It's all gone very quiet over there...

This is partly because Hedgewizard has a splendid new camera* which he cannot - cannot, I say - get to release its bounty to the internet, but also partly because Hedgewizard has officially Done His Back In Lifting Inadvisedly Heavy Objects. Normal service will be resumed as soon as he can press *this* button without...

...ow! Crap!



*All right, a splendid pre-owned camera**

**All right, a splendid pre-owned digital body for his existing SLR camera. Are you happy now? Let's just say it would be expensive if it was new. And if I didn't already own most of it.

Deck the Halls with Bats and Besoms

Deck the halls with bats and besoms
Fa la la la la, la la la la
We're the witches for all seasons
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Don we now our black apparel
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Fetch the ale and crack the barrel
Fa la la la la, la la la la

Have a cool Yule, everyone!

The Last Cucumber

Ah, dammit - the last cucumber has gone mouldy. Harvested from the polytunnel in mid-November, I was really hoping I could get the last one to hang on until Christmas day because it would have made a lovely claim in an article - but never mind. I could have got it to last a little longer if I'd wrapped it, but frankly refrigerated storage feels like enough of a cheat to me. 'Early December' it stays.

The garden really is a sorry, soggy sight at the moment. This summer I have spent less time on my plot than ever before, and it really, really shows. Partly this has been down to a combination of laziness and the horrible 2008 weather, but mostly it's just been a symptom of having too much on my plate. Regardless, it's time to get a grip on things again. There's a tricky little hump in effort required when your plot gets out of control – I mean, where do you start?

In my case, I've started the easy way – with a truly terrifying list. The urgent jobs alone will take me four full days, and catching up with where I should be will take about another five. Time to call in some help, I think, or I won't manage to get any infrastructure work done this year. I wonder where the LETS membership list is?

Casterbridge Food Co-op launches at last!

It was a big night on Thursday, for me at least. Regular readers might remember that I first tried to start a food co-operative about a year and a half ago. The concept of going straight to a wholesaler to buy (mainly) dry goods really appealed to me, since five minutes' research convinced me that I could convert more of the family shop to organic produce and save a little money in one swell foop. Not to mention slapping it up the big boys' bottoms. I had half a dozen people who seemed interested and, so convinced was I that the idea was a good one, I decided to hold a first meeting using nothing more than word of mouth to attract members. An evening spent sitting on my own in the pub soon taught me otherwise!

A year later I tried again, this time appealing to the mailing list of Transition Town Dorchester – people who are environmentally aware and therefore more likely to have thought about how their food is produced, and also substantially less fond of supermarkets. Feeling a bit nervous this time, I called a second 'first' meeting. I brought along six cucumbers to give away to the first six bums on seats, since I needed six households to make the idea work, and hoped I hadn't brought too many. As it turned out, I would have needed twenty-three cucumbers.*

It took taken a few months to jump through the flaming hoops of bureaucracy, but on Thursday it was finally time to take delivery of our first order. I am now the proud owner of enough organic dry produce to substantially reduce my dependence on the supermarkets for a couple of months – another vital step towards not going there at all. So thanks to all my fellow Casterbridge Food Co-operative founders, particularly Rentman and Steve, who between them took care of placing and taking delivery of the order.



*Although knowing my luck I would have been stopped by the police and asked to explain where I was going with twenty-three large knobbly curcubits. In my life I have been stopped by the police three times, and on each occasion there has been something embarrassing for the policeman to remark upon. Why am I dressed like a Roman?(Because I went as a Viking last year.) How many cats are in that box, exactly? (Five, but I'm only going round the corner.) Why is the drunken Irishman swearing at me from your back seat dressed like a doctor? (Because he is a doctor, a senior psychiatrist in fact, and he apparently doesn't like the police very much. Might I take him home now, before he vomits over the upholstery?) You can see why I might hesitate to travel with a significant number of cucumbers.

Polytunnel Handbook

At last, the Youtube video for The Polytunnel Handbook, featuring yours truly and some mad beardy bloke who wandered into the garden, is up. The book's available to pre-order too (there's a link in the sidebar) - but now that's out of the way, what the hell am I going to do until 1.30 every morning? And why does the Receding Hairline Fairy insist on sneaking into my bedroom every night with a big tin of forehead-coloured paint?

I Like Chinese

Ah, Christmas shopping; a fine institution, guaranteed to blow even the cheeriest of individuals out of the doldrums of early winter, and into the choppy straits of full-blown Seasonal Affective Disorder.

The trouble with Christmas shopping is that I don't do it - at least not in the sense that most 21st century people understand the concept. During the year I don't 'go shopping' and buy whatever looks nice; instead, when I need something I usually wait for a while to see if the need evaporates. Most of the time it does. It's a strategy that seems to work well for me, but it means that when I finally brave the shops at Yule I'm in severe danger of being afflicted with 'mission creep' – which is how I came to be staring into the deep freeze compartment of a Chinese supermarket trying to identify the contents of a package marked 'Big Pig Fat End' (on the pack) and 'Pork Large Intestine' (on the box).

I love Chinese supermarkets. I encountered my first one as a student, and having previously lived in 1980s Belfast where 'cosmopolitan' meant a mixture of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla ice cream, it was unthinkably exotic. Of particular interest were the pressed whole ducks, completely flat and almost perfect discs of unlovely fried poultry. I thought very hard about how such a thing could be accomplished, and eventually decided that you had to persuade the duck to examine its own foot and then drop an extremely hot truck on it.

Foodstuff, living creature, or kite? You decide.

Authentic Chinese food is a riot of flavours and textures, but I quickly learned that not all of them are palatable to westerners. Not without a bit of a run-up, anyway. One notable experience of my first attempts was an encounter with a tinned 'Chinese radish', which looked like a small brain rolled in chilli and tasted like distilled socks. I can taste it in some Szechuan dishes even today; but that's with the tiniest sliver in a sauce for thirty diners and not, as I first attempted, half a tin in a pot of soup for four. It's a mistake any drunken half-wit could make.

These days the Chinese supermarket is my port of call for herbs and spices that aren't grown locally, but which make a big difference to the range of dishes we can make with what the garden gives us. Chunky cinnamon bark for spiced apple juice, whole coriander seeds for truly epic roast potatoes, cloves for mulling elderberry wine or studding into pork – and generally sold for 69p per 100g, against the £1.80 the supermarkets like to charge for a little glass pot holding a miserly 10g. Admittedly some of the niceties of western retail are left out – such as fancy packaging, clear labelling and, er, expiry dates – but it all adds to the sense of adventure. And anyway, where else can you have the fun of trying to work out what you're buying when you pick up a bottle of 'seafood (squid) sauce for cook with the gluten fly'?

Actually, that's a little worrying. I mean, I'm a cook – but do I have gluten fly? (scurries off for medical books)



* Asides from a vague sense of impending doom, but I have that all the time I'm out of the garden anyway.