Our long weekend

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 26 April 2011 in chickens, DIY, growing, wild food, wood stuff | 8 comments

Cor, I feel like I’ve not written here for weeks! Like Christmas, Easter doesn’t mean anything to us here – not even the consumption of chocolate – so we’ve just had four days of doing nothing. Well, not doing nothing…

On Friday, I spent a lot of time reading about Square Foot Gardening. It’s something I’d heard vaguely about before and suspected I’d borrow it’s spacing principles when sowing/planting in my various wooden planters, but Friday was the first time I sat down and read about it. Then fully converted to the idea, I built a 3ftx3ft raised bed from our old bathroom cupboard doors (4ftx4ft is more typical but my doors were 6ft tall so 3ft-square was easier and also tucked away better into a space next to the pond).

I reused the former hinge screws to mark out every foot around the frame, so I could easily divide it into those magic foot square sections with twine. I haven’t decided exactly what I’ll plant in it yet but looking at the planting guidelines, my nine squares could be a rather productive space.

We did have a rather lazy day on Saturday – mostly reading in the sun – but Sunday was productive again: we painted the bathroom. I’m holding off talking about our bathroom renovation until its finished (two long months and counting) but I will say, it’s now rather blue.

It needs some more filling/sanding then a second coat, but it’s feels like it’s finally starting to come together. Hurrah.

Yesterday, we had the bathroom flooring fitted (hence the rush to paint at least one coat on the walls on a sunny Sunday) then went for a dog walk at Shipley Glen. When we came back, I pottered in the garden – chicken chores and potting on (the third batch of tomato plants, the two types of courgette, some lollo roso lettuces). I’ve decided that I’m not allowed to sow any more stuff until I’ve dealt with the stuff currently growing – stuff that needs pricking out or potting on – so I don’t get overwhelmed and leave things in too small pots for too long, as happened at some points last year. I can’t wait until stuff can be planted out in the garden en masse though – the greenhouse is just about full of seedlings and the sun porch is pretty packed too. It would also be useful to be able to start clearing space in the salad troughs/pots – grow faster lettuces, I want to eat you!

On the chicken front, Ginger is still broody – I’m kicking her out of the nest box whenever I go down there to make sure she gets food and water regularly, and I’m getting some harsh bwarking in return. I think I managed to talk Blacks out of following her though – she was acting a little hot & bothered for a couple of days but I cooled her down a bit and she’s back to normal and laying again now.

And while we were down near the chickens yesterday, John spotted what he called “the biggest mushrooms I’ve ever seen in my life” – a slight exaggeration maybe but they are pretty sizeable:

They’re on the tree trunk marking the division between our and our neighbour’s gardens and since we walk past there at least once a day, I’m pretty surprised how they got so big without us noticing. I think they’re Dryad’s Saddle (Polyporus squamosus) – edible but only really when they’re young. These guys are probably past it now but I’ll keep an eye out for future fruiting.

So our four-day-weekend was a decent combination of laziness and productivity, how was yours?

Mushroom hunting at Ogden Water, Halifax

Posted by louisa on Monday 1 November 2010 in wild food | 1 comment

Yesterday John, Lily-dog and I went on a long awaited funghi forage, led by Jesper Launder and organised by Slow Food West Yorkshire.

We went on another wild food walk with Jesper & SlowFoodWY in May – mostly tasting different greens and crayfish – and as our interest in wild food and mushrooms has sky rocketed since then, we were very much looking forward to yesterday’s walk. Unfortunately some local rapscallions nearly caused us to miss it at the last minute – on leaving the house to get into the car, we found someone had nicked one of the wheels! We were grateful, again, that we have a cheap runaround car that we don’t really care about – and that they’d left all the nuts etc, so we could fit the spare and get to the walk just half an hour late.

We met the group in the woods just over the dam at Ogden Water. We’d not been to the reservoir before but will return again – it was misty so unearthily beautiful – and the woods a combination of broadleaf and conifer tree, making the mushroom picking extensive and varied. The group had already picked a few different types of mushroom but between us we found many, many more as the walk went on.

As with the considerably warmer and dryer wild food walk earlier in the year, Jesper enthusiastically identified every ‘shroom we took over to him, and told us how to use them or cook them, or whether to discard them unless we wanted hallucinations and painful death. There were too many different types to remember but I did get confirmations on some that I had been unsure about – and got to try eating some I’d seen & identified previously but not wanted to cook up for fear of that painful death stuff.

Some of the ones we got to eat and I’d happily pick & eat again:

• The Deceiver (Laccaria Laccata) – something I’ve seen before but not concretely identified, small and unsubstantial but good in a mixture
• Amethyst Deceiver (Laccaria Amethystea) – something we’d found before and identified, because nothing else is quite so purple
• Honey Fungus (Armillaria Mellea) – we found a full stump of these just near the end of the walk
• Grisettes (Amanita Vaginata) – something not included in my little pocket mushroom book so not something I’d really heard of before, but a decent size so well worth looking out for
• Wood Blewit (Lepista Nuda)
• The Blusher (Amanita Rubescens)

I also got to ask questions I’d been wanting to ask since I started identifying mushrooms such as “is there anything so poisonous that we shouldn’t pick it up?” (no, even licking your fingers after a death cap is probably ok) and “how much do you need to eat of the poisonous ones before the painful death thing?” (depends on the mushroom, some it’s a lot but death caps can sometimes kill after just half a cap so it’s well worth being careful).

I also got a book recommendation from Jesper – Mushrooms by Roger Philips – which will hopefully be a useful definitive guide in comparison to my existing not great ones. If nothing else, I find it very useful to cross-referencing potentially identifications (the more pictures the better).

All in all, despite the wheel-stealing-stress and the rain, it was a great day. We met some lovely people, learned a lot about funghi and found a fab new place to take Lily-dog. I’d highly recommend a walk with Jesper and will definitely be going on the next SlowFoodWY wild food walk.

(Apologies for the lack of pictures – I forgot my camera in all the where’s-the-wheel-gone hoohah. I’m hoping someone else will post some freely licensed pictures soon!)

Spotted – foxes and fungi

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 5 October 2010 in wild food | 0 comments

On our lunchtime dog walk today, the dog ran through the beck into the meadow – the steep hill of grassland a short way from our house – and stopped.

From the ridge at the top of the slope, two burnt orange foxes were staring back down at her – they looked between her and me, then ran off into the woodland between the meadow and our house. I wish I’d had time to take a picture – John’s yet to see any foxes around here and also, the contrast between their fur and the green grass was extraordinary.

Lily *needed* to thoroughly smell where the foxes had been so while she was busy with her nose, I looked for mushrooms. There were a number of different tiny bell cap type mushrooms around in the grass – I think the bigger one (which is about 10mm in diameter) is a brown bell cap (Conocybe Tenera), and the darker one is possibly a hay cap (Panaeolus Foenisecii). Not sure about the little one – possibly a baby brown bell cap?

I also spotted one of the biggest mushrooms I’ve seen around here – a Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria) about 20cm in diameter. It had been knocked off its stalk and the gills were damaged – either by the heavy-heavy rain from the other day or by foxes wanting a trip.

Finally, I saw a couple of interesting bluey-grey mushrooms on the edge between the woodland and grassland. This one is pretty badly damaged so I brought it home to identify it – and I’m pretty sure it’s an Aniseed Funnel Cap (Clitocybe Odora) — the smell is really quite distinctive.

Mushroom spotting at The Chevin, Otley

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 17 August 2010 in wild food | 4 comments

As I mentioned in my quick round-up yesterday, we found loads of mushrooms while walking at the Chevin, Otley with Lily-dog at the weekend – lots of different types and lots of each type. Unfortunately we didn’t have our mushroom identifying books with us so I had to make do with taking photos of some of them and attempting the identification later. The identifying is the most important thing for me at the moment – there are too many inedible and poisonous ones for me to want to try eating them until I’m more confident in my knowledge.

I’ve made some stabs at identification here – anyone got any feedback or better suggestions?

FYI, all the mushrooms here were found in the grass, but in a tree lined area so not exactly open grassland or deep dark forest. I didn’t pay that much attention to the trees but it was a largely deciduous area rather than the planted pine woods around there.

Mushroom 1

This was the first big one we saw. A light orange sombrero-shaped top with pinkish white gills underneath.

A few days off

Posted by louisa on Monday 16 August 2010 in cooking, frugal, growing, wild food | 1 comment

I’ve just had a few days offline to clear my head a bit – I spent a lot of time reading, resting & DSing so it wasn’t as productive as four days off work usually is, but there are a few things to report:

Massive egg update
The supersized chicken egg we got on Monday has been repeated on a few days this week – not a scientific test but definitely more likely to happen after they’ve had a good portion of green treats the day before. We’ve had a couple of them and they’ve been double yolkers – which is a worry as it hints that there is something wrong with the fine lady’s reproductive system (even though they’re still young, I think they’re a bit too old for it to be a “really young and still learning” quirk). Will keep an eye on the situation.

Foraging & fruiting
Took Lily-dog for a long walk around Otley Chevin on Saturday – found the most wild mushrooms I’ve seen in one place but unfortunately didn’t have our identification books with us, doh! Took lots of pictures for post-hoc identification – means we can’t forage them but the identification part is the more important bit at this stage in our learning really.

We also found the dregs of some wild raspberries – so ripe it was hard to pick them because they’d fall off as soon as we went nearly them.

Speaking of which, the bramble bushes in the woods next to our house are just about ready to give up their first glut – John had some as a pre-breakfast snack while dogwalking this morning and declared them delicious. Have to go picking soon.