The Tipping Point

This day happens every year. Sooner or later, something about the light or the humidity or the temperature tells the garden that it's autumn, and that's it; all fall down. The squash plants fold up, the beans collapse, and only the thistles are happy.* I judged that today was the tipping point, and so Keats weather is at its height; I spent the day stripping out the squash plants, the cukes, the melons, the marrows, and anything else of a curcubitic manner. As is customary, the whole family helped.

As we harvested the last of the sweetcorn for lunch, Witchypoo tried to remove Number Two Son's bicycle helmet for the photo call. He objected, so to distract him WP asked him what his favourite thing in the garden was. He thought about it for a long moment.

"The donkeys," he said at last (for the sake of visitors, the only livestock we keep is chickens).

"Really?" said WP in surprise. "I didn't know we had any. Where are they, then?"

"There were only two," N2S countered, "And they're dead now anyway. Hey! I need the helmet to keep my head safe!"

"But Daddy doesn't want to photograph your safe head, he wants to photograph your real one," WP replied. "And anyway, if you keep your helmet on the donkeys might not recognise you..."



Such is Sunday afternoon in the Hollow. Owing to the weather the squash harvest this year has been pitiful - about a third of what we'd normally expect, but enough for the winter provided we don't start giving it away! Anyway, all is safely gathered in including the Mafioso Mouse's marrow. David Attenborough's remains have been returned to his family, and the skeleton of an unidentified female wearing short pants and a pair of Browning 9mms has been returned to Eidos for safekeeping until the next sequel - I guess that rumour about the lost Incan tribe that I started got taken seriously after all. I had expected there to be an extra marrow or two under the extensive canopy too, but in the end there were six of the bloody things, which means we have eight in store (seven after tonight's dinner). And we're just a little sick of them.

The Buster Gonads have done so well that when I staggered back up the garden with them WP actually gave a little scream of horror. That's because by this stage of the game both of us equate large amounts of produce with blisters, scalds and late nights - in this case, it'll be American-style sweet pickled cucumber, and may the gods have mercy on us. After the harvesting was done, all the plants were lifted and stretched out on the lawn to be run over by the petrol mower for easier composting. The slight downside of this is that there was so much sweet sap in the plants that within a few moments the grass box on the mower became saturated, which meant that every time the blades engaged I was enveloped with a sort of sticky green mist that smelt faintly of cucumbers, and which interested the local wasps more than a little.

Anyhow, that's it; as you can probably tell I'm cream crackered and slightly the worse for the demon drink, so all I can say is "Happy 200th post from all the cast of HWzD, and goodnight!"



*But then, the thistles are always happy. In the event of a nuclear war there would just be the coackroaches, the thistles, and Jonathon Ross. Bastard. Why doesn't someone give the talentless gimp the elbow? Have you tried to listen to what the BBC laughingly call his radio show - but what is basically just him and his stooge burbling on about how brilliant and showbiz he is for £10,000 a show? Wanker. Anyway, on the basis of the fact that if you cut his head off it'd take his asshole three weeks to realise he was dead, he'd probably survive a nuclear strike.**

**In the 80s, my English teacher asked each of us to write a short piece about what we'd do in the event of a four-minute warning. My first answer was that I'd want to get down to the Short aircraft factory (the likely aim point for Soviet nukes) and stand on the roof to make sure I was killed outright, but while the things were being marked I asked for mine back and changed it to say that I'd like to stand near the factory, the reason being that if the nuke turned out to be a dud I didn't want to risk being the only one killed.

Ballymena Dreaming

The sloes are ready in the hedgerows. Conventional wisdom is that you should leave them until after the first frosts, but that advice comes from an earlier time when winters here were colder! In truth the only reason to wait for a frost is to make the skins more permeable, and a couple of hours in the freezer does the job just as well. So off Witchypoo went on her bicycle this morning, and soon there will be a great making of... things. Things like sloe gin, and sloe wine, and a magnificent sloe jam (something I wouldn't even have thought of until I was given a jar by a Dorset lass in exchange for a handful of Buster Gonads). The jam is tart, tangy and mysteriously dark, and I'm sure it will make an astonishing Cumberland sauce. I'll post a recipe when it's done.


All the talk of booze at this time of year always makes me think of my Great Uncle Sam, who had a farm in Northern Ireland. He terrified me. Not because he was in any way terrible, you understand, but because he was so very rural that to a six-year-old me he seemed to come from another planet altogether. I couldn't understand a word he said for a start, the word dialect still meaning something in those days, and then there were his hands - great knarled shovels they were, with the nails so damaged that they had turned into little pearly lumps that were nowhere near the fingertip any more. Great Uncle Sam himself was painfully shy, and seldom spoke more than three syllables at a time (usually something like Oort Ock Ack, as I recall) before retreating, leaving Great Aunt Aggie to translate for him. Yet for all his reticence, Great Uncle Sam had a secret to be proud of - oh yes. Great Uncle Sam had a still hidden in a shed in the depths of the farm.

As with any home-distilled product, poteen (pronounced pot-cheen) has always had a reputation for blinding people, but it's not entirely fair. Of course there was always a bit of unpleasantness, what with home-made stills having a tendency to blow up, but by and large provided you knew how to take the methanol off first the drink itself was safe enough. That's not why it's always been illegal, though. No, that's more to do with the authorities wanting you to pay duty on distilled spirits.


So it was that at around this time every year a trickle of smoke would be seen rising from the shed and the Constable from the village would pay a visit to Great Uncle Sam, picking his way across the fields with an expression of great distaste. The conversation was ritual.

"Ah - Sam, Sam," the Constable would say, shaking his head sadly. "Now, you know this is illegal. I'm afraid I'm going to have to tell the Sergeant about this."

"Well now, why don't we take you a couple of bottles off the top?" Sam would say (Ar Ack Op in the original Sammish) "Then you needn't be in such a hurry to tell the big man." And Sam would draw a couple of bottles worth from the little cask, and top it up with water.

And every year, about a fortnight would pass before the Sergeant would knock on Sam's door for a piece of cake and a chat. "Ah - Sam, Sam. We can't be turning a blind eye to this kind of malarkey, now can we? I'll have to be telling the Excise man."

"Ah, Frank, I'm turrible sorry that you've had to come all this way," Sam would say. "Why don't I give you a couple of bottles for your trouble, and then you needn't be in too much of a rush to tell the Excise man." And Sam would draw another couple of bottles worth from the little cask, and top it up with water.

Another two weeks later the Excise men would trundle out to the farm looking rather glum, because they already knew what they'd find. All the evidence of the still had been cleaned and put away until the next year, and all that was left was half a cask of spirit so watery you'd have been hard pressed to tell it from sheep dip, and the good stuff salted away somewhere that they'd never find it - for of course, Sam had taken his own supply off the still long before the fat old Constable had got off his backside. So was the story that Sam used to tell, and although we never knew if it was true he used to love telling it.

Except, of course, that we could never understand a word of it. For all I know, he could have been reading us his latest seed order!

Drying Tonight!

The tax return is finally done, and I have the headache to prove it. Eventually I opted to use a piece of music to nail myself to the chair (in this case Ask The Mountains by Vangelis). Using single-minded music (usually new age or ambient) is a trick I've used before, because it seems to stop me wandering about so much. Ask the Mountains is a beautiful track, and I may have to invest in the album (by the way, to get the full effect I recommend listening to it on repeat, at least a dozen times straight). I like to get the flavour of things before I buy them, particularly Vangelis... I still haven't forgiven him for the second record I ever bought. That was one of his. It was called The Dragon.

Anyway, I'm self-employed (at least some of the time). Now you might be forgiven for thinking that the best way to keep track of one's accounts would be to keep scrupulous records of transactions as and when they happen. Not so. Not for me the dry and dusty columns of figures beloved of professional accountants. No, I like to see myself more as the Indiana Jones of the self-accounting world, following obscure references and poorly-worded clues written in a crabbed hand* in the margin of a half-forgotten tome. Of course, by a logical extension I'll end up being pursued by Nazis**, but that's a small price to pay for the thrill of decoding such gems as "b/f to July from jumble, auth £63.13." Is it a mis-spelling - perhaps a reference to Julie's boyfriend, the author from Jumble in Derbyshire? And do I owe him sixty-three quid?

Speaking of things dry and dusty, necessity has driven me to delve into Mythago Shed to retrieve my trusty dehydrator in order to avoid breaking the only pagan dietary law***. People have been giving us apples, you see, and since it's our first year of making real cider I thought we'd keep things fairly small-scale (eight gallons, of which three went to the Whisky-Snifflers, who gave us the apples). The rest of the apples got sorted and the sound ones stored, but given that they're from untended trees most of them were... shifty. Subtly untrustworthy. Eyebrows too close together, that sort of thing; leave them in the garage for five minutes and they'd all be dissolving into puddles of brown unspeakableness.

So what to do? If they were cookers they'd be chopped and frozen, milled down for spiced sauce and frozen into cubes, or used for highly experimental marrow and apple chutney. Incidentally, would the person who posted the chutney recipe mind, er, doing it again please? The comment system has just been overhauled so that you don't have to register to use it, and I think it got a bit hot and bothered, poor thing.

Our solution is our Stockli dehydrator, looking like a dalek and sounding like a muffled hairdrier. This is a gadget that we bought (with some extra trays) to indulge my compulsion to prowl through the countryside looking for mushrooms every autumn, since for some reason Witchypoo isn't keen on the idea of me filling the airing cupboard with questionable fungi for a month. It gets used for all sorts of things though - in the photograph below there are mixed mushrooms, black magic beans and carrots, as well as the apple rings we made with our nifty little peely-spinny thing.


The Stockli dehydrators sell from about £85 and have good, deep trays, and although there's a posher one with a timer I've never found that I've needed it - everything gets from whatever time I finally collapse until I get out of bed in any case. Variable heat is a must if you're buying a cheaper model, though, as some things just won't take the heat without spoiling.

Now here's the mystery. If I can dry apple rings with nothing more than a dip in some diluted lemon juice, why on earth do the commercial producers feel the need to treat them with sulphur? Unfortunately, the answer is that treatment with sulphur means that not only does the fruit stay a lighter colour but it also doesn't need to be so dry - which means higher weights at retail. Some people react to the sulphur, of course, but hey!

The biggest problem with sulphur, though, is that it affects the taste of dried fruit enormously. Sulphured dried apples have their own taste, but while it's not unpleasant it's also nothing like a real apple; contrast that with the experience of eating an unsulphured home-dried one. To begin with it's leathery, almost brittle, with little flavour apart from a vague sweetness. However, after a few chews there's a brief warning note of sharpness, and then - whoosh! - the flavour of a fresh apple just bursts into your mouth. We took some home-dried rings with us to a cider-making last weekend, and I took great pleasure in watching the looks of surprise on everyone's faces as the taste hit them.

The dehydrator will be working on and off into November as I stagger back from the woods with various suspicious offerings, but it's not just about mushrooms and apples. Bananas were a surprise hit a few years ago (they actually tasted of banana! Imagine!), and we've also dried leeks, tomatoes, various beans and the biggest treat of all, onions. Yes, onions - as it turns out, home-dried onions are so tasty and sweet that you can munch on them as a snack of an evening. Provided that your other half does too, of course...


*I've never been entirely sure what a crabbed hand actually is. I think it might be something like a jugged hare, but without the port.

**Quite definitely NOT drawing a parallel to the cheery boys and girls at the jolly old Revenue, FYI. Absolutely not.

***Never Turn Down Free Food.

Procrasthenics

I'd like to introduce you to my new exercise program. I call it "procrasthenics - work for the body you wanted yesterday (starting tomorrow)™". The beauty about it is that it's not just for exercise; it works for anything unpleasant. Tax returns, for instance...

...no! I've GOT to do this NOW!

...

...in the meantime, please take a moment to appreciate the new blog header, as supplied by Number One Son. We bought him a book on drawing anime-style, and this is one of his forays. Sadly it's only in coloured pencil on scrappy paper (we're working on him) but before too long I'll connect the graphics tablet and brighten it up a bit. For now... let me say how proud I am that the artistic genius hasn't skipped yet another generation. Well done, N1S!

Gainful employment?

The tax deadline loometh. I have five days remaining to collate a year's worth of dusty accounts, render them into some form pleasing to the eye*, and then stuff them into a tax form. For those not familiar with self-employment tax returns, this is akin to attempting to stuff a fully-inflated zeppelin up a small cat's bottom, while said cat casually attempts to remove all the skin from your arms.

So. Five days, eh? There's only one sensible thing to do, and that's ignore them and hope they go away. That's why this afternoon I have successfully reorganised my office so that I no longer have my back to the door behind which Mr Tall is currently reloading his car for the eighth time of the evening. Maybe it'll even help - but at least it's now too late to even consider the accounts. Result!



*Or at least more pleasing than they are at the moment. Which isn't hard, because they're spread in a monomolecular layer over every horizontal surface of Hollow House, much to Witchypoo's disgust. From past experience I know that in twelve hours they'll have magically transformed into one large envelope, but every year I doubt my sanity until that actually happens.

This had better be worth it...

Muggers beware. The Hedgewizard is more deadly than he was before. Admittedly this only matters in fairly specific circumstances - in the process of mugging me they'd have to end up kneeling in front of me with their head at waist height* - but give me the right set of circumstances and I'll pound them to death.

I should explain.

Saturday, the warmest and brightest day for weeks, saw us at the house of Mrs Whisky-Sniffler and The Pivotal Man for cider-making. This was a first for all of us, but I was armed with a knackered old press (a freebie from the generous Thrifties in Cornwall) and a photocopied "how to" sheet, so I felt greatly confident. After all, how hard could it be?


It's a pity that Number One Son, a fanatical tree-climber from way back, had decided not to join us because he would have loved climbing into WS's ancient apple tree. Hollow down the middle, cleft from previous storms, and as gnarled as a... gnarly thing, the tree gave us a wonderful crop of sweet, tart, rosy apples from the variety known as probably Cox's, but possibly not. Having been unattended for about forty years (the Snifflers have not lived there for long), the tree's fruit was heavily infected with a number of nasties, from codling larvae to woodlice; but I was assured by my sheet of instructions that it didn't matter. Only rotten specimens need be excluded.** Bruised fruit was likewise OK, which meant we could make very short work of picking - a vigorous shake of each branch and then it was only a matter of picking up the fruit and storing it next to the pile of injured children (who insisted in being under the tree at the most dangerous moments).

Next the apples went to be chopped and washed by Witchypoo, Mrs WS and a helpful Small Sniffler, and then they were pulped. And this is where the easy bit stopped, since we had no apple-pulping medoofer. Instead, we were forced to half-fill a large soup pan with chopped apples, and then beat the crap out of them with a heavy piece of 4'x4' timber (although we did get all hi-tech and put a handle through it). After a while this got to be truly back-knackering work so we shared it, and gradually the work got done. Perhaps "gradually" doesn't really do it, though - I actually finished the second half of it at home the following day, on my own, and now possess pounding muscles hitherto unseen outside of some rather select establishments in Bangkok.

Anyway. Then there was the press, and the best thing that I can say about it was that it worked. The principle is very simple; two wooden plates with slats in, mesh bags of pulp placed between plates, pressure applied with a car jack. Um, like I say, it worked... up to a point, anyway. Well enough for us to press out eight gallons of crisp, golden juice with just enough bite. Add yeast, and watch it go! If I do this again, though, I'm going to want a better press and a screw pulper...

I also found the time to get a single load of well-rotted horse manure in Dunk's deathtrap, now resting under a tarp in the middle of the path for me to ferry to more permanent homes over the next fortnight. Fortnight, d'you hear? Because there's no increase to the Clampett Factor allowed, that's my rule!***



*I know how it looks, but that's how it happened, your Honour.

**If the thought of leaving woodlice, earwigs, worms etc. in the fruit you're about to press - and drink - seems unsavoury, bear in mind that some Victorian scrumpy recipes famously called for the inclusion of a dead rat; when the rat finally dissolved, the scrumpy was ready. I'm politely skeptical about this, since it seems more likely to me that this was a device told to children to keep them away from the barrels of rapidly-fermenting liquor, but then you never know. After all, I've seen a recipe for woodlouse wine - a folk remedy for asthma. And no, I haven't tried it, but only because I can't work out how I would collect two pints of woodlice in one go. Whiteley's Department Store in London once supplied a pint of fleas on demand, but history is silent on the woodlouse problem.


***Hmm. Dunk's pickup. Looks like a deathtrap, drives like a deathtrap. Squeaky squeaky screeetch ping bang BANG squeak. Except, what's this little dial here? Looks like a pressure gauge... "turbo"? Surely not. Still, I wonder how fast she'll go if I give her a little...
...S
H
I
I
I
I
I
IIIIIIT.....! Oh, ye Gods, help! Space... blurring... time... distorting... Must... disengage... drive...

*pop*

Dunk's pickup - looks like this...

...but goes like this!

...re-entering normal space now. Gosh, that little spurt must have moved me quite a way, I don't recognise the road. Oh good, here's a sign.

Oh dear.

Um, sir? Excusez-moi? Bon, um... pour aller à, er, Dorset?

To Sobriety (wherever it is)

"Arise girls, arise, wipe the sleep from off your eyes
go and fetch to me some beer that I might swallow"

Last night I was forced to enter the twilight world of the garage, wherein dwell about fifty or so good-sized spiders, to retrieve the wine-making gear. It's been trapped behind various buildery things since October 2005, so I really had to fight to get in there. (In breaking news, the carpenter says he'll give us a date for coming back on Wednesday. Oh, hang on, Wednesday's come and gone hasn't it? Arse.)

So last night there was much carrying up and down, sipping, testing, stirring, decanting and so on and so forth as I worked out what was still useable after two years of neglect. Surprisingly enough, the answer was most of it. Here's the state of play;

• 5 gal elderflower wine, ready to bottle
• 5 gal elderberry & blackberry wine, ready to bottle
• 3 gal mouldyberry wine, stuck (but hopefully restarted last night)
• 1 bottle beech leaf liqueur, ready to drink
• 3 bottles blackberry whisky, being fined

Saturday's haul of cider is bound to tie up my last polybucket, but once I get the elderberry and blackberry into glass I can get started on 5 gallons of ale. Kits may not be the cheapest way to make beer, but until I get substantially more hedgewizardly I reckon my chances of producing a decent beer from wild hops are approximately nil. Let me just have a sup of this to get over the disappointment...

Anyway, DJ Kirkby politely declined to believe that the Pile of Shame could be dealt with in this lifetime, so here's a little reminder of how it looked then;

And here's how it looks now. DJK, hang your head in shame! You should know I'm a dab hand with Photoshop.

The logpile in Redcap Corner is now double the size it was, and I was - just - able to move the stumps and trunks that were too big to log with My Little Chainsaw* down into each of the two chicken runs for added interest, and in case anyone's feeling roostery...

...which left just enough logs to see us through. Until about 2010. Incidentally, the curvy nature of the carport isn't a camera effect - it really is that shape!




*The new toy line for boys, set to compliment My Little Pony for girls this christmas. If you have a boy and a girl in the house, they can re-enact the Niedermyer's Horse scene from Animal House.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

It's Keats weather. I can tell this by the smells, as leafmould jostles with the scents of apples and bonfires; I can tell by the sounds, from the commentary of passing geese to the clack of rutting deer; I can tell by the sights, as the evenings sidle closer and the trees smoulder their way into autumn; but mostly I can tell because I was up until midnight last night, making sodding jam. Out of marrows. Again. Oh yes, it's definitely Keats weather.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Keats, despite being forced at gunpoint to study Ode to a Nightingale at school. It's just that lines like "find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor" or "on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep" clue you into the fact that like most Romantic poets, Keats was rather less for mucking in, and rather more for sitting in his coach sighing about how very profound it all was. Keats, in short, never made his own jam. Probably would have brought on a coughing fit anyway.

So what's the Hedgewizard moaning about now, then? First of all, it's not about the jam. Well, not just about the jam at any rate. It's about the chutney, too; the chutney, and the dried fruit, and the liqueurs and the wine and the pickles and the frozen veg and the mushrooms. Mainly, though, it's about the fact that it all happens, all at once, just as the nights draw in and I start to feel like hibernating with a hot water bottle and a big bar of chocolate. By the time the harvest festival of Hafow* happens at the equinox, I'll have had just about enough of the horrible tyrrany of the jam jar. If you see a headline about someone being beaten to death with a butternut squash, there's a fair chance I'll be behind it.

Blackberries, frankly, are a bit of a trial. Having selected the piece of (admittedly beautiful) bramble-infested hedge that is most likely to attempt to garotte you, you gingerly approach and pluck a few outstretched berries from a safe distance. At this point the bramble's stretegy comes into play, for the easily-obtainable berries by the roadside are small, dry and disappointing. The ones a little higher up look much better, and so you are tempted inch by tantalizing inch further and further into the hedge, until you realise too late that you're held immobile and a bunch of grey squirrels makes off with your wallet. It's like subscribing to Sky TV, except with jam at the end.

The apples, though... ah, the apples. Owing to my rather distinctive approach to the remedial pruning of the Hollow's old apple trees, there have been no apples for the last two years and I really miss them. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter how many kilos of beans and carrots I stagger up the path with; if there are no apples the harvest feels as anticlimactic as rounding off a really cracking seduction with a lacklustre shag up against the fridge.

Happily, we have plenty of friends with trees which produce truly terrifying yields, and they're only too glad for us to come and save them from being wasped to death - especially if they get repaid in cider, chutney or dried apple rings. So this Saturday, the Family Hedge is off a-scrumping - and all next week there will be a great wailing and a peeling of apples. The next question is - what will we do with them?



*The autumnal equinox is celebrated by pagans under the name of Mabon.** I've never been particularly fond of the title, being as it's the truncated title of a Welsh god with no particular connection to harvest at all. A much better name could be made from a more recent God of Self-Sufficiency - hence, HaFoW...

**Or some of them, at any rate. Pagans are a naturally diverse, free-thinking and above all argumentative bunch, and it's a sad truth that if you want to immobilize a pagan political rally the best way to do it is to leave them alone; sooner or later they'll get bogged down in an argument about what to call themselves, what their aims are, or how exactly to define paganism anyway.

This article originally appeared in The Ecologist Online, but the Hedgewizard is nothing if not thrifty. And if anyone can tell me why some of the Blogger onscreen help text has started to appear in German, I'd be very grateful.

Too Tired for Fun

There are two kinds of gardening that I hate; crack-spider's bitchery and sliding-puzzlery. The first sort, as I've said, is where you don't attend to things in good time and then all of a sudden you have to do it NOW. Sliding-puzzle gardening - or sliding-puzzle anything, for that matter - is where you find you can't do A until you've done B, but you can't do B until C is out of the way, and so on all the way to about J, when you suddenly and unexpectedly find you can't do J until you've done A. Get the picture?

Today was a bit of both, with a little Sod's Law thrown in for good measure. Firstly my truck loanage bit the dust (said truck was being used for birthday-motivated tree planting), and then the cider-making was postponed - for a kite festival, I ask you! Actually, I'd have gone for that if I'd had more warning. And a kite.

I killed a tiger with a club once.
It was the East Bridlington Rifle Club.
Joking.

Anyway, the big job was to sow the grass seed in on the Slope before the rain started (it should have been done a week ago, sez Mr Crack-Spider), but that couldn't be done until I'd bedded in the paving slabs that are making the path up there. But I couldn't bed in the slabs until I'd carried them up there, and I couldn't carry them up until I'd made sure I'd got enough; and making sure I'd got enough meant that I had to lay out the path to the polytunnel first, which takes precedence on the nicest slabs. It all meant I had to carry thirty heavy slabs a fair old distance, and by the time it was done the rain had already started... so there's a job for Wednesday. Oh, and then there was chop, blanch, freeze, repeat when I came in. Bloody Keats.

However. The Pile of Shame is no more, as of quite late last night; photographic proof as soon as my arms are strong enough to lift a digital camera again (which may be a while, judging by how abused they feel). A municipal paving slab has been laid ready for the construction of a second worm bin, which I reckon we're going to need over the winter, and all the steelwork of the fruit cage has been laid out ready for painting. The primocaine raspberries are almost finished now, and I think we've enough surplus in the freezer to make some jam.

The unexpected stars at the moment are the wild strawberries. I included these in the edible hedge layout as a sort of combination forage and wildlife plant, but to my surprise the change in the weather has prompted them to start fruiting quite heavily - I never really expected to get an actual harvest from them, but that's exactly what I was crawling around doing under the smoke bush when a timetabling error brought me into brief conflict with a female barn owl.

I'd booked that end of the garden until twilight, I'm sure of it. Unfortunately, the owl was equally sure that she'd booked it from twilight, which unfortunately meant that at twilight I was scurrying about in the undergrowth looking for strawberries, and she was busy picking bits of small furry animals out of her claws in the branches above me. Point was, until I stood up neither of us had really registered the presence of the other and when I did stand up she let out a screech so close to my ear that for a moment I sincerely thought that the whole top of my head had come off. Jump? I think my underpants are still down there...

Advent of the Whisky-Snifflers

Eagle-eyed readers may notice the blog title has changed. Don't worry, it's only temporary - but for anyone who didn't click on the spider movie the other day, this is a tidy little phrase. Basically, I mean that I'm perpetually getting in trouble for not dealing with stuff until it bites me in the ass. Last night we had four friends round for dinner; I was out at work all day, the house was a complete tip, various plant-y things that Would Not Wait were happening, children's problems were demanding immediate attention, shopping needed to be fetched, and to top it all off, it's Keats weather.

But, hey. Why should yesterday be different? Nothing that two evenings of working until the small hours couldn't solved. So now we're knackered. Never mind. The evening went well and I made two new friends, and as it turns out they have a pile of well-rotted horse poo the size of Lake Michigan that they have not a clue what to do with. I have clues, I have clues a-plenty. Finding a source of bulk shit has been on the "to do" list in the right-hand column of the blog for a few weeks now, and by a happy co-incidence it's also written up on the funky chalk-board in the kitchen - where Whisky-Sniffler* saw it. As a result of which I will be stealing my friend Dunk's little truck, and fetching the manure two tons at a time.


In return, we're going to break out our little cider-press (a gift from an emigrating friend and so far unused by us) and visit the Whisky-Snifflers tomorrow morning, where there will be a great picking of apples and pressing of juices. There may then be a great making of cider, but that remains to be seen; I'll have to find out what apples are a good idea, and then try to reach my brewing equipment which is currently languishing behind the Pile of Carpentry (which is the Pile of Shame of our decidedly non-resident carpenter, whom I'd better send an e-mail saying Hurry The Fuck Up in a minute). Some people may say that turning up at someone's house to make apple juice and then taking half of it away with you hardly qualifies as an in return, but I couldn't possibly comment. Everyone will be happy, so that's a result; and if the W-Ss make cider there's a good chance I'll find out what a pathetic drunk is. Watch this space!




Random Thing of the Day: Ever wondered what a tasmanian devil sounds like? I have.

*Whisky-Sniffler (of the Chelsea Snifflers, not the Hampstead Snifflers)** is so named because she refuses to drink any alcohol. This isn't because of any religious prohibition, but simply because she apparently has an alcohol tolerance so low that the mere smell of spirits gets her giddy. She describes herself as a "pathetic" drunk. I've known maudlin drunks and mean drunks, but pathetic drunks are a new one on me; maybe she huddles up in a corner with a whole box of tissues and moans about how no-one understands her poetry or something. Actually, wait. I can remember begging to be left to die in a hedge one New Year's Eve, maybe that qualifies.***

**Class society joke. I'm afraid if you're not English, there's no explaining it.

***But nothing doing. In Belfast it has long been the role of the constabulary to beat the crap out of anyone found drunk, and then release them the next morning joking about the long flight of stone steps leading down to the cells. Consequentially I was dragged out of the hedge by my friends (one of whom is now an MP, the other of whom is dead - how strange life can be) and dragged home where I was given to their mother. This, I may tell you, was a fate worse than death, because she is an Eastern European earth-mother type and applied the apparently traditional remedy of forcing me to consume three sticks of blackboard chalk and half a litre of coke. I have never been so ill in all my life. In summary; stay way from Estonian women while drunk.

It's that time again...

Wash, chop, blanch, freeze. Repeat.

Chop, sugar, boil, jar. Repeat.

Wash, peel, slice, dry. Repeat.

Normal service will be resumed shortly. As soon as I figure out what normal is, anyway.

Nude Sleepers Warning

If you sleep in the nude

If you deal with the chickens or similar first thing

If you habitually just pull a bathrobe on to do it

If you usually deal with slugs by stamping on them so that their insides shoot out

Then you are at risk

Be aware that sometimes

Just sometimes

Their insides don't shoot forwards

Sometimes they shoot upwards

Witchypoo: "You're back quickly. Are the chickens done?"

Hedge: "I've got to shower."

WP: "I thought you said you'd leave showering until after..."

Hedge: (interrupting) "I have to shower. Now."

AvP in your Living Room

Uh-hhh-hhh-rrrr-hh...

That's the closest I can get to transliterating a shudder. I sat up for a while to watch Alien Vs. Predator on TV, in the dark (natch), and I'm pretty freaked out. Not by the movie, though, which I thought was rather vanilla, but by the three massive house spiders that decided to visit me while I was watching it. Facehuggers and Tegenaria gigantea? Not a good combination.

Since the mention of spiders seemed to get everyone's attention, I decided to find out why so many Tegenaria were coming to see me, and I don't like the answers I found. Firstly, they're not coming in as such - they're already here! Autumn is mating time, you see, so the males wander around looking for females; but they live in (and around) houses the whole time. That makes me feel a who-o-ole lot better. Although they can be found in pretty much any home anywhere in the world, T. gigantea and a few similar species actually spread by commerce, and originally came from Europe. You see, non-UK people? Pff. And you said we only gave you syphilis.

Tomorrow sees the annual wild blackberry expedition (the very thing that growing the cultivated one is set to replace). In 24 hours time I will have a whole lot more jam and a whole lot less sensation in my fingertips, so I guess I should do anything fiddly while I still can. Oh, and the Pile of Shame is going... going...

When Wildlife Invades

Some of the local wildlife obviously reads the blog, because since I posted about relocating toads the Hollow has been under seige with creatures trying to come inside to live. Mosquitos are always a problem at this time of the year*, as are the Bloody Big Spiders**. Less expected have been a magnificent dragonfly, a Bat On A String (of which more another day), and this evening's mouse as supplied by Number Two Cat. And abandoned as boring. And forgotten about, until it ran over Witchypoo's foot, causing a shriek of which the like has not been heard since the morning I realised I had a mouse in my trousers.

After a brief scuffle, I constructed an appealing mouse trap by stapling one end of a cardboard tube closed, and made a scary noise which caused the mouse to dart into the inviting tunnel - which was then upended. Mousie was making himself so small he was hardly there at all, so after a few searching questions to determine any mafia links, he was taken down to the garden wall to be shot in the head gangland style. No, not really. Although if my questioning was inadequate and he really was the Mafioso Mouse, he probably expected nothing less.

You might think, as I did, that tipping a mouse out of a shiny cardboard tube would be a simple affair, but no. Mousie turned out to be almost entirely composed of Velcro, and didn't want to come out under any circumstances. I tipped the tube at 30°. Nothing - I could tell by the balance of my tube that it was still huddled at the closed end. I increased the tilt to 45°. Nada. 60°. Zip. Eventually I had the tube held vertically and was shaking it vigorously up and down while I felt the mouse slip and climb, slip and climb - until a strange look from Mr Crackyabones next door made me aware that an outsider would only have seen me hanging halfway over the wall, apparently frantically wanking with a cardboard tube. At which point, the mouse fell out.

Even soldier infestation can be dealt with organically.

*Another of nature's cruel little jokes. Mozzies have this really irritating habit of getting into our bedroom and remaining quiet and hidden down the back of a bit of furniture or in the folds of the curtains, until about two minutes after the light goes off. Then they sound their hateful little trumpets, and out they come; I have to get up and switch on the light, and they land PDQ to try to avoid detection. If I can see them I have to flatten them with a wet facecloth thrown straight up (don't knock it, it works), but at this time of the year WP and I can lose half an hour to the nightly mozzie hunt, no problem at all. A few facts you may not know about the mosquito;

1. Only the females bite you. They need a blood meal before they can lay eggs, whereas the male mozzies only feed on nectar. Awww. But they still piss me off in the bedroom.

2. Mozzies hunt by scent, and can smell you from tens of meters away. Yes, really. Then they follow your carbon dioxide plume up the concentration gradient, using a semi-random tracking movement.

3. Mozzies can see into the infra-red, so as they come in for a landing they can actually taxi up the length of a blood vessel and select a bite site.

4. In many mozzie species, the newly-hatched male identifies a female pupa about an hour before it is due to hatch and hooks onto it with a foreleg, and waits. Mating typically starts before the female is even fully out of her pupa. I'm desperately trying to avoid a Chris Langham joke here, believe me.

"Really? You could pass for seventeen..."

** The Hedgewizard used to be afraid of spiders, oh yes. I tried to watch Arachnophobia, at home, on video with the pause button on standby, and couldn't get past the introduction where the explorers are hacking through the undergrowth - no actual spiders needed. You should understand there are no poisonous spiders in the UK.*** When Number One Son was born, though, I decided I didn't want to pass on the phobia to him, and set out to desensitize myself; starting with tiny little things, I got used to handling them and worked my way up to the big house spiders. I'd got really blasé about it too - until I picked up a big female and she bit me, right between my index finger and thumb where the skin is thin. After that I was a bit more careful.

Happily N1S is unafraid of spiders, and when three years old presented me with one in the garden that was so big, I swear its legs were hanging down on each side of his hand. "Ooooooh, thank you darling, isn't that a big one, no don't come any closer, we don't want to frighten it... why don't you put it in the flower border? No, not that one, the one waaaaay down at the bottom of the garden. That's it, keep going... yes, and across the road... now through that gate..."

***Or so I thought. This year I found out we do have one spider with a nasty bite, the False Widow. Thankfully it's not all that common, except in Dorset. Hang on, except where?

A little help here?

Calling all tech monkeys! Can anyone tell me why blogs ask you for your e-mail when you post? Does it make any difference if you feed them a made-up address? I'm not trying to be anonymous or anything; just lazy. I'd much sooner type a@a.com than be arsed typing out my real address.

This all comes from my observation than companies - and individuals come to that - often set up systems to collect information that they don't actually need. In time all the data can be sold to so-called "data miners" who can extract useful stats from it, but most of the time it serves no purpose at all. One firm that I worked for in the past had a monthly form that took about four hours to fill in - lots of finding figures and calculating things - and didn't seem in any rush to get the form into their computerized submissions.

I made a few inquiries, and no-one seemed to know what the data was used for. I did some shouting, and eventually someone from Head Office gave me permission to stop filling it in. At length a bulletin went out to all 1400 branches telling them the form was no longer required, and it transpired that the form had gone out of office use two years ago but no-one had bothered telling the branches that. So that was [4 hours x 12 x 2 x 1400] 134,400 supervisor hours spent compiling data that no-one was even collating any more.

In larger terms, this fits in with my observations about the world in which we live. When I was fresh out of the cereal packet* the world didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I derived some comfort from the notion that it would all become clear when I was older (which is what adults tended to tell me). Well, I got older - but still very little made sense. For quite some time I consoled myself with the notion that the People In Charge understood it all, but I have lately come to realise that this, too, is bollocks. Presumably a few people have a really good grip on their own fields, but the entire system is understood by nobody. In a very real sense, there's nobody at the wheel.


An example, taken from The Clinton Years on Radio Four. My apologies for not being able to remember the exact name of the government body being talked about. Richard Holbrooke (an investment banker and diplomat, so presumably a smart man) got a call from Bill Clinton (himself no slouch) asking him to come to Washington to head the President's Fiscal and Social Equivalency Steering Group. "Sorry, Bill" he said, "but I have no idea what that is."

"Neither do I," said Clinton. "But apparently I need you to head it up."

The case for the prosecution rests.




*I apparently came free with a box of Weetybangs, which explains a lot.

Marrovial Musings

Who'd have thunk it? For the last few weeks I've been giving marrows away to anyone who so much as pauses to read the electricity meter. Given that you can't store marrows for very long (no later than midwinter even in ideal conditions), trading them for goodwill is actually a sensible option. Having said that, there's only so many marrows you can persuade someone to take before you seriously piss them off. And now what do I find? The Marrow Forest of Impenetrable Prickliness has started fruiting again, so in case anyone else is afflicted with the same bounty I thought I might post a recipe that I've been fiddling with and finally have down pat. I'm still working on the vegetarian version, so if anybody cracks it please tell me!

One onion
A clove or two of garlic
Half a pound (225g) minced beef
1 tsp each ground cinnamon and dill seed
Some honey
A pound (450g) of skinned tomatoes, or a tin of chopped tomatoes
Some tomato purée
A small marrow*
Some grated cheese

Cut the marrow in half lengthways, and scoop out and discard the seedy bit. Using a suitable spoon, hollow each half out a bit to make a cavity for the meat; you should be left with a shell about a quarter of an inch thick. Chop the flesh you've removed roughly. Rub the inside of the shell with salt, and throw a tablespoon or two of salt into the chopped flesh (don't worry, you'll be washing it later). Set aside while you get everything else ready.

Preheat the oven to 180C, 350F, Gas mark4. Chop the onion and garlic finely while swearing mightily**, and sautée gently in a large saucepan until soft and transparent, then add the cinnamon, dill seed and mince, and cook until the meat is all browned. Chop the tomatoes up and throw them in, with some tomato purée to add richness; season well, and put in a tablespoonful or two of the secret ingredient - honey. Yes, honey. Look - just do it, okay? Now leave the mixture on a medium heat, stirring occasionally, and let it cook down to a non-sloppy consistency.

Meanwhile, rinse off the marrow shells and the flesh, and get as much of the water out as possible. Lightly grease the outside of the shells, and stand them on a baking tray. When the meat mixture is ready, put about half of the cut flesh into it (or more if you like), and give it a few minutes to warm through before packing the mince into the marrow shells, heaping up a little if needs be. Cover each of the shells with a piece of foil big enough to tuck in underneath on each side, and put in the oven for about half an hour.

To finish off, turn the heat up to full. Take the foil off the marrows and sprinkle them with a little grated cheese, and put back into the oven uncovered for ten minutes, or as long as it takes for the cheese to begin to brown. They're quite pretty, so cut them in half at the table; they'll serve four hungry people, along with some green beans, fresh bread, and a glass of red wine.



*Hmm. A bit vague, isn't it? I could do an Elizabeth Acton and say "The size of a lady's shoe", but that's no good. It's about (holds hands out) so big. Say ten inches or so. No more than a foot. You could use a bigger one of course, but the smaller ones seem to take the flavour better and the skins are so tender you can eat the whole damned thing. So use a little one if you can.

**If you have not recently filletted your thumb with a bean frencher then the swearing is optional, but I can't guarantee the recipe without it. Best include it, just to be sure.

The Toad Pogroms

Hedgewizard seems to have found a way of circumventing the First Law of Thermodynamics*, which says that you can't create or destroy matter, only change it into a different form. Now, don't get mad, it was an accident. I've been working on the Pile of Shame, and although the log store is getting very much fuller I have to report that the PoS isn't getting any smaller. I can only conclude that my not inconsiderable work energy and chainsaw output is actually being transformed into logs, which would be OK if they were nice, regular, stackable logs. But they aren't. They're all different sizes and as nobbly as buggery.** I shall be glad to warm my toes on them as they journey to hell. I found some toads too, which is why I'm so keen to finish this job before the weather gets any cooler and they go into hibernation; if that happens I'll have to stop, because waking them could leave them seriously weakened during the winter.

As I uncover the toads, they look at me reproachfully and mutter to themselves about habitat destruction. They are then gently relocated to the other log pile, this one a permanent (albeit recently established) feature of the garden. Here the wood is all untreated timber, some of it already nicely manky and partly buried. Over time it loses mass and begins to fall into itself, but this is balanced by throwing a bit of new wood on the top now and again. This is a habitat designed to mimic a dead tree - really, if you can leave one standing it's much better - and should eventually be home to all manner of beasties, from frogs to rove beetles, once it settles down a bit and the shade tree I'm planting next to it gets established. It might even get some stag beetles in the end, but what it happily won't have is either of the Bleedin' Cats, who seem strangely reluctant to go into that corner of the garden at all. Perhaps they know something I don't, and the woodpile will be home to some nasty little cat-eating goblin. I can but hope!


In other news, the chickens are in disgrace. Having previously ignored the apples and pears on the two-year-old trees, they have now apparently discovered fruit in a big way - and learned not only how to jump half a meter straight up, but to co-ordinate their jumps with a devastating peck. So - no pears for me, and only two winter apples out of the five I had hoped to try. Oh well. Next year, of course, the trees will have grown a bit. The fruit will be three feet up, and if I see one single chicken wearing a jet pack there's going to be trouble (taps soup pan meaningfully).

Whoops, and I nearly forgot - if you haven't already done so, please do take a look at The Big Ask and contribute if you can. Posting's a doddle, and the site automatically sends a link to your post direct to your own MP - all you have to do is put in your postcode.


* "There's no such thing as a free lunch." It was alleged in the 90s that this had been disproved by physicists who were brave enough to attend timeshare presentations, eat the food, and leave without signing anything. Independant laboratories were unable to duplicate the results of this research, however, and it was eventually discovered that the timeshare events were actually held in the evening, and thus technically the free meal was dinner, or perhaps supper. The First Law of Thermodynamics is therefore upheld.

**Is buggery knobbly, or merely knobby? Answers on a postcard, please.

Raspberry Gin

Harvesting at this time of the year takes about half an hour every third day, and the reason for this is that the Hollow is set up to provide little and often - to give us as varied a diet as possible. For most of the year that means just fetching the food as we need it, but once we get into Keats weather there's more produce than we can handle so it has to be processed for storage. Today is the turn of plums and marrows, both destined to be jam; later on this week it'll be the crystal lemons on their way to becoming a salted relish*. No tomatoes this year, but to my delight I remembered we had so many green ones last year that there are still enough in the freezer to make a batch of chahutenny.

One unexpected star this year has been the autumn (or "primocaine") raspberries. I put three rows of raspberries in last winter; Glen Moy (fruiting mid-June to mid-July), Glen Ample (early July to early August), and Glen Campbell Autumn Bliss (mid August to mid October). See? There's that successional thing again. I knew that raspberries fruit on two-year-old wood, so I wasn't expecting more than a handful of fruit this year. I also knew that Autumn Bliss was a primocaine raspberry - meaning fruiting on one-year-old wood - but again hadn't really expected much from it in the first year. Happily, I was wrong; it gave me half a pound of raspberries a few days ago, and it's only now coming into its main fruiting period. It's been giving me handfuls of raspberries every few days for a month or so now, and that's in its first year - so if you want raspberries but can only afford the space for a single row, my advice would be to plant primocaines.

So - too many raspberries to eat straight, and not enough to make wine or jam. What to do? I settled on raspberry gin, and since there are still raspberries about I thought I'd share the recipe. This joins the list of fruit liqueurs that I make, and it's basically a way of turning cheap spirit into something rather special. It's also something I can do in ten minutes, and thus gets my vote. Here's the recipe.

1lb raspberries
6oz sugar
4oz flaked almonds
1 ½ pints cheap gin



Put everything together into a clean, airtight jar, put into a light place, and shake daily for three days. I made half quantities, but probably a bit more fruit than the recipe said (since I could fit it in). Move it to a dark place, and write a reminder in your diary to strain the liquid off the fruit in three months. Sweeten the liquid further if needs be, put it into a pretty bottle (preferably dark glass, to preserve the colour) and leave it alone for a further three months to mature before drinking.*** As for the fruit and nuts you strained off, don't waste them! I'm torn between crumble, pie and ice cream...




*Traditional salted relishes like our Shorter Gentlemen's Relish rely on lactic acid to preserve them, but they're high enough in sodium to make a kidney specialist gibber.**

**Yep, I know they're called nephrologists, but that's a word easily confused with necrophiles. Easily confused by me, anyway. It's like naturalist and naturist, I always get those two confused; I think it's because both involve hiding to watch the birds. Where was I? Er.

***Bugger that! Ready by Yule, that's my motto.