It has turned from reasonably cool to excessively warm and back to cool again in a week. Today has been warm in the sun. After finishing the arch replacement a well deserved ramble to take in the garden’s other pleasures.
Category: general
Having watched a program on solitary flower bees and having recent logs lying around, I thought we’d give making another bee intended log pile/ stumpery a try. I did manage to overheat a small drill with my usual gung-ho approach. First I had to remove all the suckers from the Hazel, then split some of the logs, then the drilling and piling
In 2015 I made an arch from pollarded Sycamore branches, to mark the begining of the main steps down the garden. I didn’t expect it to last long. A bit later I added a carved sycamore owl to it. The insects were boring holes in to it already.
2026 and high winds have finally brought the arch down. It has done good service for wood from our own garden.
At the same time my latest sculpture project is coming along nicely. Something to smile at till the arch returns. As it is a cherry tree that had to go, carving needs to be done in stages. It is very soft and prone to split at first in parts then dries out much harder. Time to leave it for a while longer and decide how much more work to do when it has dried out more.
Update:
The logs have evolved into a stumpery with loads of holes drilled for bees (and one overheated drill bit casualty) and a slightly less pretty but pretty practical arch has risen up. The roses that collapsed with the old arch will come back and soften its lines. The old wood turned from nuisance sycamore tree to insect friendly arch and will now be reduced to shorter lengths and continue as a wildlife friendly zone. The two wood pigeons in the tree behind the arch fooled me into thinking they were pheasants. Masters of disguise.
Categories
Post Party Positive
I’ve suffered from social anxiety all my life and usually feel sick before I go anywhere social. It troubles my illusional self image as a person who is cool and under control in most situations. Only age has allowed me to see that getting hyper when I was very young and the consequent drop the other way afterwards, has led me to adopt this mythical persona. Anyway, that is just background to the positive sides of a couple of social situations and the magic of the weird connections between us all.
I’m writing this because I enjoyed someone’s 60th Birthday party last night (thank you Sarah) and it made me think of another group that I chat to, who all met via looking after cycle paths for the National Cycle Path people. We have kept on chatting and meeting up long afterwards and have been on cycling and other holidays together. The chats make me smile and laugh.
Leaving them for a minute, the reason for the party last night is a social worker. One group of invitees were social workers who walk/cycle/holiday together. Of course there are partners as well, who often walk/cycle/holiday too. There was a crossover with badminton players and of course there were family and other friends. Most of us had probably come across each other at previous events. What struck me was the variety of different connections there were before that. It struck me as a positive in our fracturing times.
Before we had even got into the venue, we said hello to another set of arrivals of the social work/walk/cycle set. One of these is the sister of another member of that set, who I met with one of my own cycle path group on a ride from Morecambe to Bridlington. After saying hello, I ended up chatting to one of the others about their imminent month long cycle trip from St Malo to Nice before people started to organise us.
The party was a murder dinner occasion and I then ended up chatting to the organiser because of my own experience of writing/running/acting in them. We were put on a table with two old friends and a newer member of the walking/holidaying group and her partner. At some point I heard Barrow-in-Furness mentioned. It turned out that, from the age of seven, the newer walker had lived and been to school in Barrow. My dad was born in Barrow, as was my grandad who worked in the shipyard from age 12 to 70. This couple met when the other one was working for the shipyard as a technical illustrator. He was from the Wirral by the way. My cycling friend from the Morecambe/Bridlington went to school in Barrow too.
In the follow up to all this I found out that he had trained as an illustrator in Blackpool and in fact had digs on the same road as the first hotel/boarding house that my parents owned there at a similar time. He also made furniture, so we had that in common. As my other old table friend runs his own business mending organs and keyboards, we were in a very practical and technical focus group of our own.
My mixture of age and experience have made me more at ease on such occasions and got me into the habit of finding out people’s stories. I have also learned to open up about problems such as anxiety, without burdening people, and this has often allowed me to make connections to younger people. There were some there last night. We didn’t end up chatting much but we hugged and acknowledged each other because we’ve chatted about things before.
There were people there last night with family backgrounds in the Indian subcontinent, England, Scotland, Ireland (and the hybrid Northern Ireland), Wales, Poland and almost certainly a whole variety of other places. My new illustrator friend reminded us that people from the Wirral are often keen to stress that they are not Scousers (a Scandinavian derived term for people from Liverpool) and that got me thinking about connections rather than fractures. Some people at the party were born and bred in the same locale where they still live, where some have never lived anywhere where people didn’t think they were from elsewhere. Whether locally, nationally or around the world, plenty have moved around and made new connections. Groups there often didn’t know other groups and yet the chat was happy and varied.
Like with my cycle path friends, the key is looking for the connections rather than the divisions. Try to look for the positive experiences in your life to pass on and listen to other people’s stories too. I’ve managed to pick up stories from people all over the world and they have become part of my story to tell as well. I’ve never been a great fan of longevity but I look forward to the smile from creating my own new experiences and to sharing other people’s as well.
Thanks again Sarah and Dav
On Monday Ruth was clearing one of the longer vegetable beds (they are all actually mixed flower/veg beds). We’ve got into a habit of treating brassicas like Purple Sprouting and taking heads of, leaving the plant to do its own thing, unless we need the space. During the clearing it became clear that the cabbages had developed multiple little loose heads, the Autumn broccoli had developed nice little sprouts, some spinach had developed a few vaguely acceptable leaves and a little patch of beetroot that was too small to harvest hadn’t entirely given up the ghost. Ruth saved them and passed them over to me.
Ruth and I are both on the same side of one of life’s great divides – Beetroot. I have a policy of keeping on trying things until I find out what it is people like about it and after many years of failure I discovered that Beetroot with goats cheese, really worked, especially if the beetroot is roasted. We eat it regularly now.
With that is mind and what I had in the house I came up with the following vegan recipe, which went down very well.
Flavouring – 1 tsp Allspice, 2 tsp sumac, 2 tsp ginger 1 tsp cardamom powder added to 1.5 tbsp olive oil in a roasting tin at 180 degrees fan oven.
Vegetables – 1 medium red onion, 1 clove garlic, 1 carrot, 10 small beetroot, 2 punnets of brassica tops, tin of sweetcorn,
To add at the end – 1.5 tbsp nutritional yeast, 1 dsp vegan bouillon powder, 100 ml water.
Process – Clean and if necessary peel/scrape vegetables and cut into long pieces not to thick. Remove any hard stalks from the Brassica tops and clean up.
Starting with the beetroot and carrot, pre-cook the vegetables (other than onion, garlic and sweetcorn) in the microwave and add in turn to the hot roasting tin, putting the onion and garlic in after the beetroot has cooked crisped up a bit. When the leafy bits are starting almost to turn into crisps, add the sauce ingredients and the sweetcorn and return to the oven for around 5 minutes. You can turn the oven off at this point.
We ate it with toasted home made bread and there was a little bit left for lunch today.
No pretty pictures, but a fully enjoyed concoction.
In the roasting tin – 2 tbsp olive oil, desert spoon turmeric, tsp saffron, desert spoon mint, ground black pepper.
Winter vegetable mix – equivalent of two medium main crop potatoes (whatever type of potato is your favourite), medium size cauliflower, same of broccoli, 2 carrots.
I have a standard technique of putting the roasting tin in the oven, with oil etc., at around 225 degrees at the same time as giving the potatoes 5/6 minutes in the microwave at full power in a Pyrex container with lid then dropping them in the hot oil, turning over and returning to the oven. Each vegetable gets started off in the microwave in turn – Cauliflower 5 minutes, Broccoli and Carrot 4 minutes.
While the broccoli is in the microwave add half a red onion and 1 clove of garlic (both chopped) to the roasting pan and turn in.
While the vegetables finish browning nicely, mix 2 tsp bouillon, 1 desert spoon of nutritional yeast, 2 tsp soy sauce, 2 cup water. Add this to roast vegetable mix, turn over and brown off a bit more.
The aim is for each vegetable to be just cooked, nicely browned and gently soaked in the sauce.
