There are still a healthy amount of wild strawberry (fragaria vesca) Bilberry (vaccinium myrtillus) & chanterelles (cantharellus cibarius) around Cornwall at present and after years of looking I actually found my first burdock... nearly ran it over collecting for the woodstack!....
Have just finished blanching and freezing a stack of vine leaves ( for dolmades or koupepia in Greek). And wild cherries have been frozen and preserved. Any mushrooms correctly identified that are surplass are being thinly cut and threaded onto a string in the kitchen as well as cheap supermarket mushrooms.
Herbs are drying in bunches in the conservatory and crunched up into bags and just about to pull up rooted oregano to spread on the field for the poultry... Eggs already taste fantastic but have lost eight to various things!. Quail eggs are also being pickled and seem to be a glut at the mo.... just about to hatch some more chickens for laying and freezer and Our friend up the road has bought a chest freezer... for me to use!!! can you believe it?... we had her last one because we thought she wanted shot of it!!!... already planning on filling with a few geese and several braces of quail!!!
Lots to do and probably more I have forgotten.. oh yes dont forget the rock samphire and sea beet when on the coast!... I obtained a loose root of samphire last year and water it with a good deal of diluted salt and the thing is thriving!! and flowering!!
Out bunny shooting tonight. I am mentoring a chappy up the road and its a good excuse to top up the freezer. I usualy only keep the saddle and boil the rest up as animal feed... If the cat doesnt eat it there are plenty of dogs around that will!
First proper post and suitably vague I hope..
Oh yes the sweet chestnuts are flowering profusely so a good harvest to be expected I hope?.
Stephen
Regards
Stephen
Slow down.....you make me feel positively lazy.....I'm just about to harvest my wild cherries/damsons/any other flavour you could care to think of and that's about my lot...jam and rakia (well it's what the locals drink) and then my mate with the still will finish it off....well it is 34 in the shade....
Who lives long sees much : The diary of my life in Bulgaria
That's an impressive haul.
We're slowly accumulating pickled quail eggs. My plan is to do a range of multicoloured eggs, pickling them in vinegar with various things added for colour:
I don't know how well these will work but the idea is to give jars of multicoloured eggs to our parents for christmas presents.
I'm waiting for the wild berries to ripen around here. Every year I collect blackberries and elderberries. Last year someone pointed out some plum trees. And late last year I noticed some rowan berries growing near work so I'll pick some of those this year and see what I can do with them.
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My Latvian friend uses the rowan juice as a tonic in winter. I think she makes it into a syrup. I am seriously going to have to get all her knowledge written down.
Burdock! We have loads of the stuff. Now what am I going to do with it?
The rowan juice tonic sounds good " this recipe might be similar: although I'd be a bit wary of heating the corked bottles. I'd probably cheat and add some wine stabiliser to the syrup to act as preservative. Talking of wine, my original intention was to make one using the rowan berries. It'd make a nice change to the gallons of elderflower I'm currently making
I did a bit of googling and found a Rowan, Onion and Courgette chutney.
The plums and berries can be picked locally, the tomato, courgette and chilli could come from my own garden, so it'd be almost completely locally sourced
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Thanks for those recipes. My friend is a singer and a musician and so that probably explains why she makes the juice for the winter months. Might help me because while others come down with colds and coughs, I lose my voice.
We have one or two of the HFW books around the cottage too, Shereen. Bummer that we do not have a chance to watch TV these days. Maybe we should make an exception for HFW slots. He is so much in our genre. A very good bloke and ethos.
We will definitely buy that Edible Hedgerow guide.
Never knowingly underfed
We have Sky+ Danny, so once a week I go through the listings (usually Saturday morning, with a mug of tea in hand and the cat on my lap) and flag to record all the programmes I want to see. Then whenever it suits me I sit down and watch them.
We already have the little Collins Gem "Food for Free" classic book, but I really like what John does with foraged food, so thought it would be worth a go with the last of the birthday money.
thought you'd like to see what I harvested today; took some piccies as you wont believe how early one of the harvested crops has been found!!
Wonder what you think about combining the two harvests together in a jam???
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