planned it. Hang on, I did plan it! But for next year, my decision to take spuds out of the raised beds and move to a three year rotation (adding in a couple of conventional rows to make a ninth virtual bed) has made it visually more difficult, and I keep getting confused about which bed is which. I'll be all right once stuff is growing in them again, but maybe I should paint the end boards different colours or something. D'oh.

Never mind. After a tussle with my books to see how much manure is recommended (a barrowfull per 10 square yards, or half a barrow to one of my beds) I manured the only one of next years peasenbeans beds that isn't currently full of brassicas, and then lifted my beta III maincrop carrots. Wow! A prehistoric monster every time! I just hope they don't turn out to be woody - more on that tomorrow since we'll be eating some of the damaged ones for lunch. Uneven watering leading to splitting - must mulch the carrots in summer next year! The perfect carrots have been laid into plastic boxes, layered with wet sand to keep the local humidity high. I raked and sowed rye into every remaining scrap of spare bed, and that's it for the beds until, oh I don't know, about February I think; the remaining manuring will have to wait until we eat the cabbages and kale.

The cukes are finally finished, with the remaining plant doing a dramatic faint onto the paths. Oh well, it owes me nothing - I call mid-October cucumbers reasonable, I do. With Witchypoo's help I laid leaky pipe all along the beds, cutting under the paths, so next year's watering should be a hell of a lot less of a chore. Huzzah! Witchypoo then sowed Nantes Frubund carrots into the recently vacated tomato bed - they're supposed to grow slowly over the winter and then give a really early crop next year - in the tunnel that could be as early as the end of February, but we'll have to wait and see.

The tunnel has also become a bit of a moudly place with all this damp, but warm weather. There's a sour, mouldy smell, and the broadies and potatoes are both showing signs of a black mould. I got out there and sprayed with bordeaux mixture (reluctantly, after my friend Digiveg's dire warnings and Stoney's predictions of soil accumulation - but I think I used about 30ml of the mixture all told so I guess there's not too much to worry about). Let's see what Mr Salt says on the subject. Hmh! Not a lot really - using a sysemic fungicide is out because I garden organically, so that leaves increased ventilation which is something I did at the first sign of trouble. Apparently having all the doors open is something I'm going to have to do except in the coldest of weather!

Planning to have worms...

The irrigation order arrived today, and I got the first section of leaky pipe laid onto the pumpkin patch. This pleases me mightily, because I spent an awful lot of time watering this year and I have no wish to do so again! I balked at the cost of installing the stuff (£250 for my whole setup, including the polytunnel) but when I worked out how much time I spent with a watering can it began to look like a bargain. The stuff lasts 6-10 years (perhaps less in the tunnel) as well. So I cleared off the rest of the patch with a claw hoe, sowed forage peas* and arranged the leaky pipe on top before watering the seeds in. They've gone in really late, I know, but hey! This is Dorset. Dana will let me away with it.

I'm ready to go with the tyre wormery I mentioned before - my solution to rats in the compost bin in the winter - but the damned brandlings are taking their time moving into the ordinary compost bin. I wonder if it's the time of year, or if it's just too hot in there still. May have to consider ordering some eggs from Wiggly Woo or whatever that site's called. Let me check...

Hmm. 250g of worms is £11.25 plus postage, which is enough to make me stop and think. They supply 1kg of worms with their own "can'o'worms" kit, and I had a quick link at franchise operations and discover that the best you can hope for is a doubling of numbers every 90 days - in cold weather probably quite a bit less. So I need to get hold of a decent starter of worms. A bit of research suggests a minimum of 100 worms and that would weigh about 60g, so I reckon a 250g starter would be fine. Before I fork out, though, I'm going to post on Freecycle...

*Isn't it funny how things work out? I opened my bag of forage peas and thought, "a small handful per square metre". Then when I was actually standing there with the peas in my hand, I started to doubt myself so I trooped all the way back up to the house and found the Moles catalogue, which very helpfully said "60kg/hectare". Conversion tables, kitchen scales and calculator at the ready, and ten minutes later I had my answer.

A small handful per square metre.

A Load of Old

Hedgewizard is a happy man, oh yes he is. I never thought I'd be glad to get hold of a load of poo, yet here I am: Witchypoo has found a couple of local horsey lay-dees who are only too glad to supply us with all the rotted down horsecrap we can eat, and all I have to do is swing by their paddock gates to collect it. Wonderful. I can get on with digging the strawberry and asparagus beds, and put a decent amount on next year's Peasenbeans bed (oh, that's my rotation now - Brassicas, Peasenbeans, and Grimsbies*) too.

Witchypoo and I managed to escape outside together for a change this weekend, mushrooming and gardening. I dug over the potato bed, unearthing another full bucket of potatoes that Connor the Destroyer had inexplicably missed. We stripped out the remaining tomato plants (sadly this means another hundredweight of unripe tomatoes, but - hey! Lessons learned), the fruitless aubergine and half the chard to improve ventilation, and I charge over them with the lawnmower to reduce them to a very compostable mush. A word of warning here. This works very well, but with moist plants like chard it does tend to leave some of the mush on the grass. In sunny weather this isn't likely to be a problem, but it does look a bit of a mess and in the wet it might damage the grass if you don't rake it up, so don't do it anywhere pretty.

Witchypoo planted out the last of the winter salads into beds and trays in the tunnel, and I transplanted the spring cabbages. The broccoli, sadly, were nowhere to be found despite the netting. Perhaps they made a bid for freedom. Oh well, serves me right for sowing way too late. As for the turnips and swedes, well...

I feel that I've done very badly with brassicas this year, and I suspect it's because I'm growing in unmanured soil. The peasenbeans let me away with it, and the roots really don't care - but the ever-hungry brassicas do, oh yes. Hopefully the new supply of horse poo will sort that out for next year... we'll see.

At any rate, all the old growth is cleared and the composter is nicely topped up (although until the brandlings turn up in the last lot I can't start the worm bin), and all I need to plant out now is the green manures before I'm on to digging in new beds and the irrigation system, which should arrive in a day or two. I wish someone had told me how vital irrigation was in the tunnel - it would have saved so much time in the summer! The tunnel's looking strange now that the energetic tomatoes have been cleared away, but thankfully there are the broad beans and the (highly optimistic) peas to hint at future harvest in a way that the likes of rocket and pak choi just don't, for me. Straight away there's been a drop in the numbers of slugs about, which shows that their numbers are influenced less by the availability of food than by the availability of shelter, which I guess makes sense for an animal prone to drying out in the open air. I'm going to sprinkle a little silver sand round the inside edge of the tunnel to seal the gap between the soil and the plastic, and then there really will be nowhere to hide!

*The word "Grimsby" comes from my school days, first having been applied to the contents of little breadcrumbed scraps affectionately referred to by the dinnerladies as Scampi, but christened by those of us who had to eat them as Grimsbies. Here I use it to mean "everything else". Potatoes, by the way, go into a separate rotation with strawberries, but it's a bit complicated to explain without the use of diagrams and a degree in maths. See what I mean when I say I need to devise something less mad?

The Cardex of Destiny

I've been trying a new system over the last couple of weeks, and it seems to be working well so far - although Witchypoo has her reservations. She'd been complaining, y'see, that I'd been carrying the plans and the to-do list for the garden around in my head; she couldn't get on with anything even if she did have the time, because she didn't know what my insane plan was.

Enter a cardex box, purchased at great expense (just under a fiver) from WHS, freecycle having come up blank. I balked at spending another four quid on tabbed index cards for it though, so I spent a merry ten minutes cutting the corners off every single card apart from 52 to be used as weekly markers, which I numbered. I did think about putting "Sept #1" and suchlike on them, but gave up on that idea because things would keep shifting by a week depending on where the 1st of the month actually fell.

With the weeks numbered 1 to 52 I can pop cards with jobs written on them in front of the date tabs, such as "plant winter saladings", and once the jobs are done the card itself has the date on it, and goes to the back of the file. Once-only jobs though, such as "dig new asparagus bed" will just get rubbed out and re-used. Eventually the cards will rotate, and provided I look ahead by a month or so I'll be able to see what I was doing at the same time last year. Sounds fine in theory, although it'll be a year and a bit before I know how well it works! Oh, and just to complicate things, I decided to start my gardening year at Samhain (old Celtic New Year) just because I can. That's bound to confuse me.

Really the idea of the cardex came about because I was berating myself for having completely forgotten to keep planting saladings in the latter half of the summer, which means we've had a four-week gap in supply now. An article somewhere on the net - sorry, I've forgotten where - suggested using a cardex to get round this although it was a big one and they were actually putting the seed packets into it, something I dismissed because I have too many seed packets. I am also quite taken with an old 1940s book I have that tells you week-by-week what you should be doing in the garden. This is a nice book, because they use relatively few chemicals; mind you, the ones they do use would make your hair stand on end! It does, though, suffer from the problem of ignoring regional and annual variations in conditions, merely saying repeatedly "or later in more northerly gardens".

So the cardex is my own week-by-week guide, or at least it will be eventually. All I need to do now is devise a new, less mad way of mapping the contents of the veg beds over time (not as easy as it sounds if you're trying for full occupancy) and then Witchypoo will actually be able to see what's supposed to go where. I hope.

You know it's Autumn when you take the last courgette plant up. The pumpkin patch, formerly a riot of scratchy stems and multicoloured fruit, is now a barren wasteland. This "brownfield site" look isn't helped by the way I've put the half-arsed german mounds to bed - I've capped them with compost and covered that over with squares of old carpet. All I need now is a brazier and a burned-out Cortina and the image will be complete, but instead I'm going to lift the weeds, rake over and broadcast-sow some forage peas to supress weed growth and build fertility until it's time to put in the next bunch of curcubits.

I wonder if I'll encounter problems eventually, growing the same stuff there year after year? Hopefully by that point the fertility will have improved (there are a few worms there already) and I can make it a long corn bed or something, but there are so many places for birds and mice to hide down there that it strikes me as a bad idea. A problem for another day. At any rate, we've had all the courgettes we've needed since May (including three main meals) and the last few courgettes were left to grow on to marrow size, giving enough for a batch of marrow and ginger marmalade. All that from one plant!




I'm impressed with how well the curcubit group has done for us this year, I really am. One of the cucumber plants gave up in the spell of unseasonably cold weather at the start of September, but the other is still struggling manfully and gives a cuke about once a week, which is fine by me given the glut of the summer. I'm considering growing crystal lemon cukes next year because they're smaller, so one cuke does one salad (or one lunchbox, kids) so you aren't left with half a cuke taking up fridge space. Hmm. The pumpkins and squash did well, as I said, and we had our first vat of pumpkin soup at the weekend which was scrummy (welcome to autumn). The surprise success was the melons; of the four seedlings I grew, one died and the other three all managed to provide four good, tasty fruits each that ripened without too much heartache. We're still getting through them, and the canteloupe type produce later than the honeydews which is very handy indeed.

Gonzo the wall-eyed chicken has sadly passed away. I'm still not sure why, but it was sudden; she did have a clear discharge from her nose for a couple of days, but other than that she seemed fine. No-one else has the discharge, but I'm watching them all closely. Following the comments of Digiveg (a buddhist putting the "om" into "omnivore") Gonzo has been laid peacefully to rest in a hole under the newly-planted comfrey patch, and I guess that means that ultimately she'll become a nourishing probiotic feed for the vegetables. This takes us down to four three-year old birds, but provided they manage to produce an egg a day through the winter there doesn't have to be any unpleasantness (fondles soup pan meaningfully).

And yes, I know I said I wasn't going to be updating regularly. And I'm not. I just happen to have had a few minutes spare here and there, and maybe my conscience has been pricked by a couple of disappointed e-mails, all right? And maybe not. What am I, social services? Get out of here!

Ooh, Hedgewizard likes Chickpea's "now harvesting" sidebar, yes he does. In fact he likes it so much he's going to steal it, even if his coding's really not up to the challenge. After all, he worked out how to put in a "self-sufficient links" section just for Chickpea, didn't he? Fair's fair...

The Hedgewizard has seen a UFO. Oh yes he has, and he's not a nutter. Not in that way, anyway. Before I get to the sighting, I just want to mention how interesting people's reactions are when you give them that particular piece of news! Mostly this causes people to stop and stare at you while they work out which bracket to put you in (nutter or fool), but there's also a few people who take the opportunity to tell you What's Really Going On. Highly interesting. Apparently I have to research Project Paperclip and a Canadian Aerospace company called AVRoe, which I actually probably will. Experience has taught me never to dismiss anything out of hand (just as I've learned how two conflicting things can both be true).

But anyway. A few weeks ago I won a metal detector at the Dorchester Show, and owing to (very long story edited out) I ended up wandering along in the middle of a field near Owermoigne, Dorset in gathering darkness at 8.30pm on Saturday night. Conditions were fine; a fairly clear sky, a light breeze, reasonably warm. I"m wandering along looking at the ground, and then I see a series of faint flashes as if someone were taking some rapid-fire flash photographs - about that speed and brightness - a ways off. I look, but I can't see anything. Then about three minutes later the flashes happen again, but this time much closer (or brighter, I suppose). This time I was a bit worried because although the sky is clear it's a big open field and I'm the tallest thing in it. And I'm holding a metal detector. The UFO thing flashes through my mind so I scan the skies - absolutely nothing - but what's mainly going through my mind is notions of some wierd kind of lightning.

Anyway I hustle off the field (detecting as I go. I was worried but not THAT worried) with another set of flashes on the way. Just as I get to the car there's another set, and this time I see the lights themselves rather than light reflecting off the ground. It's a set of four or five of them, going off in a row left to right thirty feet up in the air over the centre of the field. They look like big yellowish floodlights, except they don't dim slowly the way floods do - in that way they are more like flashbulbs. At this stage I was simply puzzled, because after the flashes there was nothing to see. I mean, absolutely nothing - if I'd been expecting to see a hovering spacecraft I'd have been very disappointed. I go home. To cap it all off, an hour later Connor (whom I'd not yet spoken to) saw the same flashes from his bedroom rooflight. We live 6km away. I mean, what? They followed me home?

A bit of research showed another sighting in Gloucestershire reported on a local weather page a couple of days before, which sounded identical apart from the fact that my flashes were always grouped in four-or-fives, whereas the Gloucestershire sighting was more varied. Other than that, the same. Also another sighting on a UFO site, this time in Langston Herring. Whatever this is, it's a real phenomenon rather than a tired old neuron finally going belly-up in my brain. At the moment I'm thinking electromagnetic discharge buildup because in my case the groups of flashes were fairly regularly spaced, but that's a guess and there are some problems with it (I didn't feel any static and there was no sound). Watch this space. Or possibly the skies...

On a gardeny note, the pumpkins are gathered and are currently curing in the nonexistant autumn sunshine before moving to their winter home in the garage. The growing-in-holes thing worked absolutely fine, so between squashes and pumpkins we have 30 fair-sized fruit and one beachball, which Connor will carve as he does every year. Actually the cutting turned out to be a nice family activity with me cutting, Witchypoo carrying to a sunny ledge, Connor clearing off the vines, and Harry staggering up and down with the smallest fruit, complaining bitterly that it was spiky. Arguing about how the camera worked was a group effort. Now I need to build fertility in that patch, so I'll water and top dress the holes with rough compost and cover them with carpet, and plant forage peas all around. *singing* And plant forage peas all around, all around, and plant forage peas all around...

I've learned an important lesson about clearing away plants this year, which is that fibrous growth takes forever to rot down in even the best conditions - unless you shred it, in which case it's fine. So I have one bin with whole broad beans (lifted in July) just sitting in it between two layers of pretty oozy grass cuttings, and the other with shredded sweetcorn stalks - pretty much the toughest thing I grow - which have composted down to nothing in about ten days. After cutting the awkward squash vines, then, I was keen to shred them. But how? I have an ordinary domestic shredder with rotating blades and a don't-sue-us narrow chute, and while you can shove something rigid like sweetcorn in there curcubit vines are just too floppy. Reluctantantly I put them in the composter bit by bit, thrashing away at them with a machete at each addition to chop them up as much as possible. It took twenty minutes and I didn't make that good a job of it, and then it occurred to me; why didn't I just spread them out and run the lawnmower over them? Oh, dear... maybe next year I'll remember.

It's time to clear the tomatoes to make room for the new roots and salad bed in the tunnel, and I have to say with a little sadness that none of the heritage varieties that I grew this year did so well as their modern equivalents. "Pink cherry" was indeed startlingly pink, but had a nondescript flavour; "Auntie Madge" produced well enough but was nothing special; and "Tom Thumb" was a riot of tiny fruits but had such wanderlust that I spent too much of my time trimming the ends off flowering trusses before they turned into new branches and took all the goodness away from the fruits. In contrast Moneymaker was heavy and had a good flavour in my soil beds, Harbinger produced a startling amount of tasty fruit, and Dos Mercados gave tomatoes the size of navel oranges that were sweet enough to eat like an apple. I'll give Moneymaker a rest next year and grow the other two plus one new heritage variety - perhaps "Peace Vine" if I can get it. Plus, I shan't grow so damned many of the things. The freezer's only so big!