Hangover Cure

I was chatting with my Uncle Roger the other day about hangovers. I didn’t have one and I presume that neither did he but he had written a very amusing article about the perfect Hangover Cure and how there is actually no such thing. Since then I have done some research.

Last night Dave came home with a few half full bottles of wine left over from a wine tasting at Hove Tin Drum earlier in the day. Obviously, it’s quite important that I give a second opinion on certain matters so I gave the wine tasting my full attention – and, well, they all seemed rather lovely to me in the end…but that was last night.

Getting up this morning was a very nasty business. I crept downstairs for water expecting a few more hours sleep to discover that the morning had already set in: the sky was aluminium grey and a bullying wind pummelled the house. Dozens of black birds were being tossed about in the air; up and down they went as if on an invisible roller coaster. I wanted to be one of them, frolicking in the gale rather than wondering whether I was about to die.

There was no question of going back to bed and calling the day off: children had to be chivvied to school and we had people booked in to come and help outside, although I did think – as I watched the majestic oaks bowing under the force of the gale – that a nice mug of cocoa, a fire and a good book might be more sensible. I was just working out how to put this brainwave to Dave when he came into the kitchen with an agenda: it was far too wet to plant broad beans and garlic so Charlotte and I were to clear out the greenhouse, and move pigs again, whilst chef Matt – out from Hove for the day – would help Dave with more manly stuff.

The pigs have to be moved to fresh ground every week at the moment because in wet weather they can turn a vegetable patch into a swamp in a couple of days. Still, we have evolved a very efficient procedure for moving them. Pigs have the intelligence of a three year old child, apparently, and they do seem to know exactly what is going on and how they are supposed to behave. We have a holding pen in one corner of the field which is quite a walk from where the pigs now live. To move them, we wait until they are hungry and then I lead them with a bucket of food. It is all very straight forward and they follow obediently behind while I chat to them in a soothing way to keep them focused on me and the little walk that could go so horribly wrong if they had a mind to take a diversion.

The walk to the holding pen went without a hitch and we all blithely chatted about how easy this pig moving routine has become. Charlotte and I then grappled with the electric fencing string in the gale but eventually set the pigs up with a nice L-shaped floor plan bordered tantalizingly by parsley, celeriac and chard. It was then time to move the pig ark which is best done with four strong people and a lift from the tractor loader (although last week a frisky gust  lifted the ark out of the mud, flung it in the air, twisted it around a bit and dropped it back down in a crumpled heap narrowly missing the pigs). Just as we needed an extra pair of hands Sam arrived in the field still dazed and blinking from youthful slumber. Sam is related to Mary Poppins. He blew in to Starnash one night on an east wind and here he still is  - tending, mending and lending a hand wherever the need arises.

We set up the pig ark in its new location and then off we went to bring the pigs to their new home before lunch. Sam came with me and I gave him their bucket of food and opened the gate of the holding pen. I remember the words, ‘Just keep in front of them…’  drifting off on a breeze as three hungry pigs crashed through the gate, bypassed Sam, and broke into a combined 30 stone gallop heading straight for Dave. Seeing this tricky situation hurtling towards him, Dave did what any self-respecting bar owner would do and leapt into an assertive star shape. I don’t think the pigs noticed. Into the vegetable plot they thundered and by this time I had the food bucket and was trying to run ahead with the shrill cry of, ‘Piggies…Piggies!’ which  means ‘Food…food!’ But hey, why eat pig nuts when there is a kitchen garden spread out before you? And, come to think of it, why confine yourselves to a kitchen garden when there’s the world outside? So that is where they headed: one for the orchard and the fields that lead to the Cuckmere River, one for the main road via some ponds, and one to the next door neighbours house.

Golden rule: never chase a running pig – they think it’s really funny. And they’re nippier on those little trotters than ever you would believe. So, we all chased the pigs. All around the field they darted, round and round the house, through the back yard, flummoxing the chickens, and off to the orchard where the whole escapade was suddenly arrested by a glut of windfall apples. After about half an hour of running round we had all three in the orchard.  We filled the bucket with apples and acorns and offered it to Big Sow. Big Sow was pleased. A couple of grunts from her and the other girls fell into line and off I ran, leading them with the gentle call of,  ‘Piggies…piggies!’ through the garden, up a wooden plank, past the greenhouse and the huts, and into their new quarters where they settled down to a nice pile of pig nuts. On went the electric fence and we all heaved a small sigh of relief, and then I realized that not only was I feeling relieved, but that all signs of a hangover had completely disappeared and that I wasn’t going to die after all.

The Pig Run

November is a stroppy month. It comes flouncing in with its winds lashing, throwing fitful rain storms at us,  and then all of a sudden it is over and out comes the sun sparkling off the slippery mud as if nothing of the sort had happened. Things are beginning to look  pared back but not clean and bare as in mid-winter. There is a scruffiness about this time of year. I open our back door to the yard and there are the hens in a huddle on the door mat, looking dismayed, their feathers bedraggled by rain. Overhead fly the ducks in formation, their feathers oily and sleek, quacking mirthfully. My urge is to light a fire and snuggle up indoors and I am tempted to think that it is all over now until the spring but when I step outside there is still such a choice to be had. It is a time of year when there is no longer a confusion of produce, so we have to think more creatively about how to use what is out there.

 Here are the Tin Drum Land Army – Mark, Harvey, Magnus and Abbie - clearing the kitchen garden for no more than the price of a Guinness and some cheesy chips down at the Local. The bean poles are now down, the courgette plants are on the compost heap, the ruby spinach and salad rocket have gone to seed.

One day last week when the sky was white and the air was dry, Charlotte and I gathered seeds and laid them out to dry in the sheds. Seed gathering is an  intimate procedure and one of ultimate satisfaction - remembering the moment the initial seed was planted, thinking of all the food that has been consumed from a single plant and then saving for next year dozens of seeds borne of that first one .

Thistles and nettles have now taken over where once there were lettuces, broad beans and potatoes. At first sight it looks uninspiring and yet you walk around and look a little closer and there, right at our feet, are still box loads of vegetables. I set the children onto the field, hunting down Paris Market and Rainbow carrots, golden beetroot and rubine sprouts. Hidden away under giant dock leaves each find became a treasure. And growing in the field we still have our rainbow chard, spinach, Brussels sprouts, celeriac and more. Then there are the winter hardy herbs – parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and bay. And medlar fruit now perfect for harvesting and bletting.

 

Early one morning last week I was drinking tea and looking out of the bedroom window while my bath was running. It was too early for thought, let alone running round a field in my pyjamas chasing a tractor with a trailer load of steaming manure. And yet that was how that day started, and every subsequent day for the rest of the week the same thing happened – a local farmer…'friend of So’n’so down the road – heard you wanted some muck’…would clatter up the drive unannounced and tip a few tonnes out onto our muck pile.

We now have thirty tonnes of the best manure from local farms; it ranges is colour from black to sepia and knowing what it is going to do to our soil and next years crops, it is really quite a beautiful sight to behold.  After a fortifying pint at the Plough Inn, the Tin Drum team set to work on the muck pile, laying it out thickly on the field…oh how they worked – and look who got to sit in the tractor!

November is a time to think about meat. Traditionally a pig  would be ready for slaughter at this time of year so that hams could be salted and preserved in time for Christmas and the winter.  It is also when we eat wild meat – pheasant, pigeon, rabbit and venison - that has reached maturity naturally. Sometimes, when I am cooking supper, the local game man turns up at the door with his catch of the day. We don’t order specifically from him, we just see what he’s got and then it goes onto the Tin Drum specials menu.

We have three Gloucester Spot-Middle White cross pigs at the moment. They have been working on a rhubarb patch for us for the last month or so, but we decided it was time to move them to fresh land and put them to work digging up the vegetable plot for us whilst rooting around for all the goodies we have missed. The pigs are a fair size and quite feisty now. Pigs are not slow and cumbersome, on the contrary, they are nippy movers and will knock anything out of the way in the pursuit of food. Our three acres isn’t stock fenced off from neighbouring properties and to a ‘Tamworth Two’ escape while we ran them the distance between their old home and the kitchen garden we had men, women and children on hand with boards to guide them should they stray. That was the plan, anyhow, but the great thing about pigs is their love of food and in the end a bucket of pig nuts was as good as any lead and they trotted along obligingly into their new quarters.

Small Things

Autumn came very suddenly one day about two weeks ago. It wasn’t a gradual process - noticing that the leaves are beginning to fade and turn or that there is a slight nip in the air. No, it was the light; it was as if someone had popped a golden filter over the sun and angled it down in the sky. Blimey! I thought, This is It…End of Summer. And as I thought that thought a flurry of copper leaves fell at my feet and whirled about in an obligingly spooky spiral as if dancing to my thoughts. The wind picked up then, in an instant, ruffling the hens’ feathers and chasing them off squawking in a panic stricken queue, heading for nowhere in particular. The clothes on the washing line billowed and danced like crazy folk and the cats jumped out of trees to avoid a sudden avalanche of prickly sweet chestnuts. And then there were squirrels – four or five - rushing hither and thither, gathering nuts as fast as they could, calling to each other with their strange monkey cries as they ran the electricity cable tightrope up to our loft with their haul. All of this I just stood and watched as if I had nothing better to do and then it dawned on me that I should be doing the same – preparing for battening down the hatches against winter when it comes.

I love this time of year with its whiff of change. Sunny days in September and October feel like a stolen treat. But there is no time to waste and we are constantly multi-tasking. There is the harvesting to be done still – blackberries before the last day of September when the devil spits on them and turns them bitter! (Yes, apparently so!) Then there are the haws and the hips to gather – all to make hedgerow jelly which will find its way onto the the Tin Drum menus. Yesterday Charlotte and I picked bucket loads of wild damsons. Charlotte now works for the Tin Drum – she is our Land Girl, with twigs in her hair from clambering up trees and striding intrepidly through brambles in her flip-flops at the sight of a mass of inaccessible sloes.

When we moved to the smallholding we had just a house in a field. No outbuildings, except one small brick shed in the back yard which was immediately requisitioned for the the dark art of turning the Tin Drums’ spent cooking oil into bio-diesel. Freddie, the bio-diesel machine, lives in there gulping and gurgling as the alchemy is performed.

On a smallholding you accumulate Stuff. You can’t do anything without equipment; tractors, ride-on mowers, strimmers and chainsaws. We pick up antique tools from farm sales – we don’t know the names for these implements and you can’t buy them in garden centres or hardware stores, but they’re invaluable to us and they need places to  live. So every now and then we hitch up the trailer and drive for miles to collect someone’s unwanted shed. Now we have a row of them, like beach huts. Sheds are wonderful things when everything has a place – and I am imposing a satisfying order to them with tools hanging from nails on bits of found wood. Nothing goes to waste.

Back in March we took our first pigs to slaughter. We had fine cuts of pork and learnt to make sausages and salam i and hams. Five legs have been salt cured and air dried and are just about ready to go on to the Tin Drum menus later this month. We now have three more piglets eating acorns in the field and they should be ready by Christmas although we are thinking of keeping one of the sows for breeding but this will mean restoring the old pig shed near the house.

  Our cat, Dixie, had kittens a week ago – three of them that fit altogether into the palm of my hand. She always has her kittens in a wardrobe and after a week she likes to move them under a pillow on someone’s bed. For about six weeks she moves them every few days into the most peculiar places and then one morning they will join us for breakfast and that will be it; kittens tripping you up, kittens in your shoes and wellies and hats, until they leave us at nine weeks old. And then, to add to the piglets and kittens, Peggy the labrador puppy arrived – our guard dog! I can’t see it yet - she is somewhat smaller than a hen and seems to rather like the idea of being one of their flock.

The kitchen garden is beginning to look depleted, and in a way that’s quite exciting. It means that we can bed down the soil under a blanket of manure. I’m looking forward to watching the dark stillness of the land in winter,  knowing that unseen beneath the surface is seething industry as the worms do the work for us, turning the earth and manure into something wonderful and nutritious for next year’s food to grow on.

Dodgy plumming

Don’t for one minute think that living on a smallholding is like a Good Housekeeping gingham and roses article with a delicious homemade Victoria sponge always on the table. It’s not. It’s the aim, but the reality is that there is always something needing tending, mending, cleaning, picking and processing from dawn to dusk, 365 days a year.

We took a little holiday to Crete this year. We left the vegetables peacefully growing in the field, the tomatoes ripening in the greenhouse, the plums swelling in the orchard. It was the beginning of August.

Crete was beautiful, arid and hot. Only the hardiest plants showed any signs of life – silver leafed olive trees clinging to the red rocky mountain slopes, cacti, fragrant wild sage and splashes of magenta bougainvillea against white-washed walls. Nothing seemed to be actually growing, just waiting. The cicadas, hidden from sight, scritched loudly day and night, the Meltemi wind bowled down the mountains bending the eucalyptus and olive trees under its invisible wave. We lay in the sun reading books, we swam, we drank cold beer in cafes. It was delightful. I thought, ‘Could I live like this?’

When we landed back in England the sun was shining and the greenness was startling. We drove at 6am past grazing sheep and cattle, gardens garish with summer blooms in their prime. We wheeled our suitcases up the lavender lined path to the front door and thought it might be a nice idea to have a little snooze after 24 hours without sleep.  But then we thought we might just take a peep at the field and the greenhouse first with a cup of English tea in hand.

We had been warned about the blight while we were away by  friends who had come for a little family holiday in the country and had ended up tirelessly digging up and burning all our tomato plants (as well as coping with a spot of cat terrorism!). The warm damp weather had been perfect for the blight and it had taken out all our carefully nurtured tomatoes and potatoes.

In the field there was a riot. I wondered whether to sit down with my cup of tea and look at a thistle for five minutes to see if I could actually watch it growing. Forget time-release photography. The weeds swayed in the light morning breeze, robust and triumphant. Every species of weed under the sun seemed to have moved into our little plot. Where had they all come from? All around is pure pasture that wouldn’t even accept my gift of lovely wild flower seeds in the spring and yet on our veg plot the variety was astounding  and they had taken over every inch of ground completely hiding my carefully sown rows of spring onions, carrots and beetroot.

Of course, we started to pull out the odd weed, tea in hand, and one weed leads to the next and finally after about an hour of toiling we found a carrot top. So they were there, bless them…my babies! Meanwhile, just behind me, I was sure I could hear a faint creaking and rushing of sap as  the weeds gathered pace  - growing, growing - faster than I could pull their brethren out.

The Weeds fall into my tending category – an on-going job, but I’m delighted to say that my baby vegetables are soldiering bravely on with their growth and now stand like rows of well behaved children in orderly lines ignoring the mayhem around them.

Nature is fantastic. Living in the countryside, I am constantly amazed by the abundance all around us. Well, to be more honest, right now I’m overwhelmed by it. Nature’s abundance comes all at once. Everywhere you look are delicious edibles, perfect for just such a short time. In our orchard the plums were weighing down the branches and the wasps were licking their lips. It felt like a national emergency to get them all picked. Children were deployed up the trees and plums rained down. Marvellous! We breathed a sigh of relief at a job well done and hefted the brimming trugs inside. There they were, picked - all our plums, all needing processing or they would all end up on the compost heap!

Processing sounds very clinical, but  preserving  is a clinical procedure. You have to have just the right amount of sugar or vinegar or alcohol to keep the bugs away; specific temperatures have to be reached and maintained for a certain time and then of course there’s the sterilization of all the receptacles that are used in the process. It may be a sweet smelling process but it has been like a laboratory in the farm kitchen for a week or so now. I have de-stoned hundreds of plums, I have de-stringed hundreds of runner beans; courgettes and beetroot are piling up awaiting my attention and all around glossy blackberries and elderberries twinkle at me as I peg out the washing, just crying out to be picked and turned into jellies and chutneys and wine.

The jam jars and kilner jars are stacking up colourfully on every surface. We have eaten jam with everything…jam on lamb – not bad! But jam is sticky stuff and a lot of washing up needs to be done, which is fine if you have a tap. But there lies a problem: somehow our kitchen tap came off in my hand the other day. Water sprayed everywhere, soaking me and entertaining the children. I rammed it back into the hole where it remains wonkily emitting  just the faintest trickle when full on. So now I have to boil pans and kettles for the washing up, which, as you can imagine, just adds to the fun.

Seedy Thoughts

I am eating onion soup fresh as can be made from onions we picked from the field first thing this morning. It is delicious and particularly special as we did not actually plant any onions. What I thought I had planted so laboriously back in February were shallots...but hey! I was wrong. Ah, the joy of catapulting oneselves into a completely new way of life with little research other than watching a couple of episodes of the Good Life.

Back in the gloom of last winter I went online to the Garden Organic website and whiled away a morning choosing my seeds. Click...lettuce - Marvel of Four Seasons; click...lettuce - Bughatti and so on. A few days on, and, surprise, surprise, Postman Pat arrived bearing a box containing 103 packets of seeds and lots of shallot sets. So many packets to hide around the house whilst I worked out how to justify such a seedy frenzy. But there were just too many varieties to choose from - what was a girl supposed to do? I based my choices on nothing more scientific than their fancy names: my beans are regal -Purple Queens and Great Windsors, and the Marquess d'Auvigny peas have delusions of grandeur. I shopped by colour too...beetroot Golden Detroit, Rhubarb chard and Canary leaf beet; Rainbow and Yellowstone carrots; kohl rabi Azur Star. Oh, I could go on, but you get my gist.

There was a time when I might have just chucked the seeds all at once onto the ground and waited in vain for a bountiful harvest. But over the last few months we have been through The Learning Curve (more like a Learning Spike in our case). Books are helpful and magazines such as Grow Your Own and the Garden Organic magazine are useful too, but there is nothing that compares to being shown. Dave's Dad, John, was a market gardener for years and still has an allotment at the age of ninety. He has shown us how to set up irrigation using our own well-water, how to pinch out tomatoes and train them up strings in the greenhouse, how to plant each and every vegetable that we now grow in the field. He has told us when to worry about the state of a plant and get rid of it to make way for something else and when to just leave a young plant be and let it recover from a nippy breeze. We now know how to tweek off the tops of broad beans to prevent black-fly, when to cover the brassicas with fleece to keep off the cabbage white butterflies. We have dug by spade and fork and quickly learnt that we can't do this thing without a tractor. We know that it never stops out in the field and if you are not weeding you are sowing, and that if you sow everything at the same time, it ripens at the same time...yes, I know it seems obvious.

There have been moments over the year when we have thought that we'd never do it -that we had overstretched ourselves this time. But then you go out onto the field on a morning like this, sun just up, mugs of tea in hand - and there it is...abundance glinting beneath dew-spangled leaves. The children sat on the tractor, eating their toast and marmite, while we washed fat bulbs of purple French garlic, the 'shallots' that grew into onions, bunches of beetroot, violet kohl rabi, carrots - long, short, yellow, orange and purple, courgettes of all shapes and colours, tomatoes from the greenhouse. We packed boxes of produce and hefted them into the back of the landrover to be dropped off at the Tin Drums after the school run. And there it was - a good morning; the way it was meant to be.

From Field to Fork

10.00am: A gorgeous blustery day...the sort that makes you catch your breath with joy at being out in it. And better still, it is not obligatory (as it has been during the heatwave)...there is just enough of a chill in the air to be mildly off-putting and what clouds there are in the blue sky look heavy as if at any moment they would drop their load right over me. So, a perfect excuse to stay inside and turn on the computer. The rarest of treats.

Suddenly it seems there is going to be a storm; the wind has whipped up outside now but inside it is quiet except for the scamper of kittens. They are everywhere...five of them...all over my lap, my lap-top, in and out of guitars, wellies, the wood-burning stove. Dixy, their mother - not much more than a kitten herself - grew up fast and now sits on the window cill, watching them with a baleful eye, her tail flicking slowly. She spends hours berating them with her strange purring mother-meiow, hours suckling them, hours cleaning each and every one of them and hours shopping for them out in the field, coming home every day with a selection of baby animals for them to share under the kitchen table as we have our breakfast. Unpleasant, indeed, but if we take them away, the carnage is worse - she plunders the fields anew. She's a very diligent mother.

Outside in the bread oven is another maternity ward. Our hens went broody weeks ago and I had to start buying eggs from the supermarket again. There were dozens of eggs being sat on for weeks by all these grumpy hens. I didn't know what to do! I asked the Ladies of the Dicker for their pearls of wisdom because we went way over the twenty one days alloted to a fertile egg for hatching and yet when i inadvertently cracked the odd one, they were quite definately 'with chick'. So we bobbed the eggs up and down in bowls of warm water, discarded those that sank and popped floaters back under Black Betty (uber-mum). Ousted, all the other hens flounced off to take mud baths after so many weeks of pointless brooding. Then one day last week during my morning egg-fret I noticed a titchy beak tapping through the shell. Naturally, I nearly dropped the egg with excitement, but regained composure and ran all eggs and fast as I could to the safety of a disused bread oven we have outside and then rushed Black Betty to her new safe haven too in case Dixy decided to make a few menu changes. When the children got home from school, there it was - one tiny fluffy black chick - gorgeous! And eleven eggs still to hatch. So for the next few days we lifted Black Betty up-down, up-down, to perform chick check. But no chicks. We did the warm water test again and clearly some no longer had living chicks in them so we removed those eggs. Then Black Betty trod on one of the fertile eggs, and upon inspection it was definately not fertile, just very old with a rather antique pong. And so it was with the other eggs - all duffs and profoundly smelly. So we have just one chick. Louis announced our new arrival in the playground to one of the mothers who breeds chicks. She asked how many we had; 'Just the one,' he said, 'How many have you got?'

'Eighty thousand,' she replied.

2.00pm: Here is the storm; thunder cracking over the flat fields; rain like I have not seen for a long time, a waterfall cascading down the side of the house. Rain, then flashes of sunlight - the vegetables will love it. But our soil is dense clay out here - waterlogged at one end of the field in weather like this, rock hard after a few days of sun. The vegetable plot was pasture before this year but over winter the pigs dug it up neatly and fertilized it for us - wonderful creatures! We are planning how to improve the soil for next year and chatting up the local horsey folk in search of heaps of unwanted manure - we're going to need a lot.

This morning Dave was up early to take the Landrover round to the field for a lamb delivery from Tottingworth Farm; then out to see what could be harvested for the Tin Drums before getting Martha into school in Brighton on time. He took in herbs and garlic, beetroot (my favourite, especially the amazing golden ones which I am planting more of tomorrow), first ripening tomatoes, spring onions, kohl rabi (which have lovely blueish leaves and are interplanted with blue borage flowers - I didn't expect the vegetable plot to look so pretty), tender yellow French beans, and at this time of year, plenty of courgettes.

I must think about feeding the family now and like the cat go out into the field to see what I can find to put on our forks. All I can hear is distant thunder, the rain, a ticking clock, the cats purring...no tv, no cars, no sirens - time to log off.