2018 Harvest

Don't you just love harvest time?  Especially when it's olive harvest time.  Every year we have to cover the tree with netting because otherwise the birds eat the lot in a very short time.  I've no problem with wildlife having its share, but when they eat my olives before they're ripe, and I don't get any, then it's war!!

We bought this tree as a little sapling 15 years ago when we first moved here.  I remember being told "you'll never get fruit on that!", but I'm pleased to say they were wrong.  Each year my harvest is getting bigger.

This year I picked just over 3 kg of olives, which filled 21 small jars!

The most I've ever had previously was 12 jars, last year.  They take about 10 or 11 days to "cure" in a salt water solution that has to be changed daily, but the final result is definitely worth it.

Can't wait to start eating them.  Oh, and I did manage to leave one on the tree for the birds :-

A couple of days ago our neighbours harvested their pomegranates.  They can't normally eat them because they live in the UK and only come over here 5 or 6 times a year, so guess what they do with them?

And there was a slightly smaller box of damaged ones, which will be used for dyeing.  Pomegranates are full of tannin so don't need a mordant.  These will just be chopped up, boiled, strained and the dye liquor is ready!  The perfect fruit (above) will be squeezed and added to my morning fruit and vegetable juice for extra vitamins and nutrients, and the shell which is left can be used as a mordant for other dyes.  I may just dry them and keep them until I need some.

Now, I just need to find something to dye!!!

Pisolithus Arhizus

As soon as I found out what this mushroom was called, I should have thrown it on the compost.  What self-respecting dye mushroom has a name like that?  Well, exactly!  If it had been Pisolithus Tinctoria I might have had better results.

The offending article

Apparently, the young fruiting bodies of this mushroom are edible.  Would you put this anywhere near your mouth???  The inside was even worse :-

Anyway, I checked out my mushroom dye book "The Rainbow Beneath My Feet" and didn't find it.  The Pisolithus Tinctoria was in there though and apparently that gives a rich brown colour.  Can't be an awful lot different, I thought, can it - it's the same family? Well, yes, obviously it can, but I still had to give it a go.

The amount of colour that came out of this was quite amazing.  Really thick, dark brown with a reddish tinge.  Very promising.

I put some merino fleece (mordanted with alum/cream of tartar) in there and heated it for about an hour, keeping it just below a simmer in case too much heat affected the colour. This afternoon I took it out and rinsed it :-

Hhhmmmm, maybe a bit of ammonia would brighten it up slightly . . . no change.  Tried vinegar too . . . no change.  Now if you actually like bleihge you'd probably be quite pleased with this.  But having achieved this colour far too often, the novelty has worn off.

I actually very carefully mowed round this mushroom the other day while I was cutting the grass.  Next time, it's for the chop!

Who Said it was Spring?

This is what we woke up to on Tuesday.  That was Tuesday 19th March.  It's supposed to be spring - our local farmer told us, so it must be true.

Thankfully, normal service resumed yesterday (the 21st) :-

This is my almond tree, the one that was completely covered in snow just a few days ago.  The flowers seem to have survived OK though.

Today was HOT!  Maybe I won't be needing these after all :-

New socks, just finished

Merino Dyeing

This is the last of my lovely merino fleece which I bought last summer at Le Lot et La Laine wool festival up near Cahors.  It's been a beautiful fleece (from Maco Merinos), so soft and easy to spin.  Hopefully I'll get up to the festival again next year (they only run it every two years) to buy some more.

The first photo is the result of ALL the weld I had growing in the garden.  I harvested it a while ago but was not ready to dye with it, so I hung it in the greenhouse to dry.  I wonder if it would have given more colour if the plant had been fresh.

It's the first time I've dyed with weld (Reseda luteola), but probably not the last.  It's supposed to be one of the most light-fast of the yellow dyes, which can be rather fugitive (i.e. they fade in sunlight).

This next one turned out brighter than I'd thought it would.  The dye was made in the spring from some fresh, young, green bracken and then stored in a plastic bottle until I found time to dye with it.  It didn't seem to suffer at all, i.e. no traces of mould, so I put some more merino in a pan with the dye and heated it for about an hour.

At the same time as I made the green bracken dye, I also tried some of last year's old, brown bracken.  Think this one is a candidate for over-dyeing!  I won't bother with that again.

Not very impressive, eh?

Here it is next to the young bracken dyed merino just for comparison :-

Rather dull and dismal next to the other one.

I have some walnut hulls soaking in water at the moment, so may use that to overdye it, or maybe I could use the pomegranates a friend brought for me the other day.  Some of them are a bit damaged, and not really edible, so I could use those.

The last photo is an accumulation of dyeing projects this year, all using merino.  I really need to find the elusive green, or overdye some yellow with woad.  That's really the only colour missing.

Top row, from left : red dock seeds, lichen, young green bracken;
Middle row, from left : black beans, madder, apricot bark;
Bottom row, from left : weld, woad, blood peaches.

Now I just need to find a project to use all of these colours!

Peachy October

September is usually our month for peaches.  We only have one tree, but last year it was absolutely laden with peaches.  The peaches are "peche de vigne", or blood peaches, and ripen later than the usual white or yellow fleshed peaches.  Last year I bottled so many of them we still have a "bottled glut", so this year I thought I'd do something different with them.

They were a bit later this year, and there weren't quite as many, but still lots.  So far I've made peach jam (Queen of Jams) which stated in the recipe "crack open the peach stones with a hammer, remove the kernel, skin it, and put this in the jam". Have you ever tried to shell a peach kernel?  Well neither had I, and after hitting them as hard as I could at least 5 or 6 times, the first two or three exploded in a shower of shell and kernel, all over the garden.  After that I started to use my brain and realised there was "just the right place" to hammer it in order to get it to split cleanly.  Then I had to skin them!  The whole procedure took as long as it did to make the jam.  Anyway, I never intended to go on quite so long about a pot of jam!

The other thing I've been making is peach fruit leather.  This is very easy to make - basically, chop the peaches (removing the stones) and blitz them in the food processor with a tablespoon of honey, spread it in a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and put it in the oven on it's lowest temperature for 6-8 hours.  Yeah right!  After 6-8 hours mine was maybe half way through.  The idea is not to cook the peaches, but dry them.  If you have a dehydrator you can use that instead.  Anyway, it is delicious when finished, and a very healthy snack too.  The fruit leather will keep for quite a while in an airtight container.

As I still have about three large bowls of peaches in the fridge, I'm planning to make more fruit leather, more jam and maybe some peach chutney.

However, this was not the point of today's post.  The point is, the other day I was clearing underneath the tree as there were quite a lot of windfalls which were damaged by ants or just starting to rot.  I filled a bucket, walked across to the compost heap and stopped . . . what was I doing?  There's lots of colour in these peaches.  I must be able to extract some dye from them surely?  Having searched Ravelry and the internet to see if anyone else had dyed with peaches, I came up with absolutely nothing!  Apart from using the peach stones for dyeing.  The only option was to try it and see for myself.

That very day the whole lot was dumped into the dyepot and covered with water.  I heated it to boiling pot and then reduced to a simmer for about an hour.  After straining, I had what looked like a very nice pan of peach juice.  I didn't fancy using it for anything else though because there had been so many ants in there!

To cut a very long story short, I mordanted some merino fleece with alum and cream of tartar, and threw it in the dyepot.  This is what came out :-

It's a really rich colour.  But what colour?  What would you call this?  Eric says it's tan.
Tan is boring, it can't possibly be just tan.  It's got to be something more exotic - light chestnut, or auburn - I used to know someone who had hair this colour.  What do you think?

Now, I wonder what colour I'd get from figs . . .

From here to infinity . . .

. . . Tomatoes, that is :-

That's approx. 15 litres of chopped tomatoes on the right, and 10 litres of tomato pulp.

And they're still coming!

Pic(k) of the Day!

Now off to the kitchen!

Flowers and Worms

The weather is absolutely glorious at present.  The fruit trees are all in flower and there are blossoms springing up everywhere.  Yesterday (actually, it was the day before yesterday - I started this post on the 31st, but by the time I'd finished it, it was 10 minutes past midnight on the 1st) I went for a walk in the woods again and found all sorts of things in bloom, from little wood violets to may flowers to blackthorn and celandines, plus a few others I can't remember the names of.

How pretty are these?

And back at home, the buds on the mulberry tree have started to break.  There are going to be lots of flowers this year (and, therefore, fruit!), but, more importantly, the leaves have started to sprout too.  Which means I was able to take some of my silkworm eggs out of the fridge today.

I took just over 100 out, which leaves maybe 150-200 eggs still in the fridge.  So if I manage to kill them all off, it's not the end of the world.

I put these into a clear plastic box and then put that into a cardboard shoe box.  They've moved around a fair bit today - they started off in a shady spot in the greenhouse, but when that got too hot I brought them back to the patio table which is nice and shaded in the afternoon.  Then this evening they've gone into our bathroom on top of the water heater.  Fingers crossed that they all hatch . . . maybe I should put them in our mail box . . . that's where they hatched last year!

11.11.11

What a date - and, if I time it just right, this will be published at 11 a.m.

This post actually has absolutely nothing to do with the time, or date though.  Being a mushroom-oholic I'm always on the lookout for interesting specimens (edible or not), and yesterday, whilst driving to the nearest town on a back road, I suddenly spied a nice sized clump of mushrooms in a field.  I was pretty sure they were parasol mushrooms (edible) so had to stop for a look.  Unfortunately, the field was all fenced off - not sure if it was electric fencing, but the fence was there for a reason, not only to keep animals in, but probably also to keep us out!  Luckily there were three specimens at the side of the road (which didn't stay there very long - I love getting something for free!)

These two were tight round balls last night, so I put them in water hoping they'd open up today, and they do seem to be doing that.  The third mushroom wasn't photographed - we ate it.

Might just have to go back today to see if there are any more.  Mushroom omelette for lunch!

Flowers to enjoy . . . fruit to come

Wandered around the garden today and took some photos of the flowers in bloom at present, plus fruit for the future.

This is my lilac bush, covered with flowers.  Actually, it's two plants together, a white and a purple, but it looks like one bush.

The irises are all in flower too - but what a pity they don't last long.

These are last year's woad plants which will, hopefully, supply the seeds for next year's!









The fruit trees have all been covered in blossom this year.  The nectarine and peach now have lots of baby fruit, the cherries are just starting to form, the apple trees are showing great promise and the pear trees are going to be prolific too.
Oh, and did I mention figs?  The fig trees swamp us in fruit every year - far more than we can eat.  Unfortunately, the hornets like them too so it's always a bit of a battle who gets there first.

The almonds are a first this year.  Last year they had flowers, and a few fruit formed, but then they disappeared.  This year there are quite a lot, so fingers crossed.









 And finally, here are our future grapes.  Again, they usually produce far more than we can eat, but they do make good raisins if they're dried.  And anyway, who can have too many grapes?

The vegetable garden has barely started yet (apart from leeks, onions and garlic, planted in October), but the globe artichokes are putting on lots of growth so we should be enjoying those in about another month.