Grazing on salad

Rain makes for a lovely green lush salad leaf and probably a wonderful beetroot in a few weeks. Strawberries on the other hand are rotting on the plants as are the gooseberries. Apples are swelling on the tree.
The raised bed that looked empty a few weeks ago is bursting with fresh green leaves and I find myself grazing whenever I pass; a rocket leaf here, a salad leaf there, a spinach leaf that is fresh and crunchy.

Salads cannot readily be preserved and are a crop that needs to be picked and eaten very quickly. Problem is that the weather suits more pies and stews than salad leaves. It makes a wonderful addition to home made savoury pies or pizza.

What amazes me every year is that different plants get the spotlight....when their growing conditions are just right. This must be a a salad year! Hence the abundance in rabbits in the fields...their vegetation is in abundance and so they multiply.

I could be negative about the lack of sunshine but instead I am grateful that this year any lettuces planted are not turning bitter and going to seed as quickly as other years. having saved the rain butt in case of drought I can only laugh at the irony of it, its overflowing every day. I fill my watering cans with rainwater to water the tomatoes that are screaming for some warmth and water the houseplants with the abundant water. After all, it makes up 75% of the chemistry of people and vegetation so there is nothing to complain about, its obviously needed.

Sandals are parked and wellies are the new summer gear!

Summer memories

Old House Ardennes 67

The daily front page news may or may not have got you down over the last month as well as the lack of summer warmth. The news all around is rather gloomy…but only if we let it. Our antidote here is to rise above any recession prediction and continue to enjoy what we do.

The economic outlook may seem as dark as the summer weather; every week suppliers provide new price lists, stop stocking certain items or change their delivery days to cut fuel costs which overall is probably a sensible approach in the current volatile business climate.

Global warming, the credit crunch and economic recession can be a selffulfilling prophecy if we let it.

My childhood in Belgium took place in a small village in the Ardennes and every Sunday I cycled to the village ( about 3 miles away, uphill) to seek out the bakery. My efforts of cycling uphill were rewarded upon entering the village where my senses would be revived. The smell of fresh bread and pastries would waft out of the bakery and Annemie would wave me in with a lovely smile. I was about 12 at the time. My basket would fill up with fresh crusty rolls, the odd baguette, fruit waffle and Tarte au Riz for afternoon tea. My cargo had to be protected on the whiz down the hill back home. During summer months I would rest on a grass verge, read a few passages of my book and admire the view of the valley below. Come rain or shine, whether my week had been successful or pretty hard to deal with, I never failed my expeditions to the bakery. Annemie’s wave and smile would beckon me in and I would leave feeling a sense of belonging and warmth which has stayed with me ever since.

This is one of the reasons for baking fresh bread, croissants and pastries in Central Stores. There are still memories to be made today for young and old alike.

For the past few weeks we have been experimenting with baguettes, different types of rolls and pastries and feedback has been very encouraging indeed. The variety on offer will continue to change, not only to test our baking skills, but to offer a moving feast for the senses to accompany villagers during bright and rainy days. You may even glimpse a smile from behind the counter!

Bread, rolls and pastries are available every day but croissants and petit pains au chocolat are weekend delights to be savoured with a steaming cup of your favourite beverage and good read whatever the weather. Baking has given me a new satisfaction; every time a croissant leaves the oven, I hear Annemie’s voice telling me not to hurry, to enjoy every moment. Every croissant has the ability to create a memory.

Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress; working together is a success.
Henry Ford

Despite the weather....

Window dressing is not a skill that I have acquired over the years but it gives me an opportunity to create something of a talking point in the village. Apparently on a rainy day it gives a focus for a small walk to the shop, then maybe be drawn in by the smell of bread baking in the oven to buy a croissant, a danish pastry or a baguette. At the weekend we encourage a relaxing morning stroll to buy a newspaper, a croissant and petit pain au chocolat to enjoy at home with some coffee. Even if the summer weather leaves a lot to be desired, we can pretend that we enjoy a holiday lifestyle.

Each window has a riddle in it.....in between the baguette and the coffee we have a french hen, a duck and some garlic.......

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be
Marcel Pagnol quotes (French Writer, Producer and Film Director, 1895-1974)

No waist

Boulangerie
Over the last month we have been busy starting an on site bakery in the shop. The credit crunch is making people in the countryside aware that just to drive 3 miles for a loaf of bread might be a little eccentric. We support home breadmaking by offering a variety of flours from french bread to wholemeal but we felt what was missing was the smell of fresh bread, croissants and freshly baked goodies on site.

The transformation is as magical as we thought and although the workload increases, there is nothing that beats the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the shop and increasing the feel good factor. The supermarkets stagger their baking efforts throughout the day to appeal to the customer to by fresh bread, doughnuts etc. In the village shop we bake early in the morning a selection of pastries, organic loaves and baguettes but when the quantity has run out we do not bake again. This means that early in the morning people sit on the outside bench waiting until the bread is ready.

Summer may have bypassed us but the bakery in the shop has brought a summer holiday feeling to our customers and all who visit.

There is still a lot of repair work to be carried out on the premises and the kitchen to expand the range. The feedback has been great and we have more visitors who follow their noses.

Salad days

The rainy, cool days suit the salads in the raised beds very well although the humans in the household are crying out for some hot weather.

The raised salad bed is planted quite densely which eliminates weeding. Red and green lettuces interplanted with radishes provide a feast for the senses. Slug population need to climb at least the equivalent of a mountain to reach the greenery and success for the moment is abundant.

Simple salad

Salad leaves- mixed, washed and cut up with scissors
radishes
parsley
tomatoes
cucumber
sprinkling of cashew nuts
sprinkling of sultanas
1 avocado sliced
dressing of olive oil and lemon or lime juice

add either crusty bread or 2 rice cakes, a large glass of elderflower cordial and enjoy what is left of the summer.

small potager

In November, the area designated for vegetable growing looked overgrown.
The above shows the garden area when we had just started to create the space: we found it was a lot larger than anticipated at first.


A few weeks ago, the raised beds were put in and a ton of compost added. The compost was bought from the local authority and came at £ 17.00 a ton. This is composted at high speed from all the green waste people take to the recycling centre and from the recycling bins collected at the kerbside; a lot cheaper than when you buy it by the bag at the garden centre.

Due to the delay in finishing the hard landscaping I have bought an instant salad garden from WigglyWigglers to make instant use of the potager which included a variety of salad plants, spring onions, celery, celeriac, beetroot and tomatoe plants. I have also planted out butternut squash and french beans.

The remaining part of the garden is still in progress but its blueprint is a food forest garden with trees, shrubs and a mixture of edible and non edible plants. Currently we have strawberries that are ripening in tubs but have had to be covered with fleece, blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes with a few berries on and 2 gooseberry bushes that show promise. As this is the first year for these plants, the harvest will be limited. Amongst the greenery there are also alpine strawberries that make a wonderful addition to our breakfast each day.

There is more opportunity to go out and potter in the garden and I am feeling a bit trimmer too. So far on the vegetarian diet my weight has dropped by 20lbs; no caffeine, no wheat, no dairy, no meat, no yeast, no sugar, no salt. Probably sounds very boring but it enables me to move forward with the possibility of eating the majority of the fruit and vegetables that are grown in the garden supplemented by natural sugars from honey, and dry staples like rice, oats,dried beans, seeds, sprouted seeds and nuts. It suits me personally but my DH needs a certain amount of meat to stay healthy.

The turning point

The news articles in today's newspapers are telling us of a new phenomenon : despite rapid increasing prices for fuel, food and daily living expenses the average high street spending has increased to record levels last month, way beyond expectations. When the government expects people to tighten their belts and spending, many have gone out of their way to spend more and more. There are 2 possibilities : some people may feel that now is the time to buy as next month the item may be more expensive and others might use shopping as a way to make them feel better about the rising costs of mortgage, credit and life in general in defiance. Whatever the motives, the move is a different one than expected.

On a local level we are seeing a difference too. We are spending more time explaining to people what we can do locally so they do not need to travel to the nearest town and there is a change in buying patterns too as people reconsider travel journeys that can be avoided. A more worrying trend is that some suppliers are going into liquidation, i.e. voluntary bankruptcy as profit margins decrease and running costs and interest rates rise. This will wipe out some businesses that are influenced by these factors and will result in some smaller companies laying off staff, and an increase in local unemployment.

I personally believe that the trend will continue as with higher fuel costs, higher prices for food and commodities will continue too. What would then follow is a request for more money, i.e.salaries to increase to keep up with the cost of living and possible strike action. This is the turning point where a simpler life is no longer a voluntary option for many but one that is being forced upon people as a result of a changing global economy. I predict irrational behaviour as people begin to realise that they cannot have what they want instantly, they may have to wait as supplies and resources become scarce. The quest for fuel seems to be a primary focus based on the fact that fuel and oil availability will reduce in years to come. The laws of economy then mean that when a product becomes scarce, the price will go up. Thus if for instance rice is no longer exported by countries because they need it for their own use, the price of rice rises as its availability decreases.

A proactive approach is to look at alternatives and ways to maximise current opportunities :

• For shelter - check what you can do to minimise the costs of your accommodation.
• For food : plan what you eat, diversify ingredients, take lunch to work and buy some staples ahead of time.
• For warmth : the cost of fuel will rise the nearer we get to winter so now is a good time to invest in filling your oil tank, building a log store for a wood burning stove and saving as much as you can on energy costs. What you save now you can use when you really need it.

Most papers will be full of tips on how to save money and short term savings can be made by cutting down on what is bought new, long term savings can be made by being focused on what you will need in the future and finding the right time to purchase that item. If you made assumptions about a budget at the beginning of the year it may need to be reassessed to take into account price rises.


As a sustainable business, we want to keep our prices competitive which has been successful in particular in the fresh produce section of the shop. Ice cream consumption is low due to inclement weather and chocolate consumption is up. Soup is in demand although this is completely unseasonal.

Life as we knew it is about to change.

Where are the bees?

No bees, no fruits? No beans?
It is remarkable at the moment that the weather is off track, the plants are unsure what to do about it and a synchronicity of flowering, pollinating and fruit is far from easy to obtain presently.
We obtain our local honey from an enthusiast. He has been telling us for the last six months that he is unsure whether the bees will survive the climate change and when he came in this week, he glumly told us that 50% of his hives had not managed to survive the winter. 50% is a huge amount.
What seemed a possibility is now a certainty in our area : bee populations are severely damaged and this can only mean that British honey will die off and we will need to import our honey from the rest of the world at a premium cost. If we have no bees pollinating the orchards and fields, our crops will diminish and as such, farmers will have a harder time managing to create value crops. As a result of less insects too, birds will require us to supplement their diets with seeds and worms to keep them thriving.
If you love honey, go buy some as British honey may indeed become a rarity in the future.

Independent small retailer's week

Canary yellow is not the most suitable colour for our complexion but it certainly has been a talking point. To celebrate the status of small independent retailers, many have joined forces to open conversations with shoppers and wear the yellow jerseys. More details can be found on the myshopisyourshop site.

In a playful way we learnt what we do well and took the opportunity to find out what our local shoppers think about the way we do things, what could be improved etc. Most of all, we had a good laugh and were laughed at. The weather has been really miserable lately and word got around that something was up in the shop. It was a fun day and we have taken on board the comments made.

At the same time, our shopping bag competition has come to an end and we have some really good entries to choose from. Some made us laugh a lot and others were more serious. At least many people had a go to make the slogan about the shop their own. What we want to do is to recreate a sense of community and belonging and although vastly present in our village, we can still do our bit to enhance and strengthen the relationships we have with our customers. Details of the winning slogan will follow.

Its been quite a week :

• market research
• photographs taken of the ' canaries'
• the choosing of our own shopping bag logo
• launch of organic vegetable and fruit box.

There is more to explore but we work on the principles of the triple bottom line as suggested by Sally Lever: people, planet and profit.

Organic box scheme

Fruits & Vegetables Sign

For a few months now we have been searching for an organic vegetable and fruit box to offer to the customers of the shop. There are still issues around it but Monday this will be available. We have been offering an increased range of local produce. Local producers did not seem willing to provide a delivery service to the shop so we turned to our wholesaler and asked him to source a box for us.

It’s a bittersweet step; we will be offering an organic box but some of the produce , although organic, will be from far away. This is a bit sad that pears in the organic box are coming from Argentina but it’s a stepping stone at the moment until we can establish demand and see if we can win the local producers over to see that it is worth investing in.

We tried the contents out last week and in the box were the following :

potatoes
carrots
onions
1 small swede
1 broccoli
1 cauliflower
1 lettuce
2 courgettes
1 sweet potato
1 lettuce
4 bananas
4 pears
4 apples
2 oranges
4 plums
6 tomatoes
1/2 cucumber
1 beetroot

It was tasty but needed to be kept cool as it does not keep as well as the usual vegetables and fruit.

A few people who order from a national scheme have shown an interest and will be testing it out.

Blooming colour

When you move into an established garden, part of the fun is not knowing what is really going to appear from season to season. I love the colour combination of the leaves and the red paeony 's palette in the garden plot. There also has been a guessing game with regards to the fruit trees but I can now begin to tell that this is a pear tree. Not many pears as we pruned the tree back severely but nevertheless nice to have a pear tree in the garden.
The business and house improvements are taking a lot of time and working in the garden has been a little sporadic. I have tomatoes and peppers growing in the garden room together with seedlings of salads and beans awaiting the completion of the raised beds. In between the flowers broad beans and mangetout peas are growing up nicely and the courgette and squash plants are reaching double leaf stage.

Our village holds a variety of plant sales for charity in which it is possible to obtain extra plants at reasonable costs. I did receive a present of marjoram, lovage, chives, rosemary and thyme which will add to the herb collection already in the garden. This will serve to season our foods.

The brill lawnmower is going well , without the use of fuel, sheer muscle power from little boys creates a near cricket pitch lawn standard on the small lawn that creates a green focus in the garden.

What I am really looking forward to are the soft fruits that are beginning to form on the blackcurrant, redcurrant, gooseberry bushes as well as the strawberry plants hidden around. The morello cherry looked pretty too and is now forming little fruits. I love the month of May, so full of promise and optimism. It May all be blossoming and a marvellous crop, it may not....we need to wait and see how the climate shapes up.

The meatrix

The meatrix is a cartoon series based on the Matrix about factory farming of meat and dairy.

Having given up on meat, dairy, wheat, yeast and sugar this week I can say that it is possible to do. I have known for some time that changing to a vegetarian diet would have an impact not only on my health but also on our carbon footprint.

Here are the steps we have taken to get this far :

• Change from normal milk to organic milk.
• Check out alternatives (almond, rice, oat and soya milk)
• Explore other grains than wheat : oats, millet, rice, barley, spelt
• become aware and ask where your food comes from.
• Shop local for meat and poultry from sustainable farms you can visit
• Change from 7 meat meals per week down to 6, then 5,4, 3 until you have 1 meat meal per week.
• Go to the library to read up on recipes based on vegetarian cooking.
• have soup for lunch or a rice salad.
• Trust that your tastebuds will change.
• Grow salads and vegetables in your garden
• Grow herbs in your garden to season your food.
• Eat fruit 3 times per day to enable your body to get used to natural sugars instead of artificial ones.
• Eat seasonally and locally produced food.

This is not about going hungry. Until recently I was unaware that the food we ate was nutritionally deficient making our bodies want more and instant fixes of sugar as this is quickly absorbed into the body.

After a week, I can eat strawberries without sugar and cream, icecream or yoghurt and they taste of strawberries.

Fresh food requires no refrigeration, can be eaten straight from the garden and waste is reduced or composted easily.

Sample menu today :

oat cereal with fresh strawberries and rice milk
mid morning snack - banana and herbal tea
lunch - rice salad : rice, grated carrot, grated courgette, raisins, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, chopped herbs, olive oil and lemon juice, black pepper.
afternoon snack- apple and herbal tea
dinner: roasted vegetables on quinoa fussili
evening snack - herbal drink

A few months ago I would not have managed this but reducing consumption of meat and dairy is possible slowly. This is not an entirely local diet but in time further changes will be made.

Some good resources are :
Barbara Cousins - Cooking without made easy
Lizee McGraw - Energy on a plate

Winds of change

The cyclone in Burma has hit and killed thousands of people and yet in this quiet english village, life is going on as usual. Maybe we are getting immune to disaster messages and shrugging our shoulders because we cannot relate to such devastation. We can however notice that a temperature yesterday of 22 degrees C was out of the ordinary ( lovely but out of the ordinary).

To visually picture the devastation, the after cyclone picture gives an indication of the area covered.

Thousands of people in a hot country with no water and very few facilities. Add to that difficulties of aid getting through and the devastation cannot even be imagined.

I wonder when enough will be enough for people to realise that something is wrong here?

It feels sad, overwhelming and before we dismiss that feeling let us imagine what we can do today to alleviate the situation for the human beings caught up in this region and also which one of our actions is contributing to future events.

This is hard to look at , much easier to run away and ignore the news. Actioning aid is a good response.

Personally I am uncomfortable with the thought that if we continue living along the same lines, someone else on earth pays the price for that .........live simply so that others may simply live.

I stare at my bowl of brown rice with vegetables and I am thankful and saddened at the same time.

Are you your self?

Following the Crowd

I reflected on my son's school report and how he needed assurance that it was OK to be him. I am not sure why the school system seems to favour head people, pupils who work things out logically, but it does. It suits some children but those who are practical, arty and pay more importance to how a task feels than what it achieves stand to be considered a failure in the current education system. Just because the level is expected to be 4c and has to be attained gives me no clear indication as to whether the subject is interesting, enjoyable or entirely useful. It all is about balance I guess.

We cannot be a world full of intelligent ' head people' surely? The logical side works things out by analysing criteria rather than how things feel. In contrast our intuition whispers to us between our thoughts. When we use our intuition we are using the right side of the brain and we feel comfortable with what we are doing. If sensitive and intuitive people are forced to use their left side of the brain exclusively, it could be possible that they have difficulties with that and do not feel happy. Just because you are good at maths does not mean that you need to be an accountant or a teacher; the question is ....will it feed your soul and make you feel good as well.

Working in the garden feeds my soul; creating a meal from scratch, feeds my soul and yet these are not career paths I chose in my lifetime.

Living too much in our heads can lead to losing touch with our sense of self. Losing our sense of self means that we are doing, being and thinking what others have taught us. Detoxing the body is about stripping off those layers and uncovering the core of ourselves.

If you are a left brain person, great we need you in this world to figure out what is happening and how we can work with global warming. If you are right brain person we need you to remind us of how we have lost our connection with the earth, why we have an inbuilt sense of unhappiness and loss. The facts and figures of global warming do not have an effect; its pictures and movies about what is affecting people that speak to us at a deeper level.We could be feeling everything and be overwhelmed and we need logical people to find a way forward.

In fact we need to work this out together. Problem is that most children will be focused on targets and solutions; not having the practical know how of how to be putting it right. The farmers who have told us over the years that the landscape was changing have been ignored by a majority of logical human beings. It needs something to appeal to our core level of self and nothing focuses the mind better on that than ill health and disease.

Levels of toxicity around us are rising and having started a nutrition route without yeast, sugar,dairy focused on basic foods I am astounded as to how addicted I am to such substances.

The question asked by my son was : Who controls your life? Who indeed ( you can answer that for yourself). His answer was that either a higher power controlled his life, he could be in charge of his own life and be responsible and true to himself or his life could be influenced by his peers.

How would it be if your life was controlled by an addiction to oil, wheat and sugar? Reducing these is a possibility only if we can truly take charge of that path our self......if we had to give up oil, wheat and sugar....you can expect a reaction on a physical level ( withdrawal symptoms), emotional level ( behaviour issues), and a mental health level. How healthy do we feel as human beings on this earth?

Answers on a postcard...........

Detoxing breakfast

One of the side effects of detoxing is that in eliminating toxins from the body, the body reacts( in my case giving me headaches), as in general it craves the missing element.

Take for instance the morning cup of tea. It contains tea, sugar and milk. I am simplifying by drinking it black first without sugar, then when I have got used to that, I change from tea to redbush or herbal teas. Reducing milk and sugar in tea does not seem to have as many side effects as reducing the caffeine in my daily cup.

Many breakfast cereals contain sugar. Here are a few breakfast options to try to reduce temptations of instant, conveniently packaged breakfast cereals.

Porridge
Oats soaked overnight in water, with cinnamon, almonds and currants
Oats, yoghurt and fresh fruit
Smoothie ; 1 banana, cup of raspberries, cranberry juice and yoghurt

Good Morning

I have come to realise that when I feel hungry my body is infact thirsty. Ultimately our bodies are made up of a large proportion of water ( not tea, coffee or fruitjuice). Water therefore seems a good source of hydration.
I used to drink 6 cups of tea per day, now am down to one. I am not saying its for everyone but we do load our bodies with complex infusions, drinks with sugar and extra sugar and maybe we were not designed to deal with that amount of sugar on a daily basis.

Herbal teas have never been a favourite of mine but I am trying a variety of them, some I like and some I do not. Herbal teas are made from herbs and many can be grown in the garden. Lemon balm and mint are easy to grow and make a really refreshing cup of tea.

You can have cake

Cake takes on a whole new meaning.

6 months have passed since stepping into a supermarket for my foodshopping. In fact this week I reflected on the fact that I have lost touch with consumer mania of too many choices for supper, impulse food buying and being influenced by adverts.

The local shop has only 10 varieties of cereal ( heavens can we survive a choice of 10 against about 45 in the supermarket). We can have fresh seasonal vegetables and fruit delivered while we wait for the garden to take shape.

The ingredients have simplified and I am discovering that moving to a vegetarian diet may be a better possibility.I have talked about this in the past but had very little personal knowledge of where to start.

This week I visited a nutritionist and discovered the shocking truth that our diet here is based on a lot of wheat, corn, sugar and fats and that toxicity levels in the food available in shops is far too high to create a healthy environment for our bodies. Did you know that cucumbers carry a higher than normal aluminium level?

I am therefore cooking in unknown territory and the ingredients before me are not the usual ones I have been cooking with. The aim is to store some dry ingredients that hold more complex nutrients and minerals . These will not perish as fast as the usual foods, frozen or canned and will provide a good base food in the future. They will take longer to digest and longer to release their nutrients in the bloodstream. We should feel fuller, longer and less inclined to go for sugar fixes and bars of chocolate. ( I don't mind the latter one!)

Today, I made a cake with lots of seeds, no fats or eggs or sugar and surprisingly it worked and tasted quite good. Its consistency is that of bread pudding. I say quite good because my tastebuds were expecting something else. I felt like one of my sons who says' I do not like that' before trying it but even one of the boys had a bite from the cake and said it was quite good.

So what was in it :
Brown rice flour
whole wheat flour
rolled oats
linseeds
sunflower seeds
pumpkin seeds
sesame seeds
flaked almonds
ginger grated
raisins
cinnamon
ginger spice
rice milk

Not the usual cake ingredients of fat, sugar, flour and eggs, not dripping in sugar icing either. Best of all,we could have cake and eat it. Seeds are not just for birds.....

The elephant in the room

African elephant silhouetted at twilight

There is an expression in English which has always fascinated me ; the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. It is based on the idea that an elephant in a small room would be impossible to overlook.

Some of us do not really see the elephants in the room until we suddenly realise that we are sharing our space with one and then we can be overwhelmed.

Having done Latin at school, my teacher told me that to break down the large and long sentences that made no sense to me at all, I had to visualise eating an elephant. It might seem an impossible task but if you took it one bite at a time, you would manage it in the end.

Living in the moment enables us to rally our resources. Instead of projecting some disastrous future, ask yourself what you can do about it today. Break down difficulties into areas. Divided they seem less threatening, Observe the details of what is going wrong in each area, write it down over a period of a week to give you a picture of what is happening. Which tasks do you feel are slipping away? Which ones are most important? Highlight the areas that need action and then decide how to deal with it.

Tackling a problem can seem like a huge task but if you break it down in smaller parts, it becomes less daunting.
Calmly make a list of manageable steps and take it little steps at a time.

Blossoms

The snowpeas are finally showing through. I covered the seeds with holly leaves to stop any mice from eating the seeds and it also stopped cats walking on them. I am not sure how many snowpeas it will yield but the seeds were left over from last year. My vegetable production will be minimal this year as I am still doing the hard landscaping of the vegetable area. I do miss the polytunnel and the large scale growing of vegetables but the whole point of this experiment is to show you that it can be done with an average size garden.
The apple blossom is heavenly and I also wonder why there are not more weddings in apple orchards? The blossom will rain down like confetti in a few weeks but I find the colour stunning and full of promise. Sitting in the garden there is a buzz of insects as well as chirping from the birds, its quite a busy time for everyone. In the background, the church clock rings every hour. A nice place to sit still, be present and take in what is happening around us.

This is the view from our sitting room, above the garden there are many fields with rape seed. It gets full of pollen and a bit overpowering but at the same time, I am hopeful that insects will venture into the walled garden.

Rhubarb - the first seasonal fruit

Preparing Rhubarb


Rhubarb is an understated native fruit. It is the first fruit of the season and can be eaten as early as March when forced. Its tender red stems, are not everyone's favourite but I continue to experiment with its flavours.

It can be bitter but when cooked with a little orange juice, the taste seems to become sweet and silky. It is a miraculous plant and I planted 2 crowns this year in the garden. They do not yield anything this year but I have been asking around and there is plenty to be had for free. I planted the rhubarb crowns under the apple tree and the morello cherry tree. When the tree is bare in winter, the sun brings on the rhubarb nicely and when the rhubarb season is over, its leaves provide a leaf compost to feed the apple and cherry tree.

Rhubarb gets creatively changed into

Poached rhubarb with stem ginger ice cream

• Rhubarb Tart
• Rhubarb Syllabub
• Rhubarb and Grapefruit Marmalade.
• Rhubarb cake

Rhubarb is said to be the ancient Sanskrit remedy Soma, for courage, wisdom and longevity. It has purifying properties and can lift our energies after hibernation.

This plant will give us fruit every year in abundance and will require minimum attention over the years. It forms part of

the road less travelled

Travellers at a Crossroads in a Wooded Landscape


Today is a new day with no mistakes in it

Anne of Greengables

Dear reader,

Yesterday's post had an impact not least on our family. Having written down my thoughts and feelings about the reality as I perceive it, today is a new fresh day which enables us either to engage with the process of change or to switch off from it entirely.

The first step is to acknowledge that in this moment in time, this very moment, we are OK, we have all we need and want to a certain extent. That is unlikely to drastically change in the UK overnight. I believe that the UK is well placed as a green and pleasant land, to weather an increase in temperature by 2 degrees and at the same time, I realise that places on the globe that are already hot will find an increase in temperature challenging.

In the face of fear of the unknown, we can pack a small backpack which contains knowledge, skills and presence of mind to deal with whatever happens to come our way. It would be easy to get depressed about the whole situation or to simply ask yourself why you should bother if your alter ego at the other end of the globe cannot wait to buy the first car, travel the world and enjoy everything just as we have done. We all have choices and I guess what I am doing is making a voluntary choice here to simplify my needs and wants to what is an acceptable level. What is acceptable is also personal but to me it means living locally, shopping locally, creating a handmade life, more in tune with the natural rhytm of life.

Do I know a lot about it? No, its a journey of discovery but I know that many of the skills necessary to live such a life have been eroded from our generation. With it the joy of living has also disappeared to a certain extent and I am travelling on a parallel road.

I think the poem by Robert Frost (1874–1963) gives a good indication of the way I am heading.

Mountain Interval. 1920.

The Road Not Taken


TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.