AUTUMN-WINTER

Lord: it is time.  The summer was immense
Lay your shoulders on the sundials
And let loose the wind in the fields.
Bid the last fruits to be full,
Press them to ripeness and chase
The last sweetness into the heavy wine.

I pinned this bit of Rilke to the shepel wall in late Nov. with fresh raspberries still in my mouth.  I've never known them last as long.  It means that jobs that are usually consecutive and with a decent interval between: picking fruit, planting for future seasons, were carried out side by side.

I rotavated out 3 new rows for currants and extended the rows of the top plot raspberries.

I hire the rotavator once a year.  It makes a much better bed than the small plough I tried once, even if after a day of milling through Cotswold brash I feel like I've been working a pneumatic drill in thick concrete.

Austerity Britain has delivered the project a talented local wwoof-er!  Above Alice models a post planting glow on completing the extension to an existing raspberry row.  These canes have been transplanted from the lanes between the old rows where they were allowed to spring up.

Other autumn-winter jobs have been running repairs, here a hessian bandage for one of the newer trees in the eastern windbreak.

As much as I would have liked to spend more time in the field over the last couple of months, most of the action has been in the winery and the marketplace.

Ding Dong Merrily!  Finally a batch of a finished product, which is rapidly flying out of the cellar, through markets:

and shops:

Shoulder to shoulder with the big boys!

Meanwhile re. that wind loosed in the field, the matting I'd laid over the new currant rows didn't survive the early Dec. gales too well.

Still and mild days recently however have given opportunity for restoration and a bit more planting. 

Below replacing the white currants that didn't survive in the currant tricolore row, next to the shepel.

Christmas - Dickens - Child labour: 3 easy steps

And finally the shepel got a pair of pear trees for Crimbo

much ado..

and time passed since my last entry, testament to how busy things have been and how much has happened in between: the summer has gone and returned, all the blackcurrants have been harvested, the raspberries are thoroughly weeded in preparation for thier big ripening through late summer and early autumn, the shepel has been anointed with its first coat of wood preserver for the year, and recipe experiments in the winery continue late into the night, my thickening moonshine beard dripping with fruity booze.

The blackcurants were weeks early this year and the raspberries look like following suit.  A lot of fruit has set and increasing numbers are ripening.  I try to schedule a holiday between the end of the currants and beginning of the rasps but Mother Nature doesn't always respect my A/L entitlement.

I can't complain however when such miracles are wrought as the recovery of these raspberry transplants that looked so mis in May.

The other bonus is that there are not quite enough ripe ones yet to make me feel I should pick them commercially, so they must all be eaten!  Like the camel herder who drinks nothing but his animals' milk and claims superhuman strength from it, apart from my Oatabix in the morning I ate nothing but rasps the whole of yesterday, bedouin chanting down the lanes as I filled my mouth with them.

Remember the wild plum tree's blossom.

The Massey and me have also been a mowing -

CSI

or 'How I blow my load' (Apprentice Natasha 2011)

This is the raspberry blood aftermarth of my first 'racking off' - the transferring of the wine 'must' from one vessel to another using a pump which at the same time passes it through filter sheets.  The pump is the silver cylinder, the filter which holds six filter sheets is the other side of the gauge.  I racked off the wine before it was fully fermented out into a vessel in which a mix of neat alcohol and sugary water was waiting.  This blending is to get the wine up to liqueur strength.  My mind is full of recipes and formulas in thought bubbles over my head as I plot in the shepel - different proportions of raspberries, syrup (sugar + water) and neat alcohol.  How many grammes of sugar per litre is desirable?  What acidity?  What volume of liquid is created by what weight of sugar once it is dissolved?  (about 0.6 litres from 1kg of sugar FYI). 

The next step is to send it off for analysis to determine the exact alcohol strength and to do some fine tuning based on tasting.

Meanwhile in the field it's all kicking off.  The dry spring means that the first variety of blackcurrants (there are 5) have ripened prematurely, three weeks earlier than last year!

I chide them camply as I monitor their progress, 'oo you're a bit previous', but am concerned at not having the requisite picking power to cope.  I am grateful for Laetitia the new Wwoof-er charmante but a rate of 8kg a day in the bucket will not get the job done in time.

These bushes and the ones above are exactly the same variety of blackcurrant.  Extraordinary to see how differently they have grown in the different locations and with different mulch matting - one lot collapsing with good health; the others balding, skinny survivors.

Horticultural porn!  Howdya like them currants?

A Magritte still-life, to illustrate actual size of currant and to record progress of finger since fracture Friday. 

A storming recovery by the frost ravaged baby raspberries who featured so miserably last month!



May is the cruellest month

The raspberry runners that I parsimoniously transplanted from the lanes into the rows a few months ago were looking in fine fettle despite drought conditions until they were scorched by a late frost.  I hope they have enough going on beneath the surface to come again.

More recently wild winds have been the dominant force.  I cannot think  of any climatic condition less becoming to the field - a wrecking ball through its pastoral and interior qualities.  It's also meant that what little moisture the rain has donated has been swiftly eroded and the larger bushes and trees that are now in leaf have struggled to cope with wind speeds more typical of the winter months when their bare branches wisely offer less resistance.

The winery has provided sanctuary and with my warehouse approval promised to be imminent, I've started my first commercial size batch of wine.

I defrosted 40kg of raspberries from last years harvest..

 ..then scooped them into the hydro press.

The press is a rubber belly inside a perforated steel cylinder.  The fruit is put in between the belly and the cylinder and then the belly is slowly filled with water.

As the belly expands the fruit is pressed against the cylinder which also has a more finely perforated hessian sack placed within it.  The juice then flows out and is collected in buckets and then transferred to a fresh barrel.

The potter's wheel - the cake of squashed raspberry left after pressing.

To the juice is added organic Brazilian cane sugar diluted in water up to the neck of the 100 litre (hectolitre) plastic barrel.

24 hours after adding the yeast not much was happening but after a good stir, it was soon bubbling away.  In fact aping the chaotic conditions outside by frothing over the air lock, prompting some equally deranged cries of "Frying tonight!" from me as I manically took remedial action into the early hours of this morning.

The must now seems to have settled into a steady bubble.

  The cap is not at a deliberately jaunty angle, this is a work in progress! Without a moving image the slow and steady piston motion of the air lock lid as it rises and falls with the fermentation cannot be appreciated, but it is a rather soothing to contemplate and contrast with all the blustering going on outside.

Fracture Friday

Forgetting the parable of the tortoise and the hare I slammed my fingers in the big iron sliding door of the tractor shed as I rushed to get several jobs done before lunch.  About 20 minutes of primal wailing followed and a trip to Witney minor injuries unit, where it was revealed that I have broken the top of the ring finger on my right hand.  Typing this is a lot slower than usual as are many farm jobs.

Truth and reconciliation for victim and perpetrator!



The word 'fracture' has an onomatopoeic quality to my ear, something rather crunchy about it, though perhaps it summons more the cracking of a creme brulee than bone and blood!

Above an elder cutting that expired in the mini-drought.

The Easter weekend was indecently hot and I spent much of it like the hunchback in Jean De Florette straining my ears and eyes for signs of rain. Recently there has been more of a temperate chill in the air but still no waterworks.

Although we farmer/gardener types grumble about lack of rain, I suspect it is a happy sort of grumble as the rewards of nurturing our plants are much of what draws us to this work.  If our crops did not need us to care for them by watering, weeding etc, our relationship would be more distant.  We would not be called to know them in the way that we are.

The blackcurrants are already moving from flower to fruit and would be happy of some water to swell them.  So far I have concentrated on keeping the smaller cuttings alive but I may soon turn my attention to the larger plants.  In bush years the one above is in early adolescence.

Foul Play!  A teething hare or rabbit the most likely culprit.

The dandelions are as rampant as ever and most have now moved into their fertile clock phase.  Meanwhile the field's weed du jour is buttercup.

The dry weather meant that last year's raspberry canes, which I cut down at the beginning of the year and then rather embarrassingly failed to set ablaze in front of one of the wwoofers last month, went up like a flame thrower with only a single piece of lit paper stuffed into their heart.

 

Turned to a circle of ash in moments, quite a vanishing act!

ENTER THE DRAGON!



It's that time of year again, the field has become thick with dandelions, tough couch grass and deep rooting cow parsley.  If they are not to overrun the berries and currants I must reignite my seasonal love affair with the Massey and its topper attachment.  'Our survey says' second most photographed entity on this blog is likely to be my red reaper. 

I have a friend who used to be the librarian at the Scottish Agricultural college and she told me that one quiet afternoon she found a group of students staring lasciviously at one of the computer screens.  She expected to have to deliver a lecture about viewing 'adult' material on University property only to discover as she drew closer that the images being leered at were those of large farm machinery.  These days I get where they were coming from, though my ardour is directed towards a small engined compact tractor, which would probably be regarded as the equivalent of nursing half a shandy through an entire night out with the rugby club.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!

Before

After



Once I've mown down the lanes in between the rows, I come back again with the light infantry, strimmer or scythe, to reckon with the weeds that have grown too close to the mulch mat for me to get with the topper.  Bits of juicy dandelion and cow parsley stem spit in my eye as the strimmer rages.

The secret farmer - silhouette of a strimmer man in the shepel window.

The extraordinarily hot and dry weather has meant that the grass et al has not been too prolific in my absence but this also means that what I want to grow needs watering which is a laborious hose pipe process as I don't have a fancy irrigation system in place.  Strangely, given how freely they grow in the wild, the elder cuttings seem to be the first to perish in dry spells.

Nothing will kill these tough nuts though, whose charms I tend to be blind to as I spend much time trying to keep the fruit free of them.  These are far enough away to admire.  I have tried to make use of the flower heads by turning them into wine, but the results were v poor tbf (too be fair) - really quite bitter and needed a lot of disguising in cocktails in order to offload.

The sword and the harp

96% alcohol 100% legal

HENMANIA!!  Declan the local customs and excise officer has just told me I have the thumbs up to become a Trade Facility warehouse.  This means I can buy in the 96% proof organic spirit that I need to fortify the liqueurs 'in duty suspension'.  This is a big advantage business wise, not least because a 25 litre tub of spirit costs approx £880 duty paid but only £112 sans duty.  I still have to pay duty but only on my finished product rather than on the raw ingredients so anything I lose in the making process will be a lot less costly.

It has been an extremely long and muddled 'journey' getting to this point in which I have received contrary advice/instructions from different departments at national level, which people at local level have, in turn, contradicted.  Declan, however, has proved to be the acceptable face of the taxman, finding a way to apply the spirit of the law without getting eternally bogged down in the letter of it.

The final piece of the jigsaw is now in place and when I return from holiday I will begin fermenting my first commercial batch - a raspberry liqueur.

Not thrilled with this potential capsule for the blackcurrant - a tone too on the lurid side of Imperial.  What do you think?

In the field I've conducted the first mini-inventory of the season, with slightly disappointing results for the currant tricolore row.  50% of the blackcurrant cuttings are showing no signs of life, despite the blackcurrant cuttings in the next two rows being 100%.  Happily the red and white of the tricolore are faring better scoring 79% and 69% respectively.  I have back up for all of them in a separate cuttings bed which I can use to replace those who have fallen in the line of duty at the end of the growing season.

Must try harder!

These currant cuttings are not ready yet but I imagine it an important rite of passage for a young stem when a bird first deems them robust enough to perch on.  I was not quick enought to catch it but below witness an elder cutting that's recently 'been there'!

Meanwhile as the wild plum sheds its petals the blackthorn takes over as belle of the ball..

And finally a panorama from the high point in the field

The shepel featuring as a distant anchor.  I will return my dear!

Spring storms

The weather has been out of sorts the last couple of days - blustering, grey, some needed tears and the occasional ray of sunshine.

A Wwoof-er has arrived to help out for a week.  Morgane from France.

A bona fide beret, malheuresement no hooped shirt or necklace of onions!

The WWOOF network links farmers with people who want to volunteer on organic farms.  I did it on and off for a couple of years which helped me to decide what I wanted to do here and to a certain extent how to do it.  Most of the Wwoofers I've had however are more motivated by wanting to learn the language and by the chance to see a different part of the world.  Morgane attended an English language school in Wales, which explains why the conversation is not quite fluent!  But I have been very lucky with the volunteers who have come here so far this year who have been bons oeufs without exception.

In the wet weather yesterday I put Morgane in the winery to touch up the walls where the paint was flaking off.  I think this will need to be an annual job due to damp.  Non-peeling, easily washable walls was one of a long list of requirements laid down by the environmental 'elf team.  The less said about these the better if relations between me and West Ox District council are to remain cordial.

                                                             SATISFIED!?

Nodded off in the shepel this afternoon or "fell into the arms of Morpheus" as my grandmother had it.  It is her old armchair that I have in the shepel and the experience of some head lolling shut-eye while wedged between its stubby arms fully justifies her poetic description.

The shepel is watched over by a trio of silver birches

As you can see two of these are being seriously scaled by ivy - the sap sucking alien.

Before

I decide to completely clear a patch around both trunks.  I hope this will kill off the stuff that has climbed higher but am not convinced that it will.

After

The liberated bark has a rather beautiful snake skin print appearance.  "This is my birch bark jacket.  It's an expression of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom".  A bottle of liqueur to the follower who can place which cult early 90s film this is an adapted quote from...?

And finally..

a precocious primrose that has decided to seed itself next to one of the rows of autuman fruiting raspberries.  The cardboard is there as a weed suppresant (or mulch) and will also acidify the soil slightly when it rots down, which is good for the fruit as it prefers a pH of about 6 whereas the soil here is very alkali, around 8.