Although we already have an elderflower cordial recipe on our elder article it is one for making it in bulk. I decide that as I have just made a smaller batch of elderflower cordial, some elder flower champagne and our forum is buzzing with talk of elderflower wine it would be good to put up a few recipes here. Elderflower cordial – Elderflower Champagne – Elderflower wine For any problems with elderflower champagne please see Andy’s other site. Elderflower Cordial An easy to make drink that can be frozen in plastic bottles, leaving room for expansion, so it can be enjoyed all year round. It will keep for almost a…
Category: News
Hawthorn Ketchup recipe
During most of my autumn courses I either run through how to make hawthorn ketchup or I have some on hand to try (preferable both!). This year I thought I would at least get round to having the recipe up whilst they are in season . This makes a very red and very delicious ketchup which can be used in the same way as a tomato ketchup. Please note that those on any heart medication are advised not to eat haws/hawthorn berries. Ingredients Mixed haw berries (midland hawthorn and common) 500g haws 300ml vinegar – red wine, cider or malt 170g sugar spices to taste – coriander, cumin…
Green Manure
Soil is a very complex living thing. In just one gram there can be over a 1000 million organisms, most of them beneficial to the gardener. These organisms help weather rocks, releasing their mineral content for our plants and aid the breakdown of organic matter, in turn releasing further nutrients for our ever hungry crops. Recent studies have even suggested that some soil borne microorganisms may be more effective than antidepressants in boosting the mood of the gardener. Most of these organisms live in just the top few centimetres of the soil, so leaving the ground exposed to the elements can mean they will be leached away, along …
Preserving Cherries Andy and (mostly) Dave Hamilton
Town planners of 20th century often included cherry trees in their planting schemes as they loved the blossom. The fruit was something of an afterthought, but not for us foragers. It has meant that added to the list of usual places to hunt for cherries you should include housing estates and parks. You will more often than not find the bitter bird cherry. but on some occasions you can strike the jackpot and find some deliciously plump variety that will rival anything you can buy in the shop. During June/July we are well into fruit season and the most opportunistic amongst us will not have to buy any fruit again until there is snow on the ground. This is a time when fruit is …
Sumac – Dave Hamilton
Stag Horn Sumac – Rhus typhina The Forager’s Lemon Staghorn Sumac makes a tasty lemonade. The small furry drupes form a larger structure called a panicle – picture by Dave Hamilton Sumac is one of those plants you may have seen a thousand times but never really realised it had an edible use. It’s not a truly wild plant in the UK but it does readily escape from gardens as it sends up suckers when the roots are disturbed. In this way trees can ‘escape’ from gardens over long periods of time and become ‘wild’. The sumac leaves are high in tannin and were traditionally they were used in the…
Group Foraging Days
Family Foraging Courses/Group Foraging Courses Don’t see a course in your area? Want an unique Christmas present? Think you could get between a group of 2 to 14 people together who would like to go on a wild food walk? Then email Dave (dave (at) selfsufficientish.com) with a list of preferred dates and locations, if you find one mutually agreeable click on the button below to book and pay for the course. Only £300 a day You will be sent a personalised card with a personalised voucher (or emailed if it is needed urgently). Suitable for landmark birthdays (30, 40, 50 60), Hen or Stag Days, Anniversary’s or work away days. The day will…
Just a catch-up
… and, I’m back… Sorry for the absence, I know it’s been awhile. Sometimes building this mad lifestyle just takes everything I’ve got. It’s not even how busy it gets, which it does, it gets crazy busy, but it’s all the rest of it, the struggling to keep my profile high enough so things happen. That’s the key, if you were interested, in how to write for a living, keep your profile high enough so things happen. And while I’m doing that, I’ve become more self sufficient than I ever was before. That’s good. At least it feels good. I’ve found some really fun self sufficient things lately that I’ll share with you in the next few weeks. Fun things, and a lot of…
Pitching to Simon & Schuster
Well, it’s certainly been an interesting week. I went to London, and not just any old part of London, but the offices of the publisher Simon & Schuster.My publisher, Watkins Publishing, invited me up to present my book to the Simon & Schuster sales team.The book, Pigs in Clover, is now written, accepted, edited, proofed and ready to go – though publication date is not until June 2012. I have been to the offices of Watkins publishing before, but that was way back when they very first took me on, and they didn’t really know me, so i was ushered from the street through the front door and shoved into the first empty office they could find, which happened to be the …
Day one of a new enclosure
This is day one (actually, hour one) of pigs having been moved into a new enclosure in the woods. Check out the New Girl – she’s the very pretty kune-kune (who doesn’t like a woman with tusks?).The enclosure is more than 3,000 square metres in size, and is utter luxury for pigs, bless ’em!I need to thank the Environment Agency for their help, advice, support and for supplying the fencing materials that made this new area possible – it’s the first of four new areas in the woods. If you have read bad things about the Environment Agency, rethink your ideas, and if you need advice and support, contact them. …
The fastest, easiest loaf of bread in the world
We’ve all been there: a friend phones you up and says, “come round, I’ll put the kettle on,” or “I’ll open a bottle of wine…” and we quite happily trundle round, BUT, if that same person said, “come round, I’ve just put a homemade loaf of bread in the oven,” we’d be on out toes and running round there faster than you can say, “I’ll bring the marmite!”Making bread is simple.This is the stripped down, self sufficient way to make a great tasting (and smelling) loaf of bread.Time:20 minutes work1 hour to prove20 minutes bakingIngredients:400mls warm water650g bread …
Homemade chocolate easter eggs
How great is it to make a homemade Easter egg? And they’re so easy! Okay, you might get yourself and the kitchen covered in chocolate, but as Shep said today on their Shep and Jo show (if you haven’t heard the Shep and Jo show on BBC Radio Devon, where have you been…!?), when they very kindly allowed me on again this afternoon, you are just going to have to lick it all off!Right, eyes down for homemade Easter eggs…This is how to make an Easter egg using the shell of a real egg as the mold.So, first you need an egg. You can get eggs in all different colours…
London Suits to Welly Boots
I’m doing a talk!Ilfracombe library, Saturday 14th at 2.00pm. There will tea, coffee and homemade cake, and me talking about stumbling from London life into Devon self sufficiency, hooligan pigs and rogue chickens. It’ll be lively, spiky and full of fun.For tickets call 01271 862 388.Please come or it’ll just be me!
Free Deer Meat
We went to town this morning to pick up a few things and just as we got back the phone rang and it was my brother, Rob. He said, ” Ah…what are you doing today?” My brother doesn’t call to just chit-chat so I knew he needed something and I said, “Nothing.” And we really didn’t have plans to do anything special anyway. He said he had a deer and wanted to know could he bring it out to skin and cut up. So I said sure. After all, we’re getting pretty good at it. Why not? So he brought the deer out.It had been given to him by some of his first wife’s family. It …
Harvest Monday- Lemonade
My lemons, of course, were last weeks harvest but I hadn’t done anything with them until this morning. I was so anxious to pick them but then couldn’t bring myself to cut into one. I did pick them up almost every day just to smell them though and make sure they were still nice and firm. I meant to make my lemonade this weekend but the apple jelly happened instead so this morning I decided not to put it off any longer and I dug out the little hand juicer. Six little Meyer lemons do not make much juice, though they do have lots of seeds. Yes, this was all the juice from all six of them. I just added water and sugar. A…
Venison Heart and Liver with Mushrooms Meal
You were expecting cookies or candies, I suppose…. well, we did make cookies and cherry pie but this post is about what I made for supper. The deer meat sitting in the cooler can’t sit there for more than a couple of days and room in the freezer is..questionable so some of it had to be used and I was curious about the heart and liver. Phil normally is more of a fan of liver than I am but I do like heart meat. I did a little investigating online and then came up with this: Take the heart and clean it out really …
A Violin
Today was all about deer meat here but since I mentioned the violin on facebook, I will save the deer meat post for tomorrow. I should have some finished jerky to photograph but then anyway. When I was a child in 4th grade, for one year, I took violin lessons in school. Our school had their own violins and trumpets so my brother and I were able to play without having to buy an instrument (he played trumpet). I can’t say that I was all that good at it. I never did understand how to read notes. Our teacher must have explained it to us but all I remember is…
Ham
I just wanted to show off our Christmas ham. I wish I could send out samples so you all could taste how perfect it was. Normally my hams are a little dry but this one was wonderful. It cured for about 3 weeks and was in the smoker on 250 for about 6 hours. It was a pretty big ham and we were pleased that it was done so quickly. The rest of the meal was great too though we cooked way too much as usual. Hope you all had as nice a Christmas as we had!
Deer Burger and Jerky
The other day, as you who read the last post know, I made deer burger and jerky. Originally I had thought to keep the deer leg whole but I just don’t have enough room in the freezer. My brother posted a Youtube video on facebook about adding bacon to your ground deer meat to make burger and I have plenty of bacon so decided to do it that way. I got all the white skin off of it and it ground up really nice and easily. Every now and then I would throw in a hunk of bacon and keep grinding (the …
Life At Hunters Lodge..
The plan was to record a piece about keeping chickens when the Ear To The Ground crew arrived here in late summer. But this very quickly turned into a feature on living the Good Life when the programme director, Paula Williams took a stroll through the garden. ;Never mind chickens, eggs, pigs and bees, I think the thing that impressed Paula most was the size of our onions! ;I’ve great hopes that she will harvest a crop like this herself next year.After a night of relentless rain I feared that the only filming that would take place would be at the kitchen table. ;I was worrying unnecessarily – by 9am the skies had …
A Cuppa Cake
Ellie celebrated her 15th birthday recently, and let me tell you that Ellie really likes her birthday cake. She’s a great little cake baker herself so no pressure for me then! Last year she was mightily impressed with the Avoca chocolate cake I made for her. It was truly the chocolate cake of all chocolate cakes. ;So how do you top that? I contemplated making Babaduck’s Rainbow Cake but time was against me so I came up with a genius plan..Recently my cousin Orla Henry launched A Cuppa Cake, a home bakery specializing in hand-crafted cupcakes. The timing was perfect – an ideal opportunity …
Thinking about 2013
“You have the life we aspire to”. Nowadays I hear that more and more from people who want to get back to basics, grow their own food and in some small way, get closer to nature. And they can. ;It won’t happen overnight, but taking one step at a time, there’s no reason why they can’t grow some of their own food in 2013.Now is actually a good time to think about growing some food next year. Over the Christmas holidays start thinking about what you might like to grow in 2013. How much space do you have? How much time have you got to spare? And most importantly, what do you like to eat? Herbs on your windowsill, potato bags, soft fruit bushes …
A Spring Photoshoot – In December
The forecast was for cold winds and blustery showers, and that’s exactly what we got for our Irish Country Magazine photoshoot today. It’s December. It really is to be expected isn’t it? And it could have been worse – imagine trying to do a photoshoot for next Spring with four inches of snow on the ground! So we got a little wet, but we have some great shots to show for it.My three girls were up bright and early this morning to help me get my props ready and then we set off for Old McDonalds Farm & Feed Store in Carlow. The proprietor, Leo Connolly, very kindly allowed us …
Twas The Night Before Christmas
Twas the night before Christmas and I baked the ham. ;And glazed it with honey produced in the garden..It’s early Christmas morning and the smell of turkey roasting in the oven is beginning to fill the house. ;The sleepy children of Hunters Lodge are beginning to stir, so it’s time to see if Santa visited last night.Food and family – I couldn’t be happier.Happy Christmas xx
Looking Back And Leaping Forward!
“So much to be thankful for and so much to look forward to” ;2012 has been just lovely. We have enjoyed good health and a wealth of homegrown food which we happily shared with family and friends throughout the year. That in itself would have been more than enough for me. But thanks to my humble blog, 2012 also bestowed some great opportunities and accolades upon me. The year started with a visit from RTECountrywide’s Damien O’Reilly and when he aired his piece on Hunters Lodge on his Saturday morning show, I thought my website would dissolve such were the hits it received – and …
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A Good Survival Knife: Top Things To Consider
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100{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} Food Self-sufficiency, part III – Using polycultures
I am planning 7 patches for experimental polycultures for next summer. It is heavily focused in cereals and pulses, because it is aimed towards plant self-sufficiency.Each patch has around 30m2 (about 320 square feet, 18 feet per 18 feet), to provide what I calculated to be the enough of my yearly seeds. Even if it is not enough, this is just a first trial.This is also aimed at a great diversity of annuals. So these are 7 patches, during summer season: Patch 1: the 3 sisters: corn, runner beans, pumpkin (perhaps amaranth and sunflowers) Patch 2: modified 3 sisters (requires less water): sorghum, cowpeas, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, chia Patch 3: similar to last but different species: millet, peanuts, mung beans, sesame Patch 4: the rice patch …
100{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} Food Self-sufficiency, part II – how much area is required?
This thread was the result of a long work. Of course it is my personal perspective and estimate. Depending on what you eat, you might end up with different numbers. REQUIRED KG OF FOOD FOR 100{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} SELF-SUFFICIENCY I calculated myself to eat (these kg of food per year): 45 kg of cereal GRAINS: 15 kg of pasta (wheat flour), 15 kg of bread (made with wheat/rye), 15 kg of breakfast cereals (oats or rye porridge); based in eating one portion of 50g pasta per day, one portion of 40g breakfast cereals, and one piece of bread (35g), per day 20 kg POTATOES (two portions of week, each with 4 tubers) – but if you eat them daily, then…