1. The Cake Cupboard

You know it’s tourist season when the Cake Cupboard is open for business again!

I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with “clean eating” or whatever the latest catchphrase is for caring about what you put into your body, but I bake almost all my own bread, biscuits and cakes, because I prefer it and so that I know what’s in them. I make an exception for Heather’s Rocky Road though – it is just so good!

I also love living in a place where people trust each other enough to rely on honesty boxes for payment.

2. Free jars!

We were in the hotel recently delivering oysters, and I spotted a few 2-litre glass jars of pickles sitting on a shelf. I asked the chef if I could have some of them when they were empty – they’re a great size for storing stuff in. He gave me an empty one that was hiding at the back of a shelf, and I’ll go back up some other time to see if there are any more available. You can never have too many jars!

(We had an exchange student from Austria staying with us at the time, and this prompted him to comment “You really like jars!” Yes. Yes I do.)

3. This Commute

Okay, it doesn’t all look like this! Most of my cycle to and from work is along the road, but there is a little section where I take a detour through the woods, rather than staying on the road. At this time of year and in this weather with the sun shining and the scent of the bluebells, it is just lovely.

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4. Natural Pest Control

The local Song Thrushes (Turdus philomelos) have been busy, and the back path in the garden is littered with broken snail shells. I love hearing the thunk! thunk! as they bash the shells open, while I’m working in the garden. It’s not quite so great at 4.30am on the path just underneath the bedroom window but hey, as long as my lettuces and cabbages don’t all get munched, I can’t complain too much!

5. Furry Sausages

Yes, you read that right! I’ve come across a good number of furry sausages recently, more technically known as the caterpillars of the Drinker moth (Euthrix potatoria). There have been a few hanging out in the polytunnel, and I stopped to escort one across the road while cycling home from work last week. The one pictured below has just moulted, and is approaching maximum sausage-ness. The caterpillars will pupate soon, and will emerge as equally furry, but less sausage-shaped, adult moths.

(Other furry sausages are available, such as the Oak Eggar (Lasiocampa quercus) and Fox Moth (Macrothylacia rubi), but the Drinkers are my personal favourites.)

I’d love you to tell me some of the little things that have made you happy recently. And here’s a bonus song for you too :-)

Have a great weekend!

Moth of the Week: Ruby Tiger (Phragmatobia fuliginosa)

Did you hear this moth mentioned in the song above? It’s a common species throughout Britain, being found in gardens, open woodland, moorland, sand dunes and meadows. The “ruby” part of the name comes from the red forewings, although the further north you go, the darker the moth is. There are two generations in the south and one in the north, and individuals can sometimes be seen flying on sunny days.

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

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This constant flowering is referred to in an old saying that goes something along the lines of “Kissing’s out of fashion when the gorse is out of flower”. On a similar theme, I remember hearing a story once about a young man who was being nagged by his mother to give up his wild ways, settle down and get married. He told her that he would get married when she could look out the kitchen window and not see any Gorse flowering on the hillside outside. The story doesn’t actually say, but I assume he never did get married!

Gorse flowers are an important source of nectar early in the year for insects, when there may not be many other options available. It’s also a foodplant for the caterpillars of one of my favourite butterflies, the Green Hairstreak (Callophrys rubi).

Because Gorse is so abundant around here there’s plenty for everyone, and I am always trying to think of ways to utilise it. There is just so much that I don’t think I could ever over-harvest it.

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There are three species of Gorse found in the UK: Common Gorse (Ulex europaeus), Western Gorse (Ulex gallii), and Dwarf Gorse (Ulex minor). They are all very similar and while I’m almost absolutely nearly positive that everything growing around here is Common Gorse, for the purposes of this article, I’m just going to use the general term “Gorse”.

All three species are evergreen, can reach 1-2m high (Dwarf Gorse is the smallest, as its name suggests), and are covered in dense green spines which can make picking the flowers a slightly painful experience if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing! It’s time-consuming, but I find the best way to avoid ending up feeling too much like a pincushion is to pick each flower individually: just grip the petals between your thumb and forefinger and pull them off the bush, leaving behind the tougher calyx.

One of the first – and easiest – things I like to do with Gorse each year is to make a loaf of Gorse Flower Bread. This is just my standard loaf of bread, but with a handful of freshly-picked flowers stirred in to the dough. Unfortunately none of the coconutty scent translates into the flavour, but the baked loaf has lovely flecks of bright sunshiney yellow. This has become a little way of celebrating the first spring sunshine in our household.

The petals can also be used as a garnish on various dishes. I like them sprinkled on salads or on the top of nettle soup. I recently made some very tasty cinnamon rolls that my son then decorated with various edible flowers he collected: Gorse, Calendula, Dog Violet, and Flowering Currant. They were almost too pretty to eat (almost, but not quite!).

I’ve mentioned the coconutty scent a couple of times, and this reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago. She’d been at some sort of outdoor training event, and some of the other participants were having a discussion about Gorse – or more specifically, how people would have described the scent of Gorse in the past, before they knew of coconut. I’m not sure what the outcome of their discussion was, but to me the answer seems really obvious: Gorse would have just smelled like Gorse, just like Mint smells of Mint. We don’t always need to have something else to compare things to! Maybe one day we’ll discover a new plant somewhere that smells of Mint and it will become so popular that we’ll start saying that Mint smells like... I dunno, “Flargenbargle” or whatever this new plant is called, but until then, Mint smells of Mint. If we didn’t know about coconuts then Gorse would just smell like Gorse.

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I was picking Gorse flowers on the path down to the beach with my son a week or two ago to make wine, and we spotted a couple of seven-spot ladybirds (Coccinella septempunctata). My son said, “This is a good year for ladybirds so far. I’ve already seen a few this month.”

This got me thinking about Shifting Baseline Syndrome, a concept that first arose in the late 1960s. I remember learning about it at university in relation to the management of fish stocks. It can be described as a gradual alteration in what we perceive to be an acceptable state of the environment, due to a lack of historical perspective.

When I was a child 30+ years ago I remember seeing literally hundreds of ladybirds on the Aubretia in our garden. We would fill jam jars with them! (And then release them, of course.) So my baseline for a good ladybird year, based on my childhood, is hundreds of them crawling around the flowers in my garden. My son’s baseline, on the other hand, is much lower: maybe a hundred in an entire “good” year.

When it comes to conservation, this really matters. Shifting Baseline Syndrome has been described as “one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today’s global environmental issues”1 because each new generation accepts the situation in which they were raised as being normal, which can mask environmental degradation.

To quote Wikipedia’s Shifting baseline page, “Areas that swarmed with a particular species hundreds of years ago, may have experienced long term decline, but it is the level of decades previously that is considered the appropriate reference point for current populations. In this way large declines in ecosystems or species over long periods of time were, and are, masked. There is a loss of perception of change that occurs when each generation redefines what is “natural”.”

If each successive generation is trying to restore nature to what they remember from their childhood, they are trying to restore it to increasing depleted levels.

Bowl full and fingers sufficiently prickled for one day, we headed back across the field to home. This load of flowers became my second batch of gorse wine of the year, and it’s now happily bubbling away on the dresser along with Batch #1. I can’t remember where I originally found the recipe, other than “online somewhere”; I’ve shared it below if you want to give it a go. The end result is a dry white wine sort of drink – I have no idea how alcoholic it is though because I always forget to take any measurements! The quantities given here are enough to make one demijohn of wine (4.5 litres / one gallon). I prefer to make it in these smaller batches, but it could be doubled or tripled if you can find some willing volunteers to help you collect the flowers!

Gorse Wine:

3 pints fresh gorse flowers (measure them with a pint glass)
4.5 litres water
510g golden granulated sugar
Juice of two lemons (or substitute ¼ tsp citric acid per lemon)
Brewer's yeast

• Put the flowers and water in a large pan. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 15 minutes. Keeping the heat very low, add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved.

• Pour into a bucket and add the lemon juice or citric acid. Allow to cool to blood temperature, then add the yeast (follow the instructions on the packet).

• Cover with a clean cloth and leave to stand for 3 days, then strain the liquid and transfer to a demijohn with an airlock. Make sure all the yeast goes through. Leave to ferment.

• When fermentation has ceased (about two weeks), siphon into sterilised bottles and seal.

• Leave for at least a year before drinking.

Gorse flowers are also an ingredient in Spring Herb Beer, that I make a batch of every year (it’s bubbling away on the dresser next to the wine as I write this). You can get the recipe for it here.

I’d love to know if you have any other ways to use Gorse flowers. Please share them in the comments below!

Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend x

Moth of the Week: Early Thorn (Selena dentaria)

Gorse is spiky, so let’s have a spikily-named moth for this week! The Thorns are a group of moths within the Geometrid family, so-called because of a little pointed thorn-like projection on the back of their twig-mimicking caterpillars.

There are two distinct generations: one in spring (hence the common name - this is the earliest of the Thorn species to be on the wing each year), and another in August and September. These two broods look different, with the summer ones being smaller and paler. The moth pictured below is from the first generation, photographed in my garden last year.

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I took some extra time off work during the Easter holidays and spent a fair chunk of it out in the garden. I planted my potatoes, sowed carrots and parsnips, peas and beans, cucumbers and courgettes. I also processed a lot of branches in the electric wood chipper my husband and son gave me for my birthday last month, and have put several loads into the chicken run and made a start on the path down the middle of the polytunnel and the ones between the vegetable beds.

Now that the days have noticeably lengthened, sitting by the fire playing board games in the evenings has been replaced by walks up the track. Would you like to join us? I recommend wearing your wellies: even though the weather has been much drier this last week, the ground is still pretty saturated and boggy in places.

Are you ready? Let’s go!

It’s still light when we set out. A robin is singing loudly somewhere, and a blackbird alarm-calls as we pass the oak tree. I have our bat detector with me; by the time we’re returning home it will be dusk and there should be a few bats flitting about.

There’s a ditch that runs along the right-hand side of the track for a while. We stop and have a look in a deep bit, in case any newts are visible. No luck this time, they must all be hiding in the mud or have headed back out into the wilderness. Like toads, newts are only really aquatic during the breeding season when they can be seen in ponds and ditches. They spend most of the rest of the year in damp rather than wet places, and hibernate through the winter.

A bit further along, at the edge of the ditch, some Common Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris) is growing. This is a carnivorous plant, a specialist of acidic heaths and bogs, with a rosette of yellow-green leaves that exude a sticky fluid that attracts insects. The insect gets stuck to the leaf, which curls around it and slowly digests it. In a month or two it will produce a couple of purple flowers at the top of its stem. I can’t help feeling the plant is a bit mean: “Hey insects, come and pollinate my flowers, and in return I will EAT YOU!” The name Butterwort comes from an old belief that rubbing the leaves on cows’ udders would protect against evil spirits and bad butter.

A few pairs of geese are hanging out in the field with the cows: a mix of Greylag (Anser anser) and Canada (Branta canadensis). They move further away as we pass. A heron squawks as it flies overhead on its way to roost in the trees.

The track curves round to the right at the yard, and we cross the cattle grid. Tufts of nettle, bramble, and ribwort plantain leaves are starting to poke through between the metal bars.

On we go towards Rabbit Mountain (it’s more of a hummock than a mountain, really.) There are sheep in the field here with young lambs bouncing about, and there, in amongst the clumps of reeds, we spot a rabbit busily nibbling away, ears twitching occasionally. We watch it for a minute before continuing on our way. The hawthorns and elders here have greened up nicely over the last few days, and the blackthorn blossom I wrote about last week is almost all passed. The first bluebells are starting to flower in the verges.

We cross the “main road” and pass between the stone gateposts into The Gardens. The birdsong is loud in the trees above us here; everyone is singing their hearts out before heading off to bed.

One of the first things we spot is a Skunk Cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) in flower. This is a non-native species, and we all spent a couple of hours with the Conservation Volunteers last week, decapitating flowers in an area of wet woodland. Skunk Cabbage was introduced to Britain from North America in 1901, as an ornamental garden plant. It soon escaped though and has become problematic, outcompeting native plants and blocking waterways.

I think in the future we will have to re-think our relationship with so-called “Invasive Non-Native Species”. Often they only become a problem due to our land management practices, and as our climate changes, so will the species able to survive and thrive in our landscapes.

My son spots movement out of the corner of his eye, and we all turn to look – and listen. It’s a pair of hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus). One of them is circling the other, making snuffling noises. I guess it is probably a male, and the other one is a female. We leave them in peace to enjoy their night!

Speaking of invasive, non-native species, while hedgehogs are native to Britain, they were introduced to this island in the 1980s by a well-meaning resident who wanted to control the slugs and snails in their garden. They’ve done very well, but unfortunately also eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds, so there are definitely some people who would be happier if they weren’t here.

We turn right past the Katsura tree – which is now in full leaf – and head into the shady gloom of the woodland path towards the village hall. The Gunnera manicata has had a growth spurt recently, and soft green Beech leaves are starting to unfurl above our heads. I’ll come back sometime soon and pick some to make this year’s batch of Beech Leaf Noyau.

At the village hall we have a look in the playing field just behind it: four rabbits here, including one very small one. If you’re starting to wonder if the main purpose of these evening walks is to look for rabbits, then yes, you are correct! They’re my favourite animal, and no day is complete without seeing at least one.

This is the furthest point of our usual walking route, and we now head back along the main road to the top of the track. It’s getting dark now, and the moon is a skinny crescent hanging almost horizontally in the western sky. As we approach the cattle grid again the bat detector, which had been dangling from my wrist emitting a soft background static noise, starts to click and chatter. We all spot them at the same time: three or four little Pipistrelle bats, and they swoop and flutter around our heads, their leathery wings flapping so fast they’re a blur.

Four different species of bat are found here: Common and Soprano Pipistrelle, Daubenton’s, and Brown Long-Eared. When they’re flying past at speed and you can’t get a good look at them they can be identified by the frequency and pattern of their calls, using a bat detector. Common Pipistrelles echolocate at a frequency of 45kHz, while Sopranos are 55kHz. There’s a bit of overlap between the two though, so I tend to have the detector set at 50kHz. So I know these are Pipistrelles flying around us, but my detector isn’t fancy enough to narrow it down to species, unlike a more modern digital one could.

Bats can eat thousands of insects in just one night. Despite my fondness for moths, I do also really like seeing bats, even if they are a major predator of moths. Pipistrelles tend to feed on flies though, and at the moment I think they’re probably feeding on the ones hatching out of all the cow poop around this area.

The bats escort us down the track towards home, darting around our heads, the detector picking up their ultrasonic calls. It’s almost fully dark when we arrive back at the front door a few minutes later. I don’t tend to take my camera with me on these walks, so I popped inside and grabbed it before heading back out to take a couple of quick pictures of the moon and the bats.

Thanks for joining us on our walk – I hope you enjoyed yourself. Next week we have an Austrian exchange student staying with us, so I might not have time to write anything to share next Friday.

I’m going to leave you with a song written and performed by my husband that mentions going for a walk along a country track :-)

Have a good weekend.

Cat x

Moth of the Week: Shoulder Stripe (Anticlea badiata)

This geometrid is one of my favourite springtime moths (Ha! I think I say that about them all, don’t I?!) It has very pretty striped wings, which is where the common name comes from. They are found throughout most of Britain, and are a regular visitor to my trap each year. Larval foodplants are Dog rose and other wild rose species, of which I have plenty in my garden.

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At the top of the track, where it meets the main road1, there are a handful of blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) bushes. I pass them every day on my way to and from work, and for the last couple of weeks they have been white with blossom: thousands upon thousands of tiny delicate flowers perched along the still-bare branches. On sunny days they almost seem to glow in the light.

Spring seems to be arriving slowly this year; most of the trees are still leafless and grey. The hawthorns and elders up the track have a light spattering of green, but the oak, ash, and beeches in the woods are only just beginning to produce buds. This makes the blossoms on the other species stand out even more against this dull background, and they are extra welcome.

Closer to home, the plum tree outside the kitchen window has started to flower now. It is a big, old, tree, and some of the boughs are festooned with clumps of fuzzy grey-green lichen. The blooms on those branches look like they’re peeking out of a cosy bed.

A pair of Bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) regularly visits the garden at this time of year to feed on the newly emerged buds. In the past they were considered to be a pest of fruit crops because of this habit, and thousands of them were killed in orchards across the country each year. Thankfully we’ve moved on from that now! I’m happy to share with the Bullfinches – the plum tree usually ends up producing more fruit that I can deal with myself anyway.

There is something about blossom that just lifts my spirits and makes me happy. I think it is beautiful – and this got me wondering: Why? Why do I find blossom beautiful? Is there a reason for it?

Flowers have been culturally significant to humans for millennia. They are used symbolically and feature in art, literature, religious practices, ritual, and festivals. When I did an online search2 asking “Why do humans find blossom beautiful?” it came up with a couple of different suggestions: our brains find symmetrical shapes like flowers pleasing, and colours affect our moods (warm colours like reds and oranges are linked to alertness and energy, while cool ones like purples and blues are calming and relaxing).

But neither of those really felt like they answered my question properly.

Evolutionarily, there doesn’t seem to be much sense in it.

Flowers are the reproductive parts of plants. Some flowering plants such as grasses are wind-pollinated, and they tend to have small, inconspicuous flowers that aren’t generally thought of to be attractive by humans. The ones that we tend to think of as beautiful are ones that rely on biotic pollination, i.e. other living things to transfer pollen from one flower to another. Most commonly this involves insects, but some species are pollinated by birds, lizards, bats and other mammals.

Many flowering plants have a close relationship with a very small number of species which carry out all their pollination for them. This can increase the chances of successful pollination, because it is more likely the pollen from a flower will be transferred to another of the same species. For example, a flower may have a particular shape which only allows access to a particular species of insect, which will be rewarded with nectar when it enters the flower. This is an example of co-evolution, where the plant and pollinator evolved together over a long period of time to meet each other’s needs.

Now, as far as I’m aware, humans aren’t an important pollinator for any species of flowering plants – and I’m not including hand-pollinating your tomatoes to try to ensure a better yield!

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So I have a different theory: Is the reason I find a blossom-covered tree beautiful because in many cases, such as if it’s a plum or apple tree, it represents the promise of future food? Is it a throwback to my distant past?

In our nomadic hunter-gatherer days, it would have been vital to our survival to remember the locations of all possible sources of food. Perhaps an emotional response to seeing a tree covered in blossom would make us more likely to remember its position in the landscape so we could return later in the year to harvest its fruit.

I couldn’t find any evidence online to back this up, but I did find an article on the BBC Science Focus website titled “What evolutionary advantage is there in finding a sunset beautiful?”3 which I thought made a couple of interesting points. It says American philosopher Denis Dutton has suggested that the open rolling plains with occasional trees that are so often represented in landscape art, are beautiful to us because they resemble the savannah of the Pleistocene epoch that the first humans evolved in, and first developed our aesthetic sense.

Red sunsets would have been a familiar part of these landscapes too, and it’s possible an appreciation of beautiful sunsets also comes from our past. There’s truth in the saying “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight” as colourful sunsets are associated with settled high pressure systems, and high pressure tends to mean fine weather. In an era when night was the most dangerous time, making sure you were safely back at camp to appreciate the last dying gasp of the day was probably especially important.

It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch (to me, anyway!) that an appreciation of blossom could also be linked to feelings of safety and survival in our distant past. The tribe will not starve!

And it’s not all one-sided either: there is an advantage to the trees of attracting humans. We may not be pollinators, but by noticing the blossom and returning at a later date to collect the fruits, we are actually doing what nature intended. Many animals are seed-spreaders, and seeds have evolved multiple ways for this to happen: ones like cleavers have tiny little hooks on them that stick to an animal’s fur and will be carried far away from the parent plant, while others are enclosed in a tasty parcel that is eaten. The seeds pass through the digestive system of the animal and are deposited somewhere else, in a fertile pile of dung, ready to germinate and grow in a new area. We are animals, after all, so in the past – long, long before the advent of flushing toilets and the like - we would have helped with seed dispersal in this way.

So there you have it: my theory as to why I find blossom beautiful. It’s so I remember where a valuable source of food is, so I can go back and harvest it when it’s ready. Plausible, or am I just obsessed with food?!

Moth of the Week: Emperor Moth (Saturnia pavonia)

Since this week’s post is about beauty, I thought the MOTW should be one of the most beautiful moths I’ve seen!

The Emperor Moth is the sole member of the Saturniidae - also known as the Giant Silkmoth family - that is found in the British Isles. There are about 2,300 species worldwide, with most occurring in the tropics of Central and South America.

Emperor Moths are pretty big as far as British moths go, with a wingspan of 55-80mm (males are at the smaller end of the scale, females at the larger). They have a single generation each year, with adults being on the wing from April to May. Males can sometimes be seen flying rapidly on sunny days in their moorland and heathland habitat, while the females sometimes come to light. The adults don’t feed at all, having done all their eating while in the caterpillar stage.

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Wild Garlic (Allium ursinum) is what I would describe as a ‘gateway species’ into foraging: it’s easy to identify, easy to harvest, and easy to use. Please note, however, that none of my posts are meant to be used as definitive identification guides. I highly recommend getting yourself a good book or two (I think one with photos and one with drawings is best) and familiarising yourself with identification features and any potentially harmful lookalikes before picking and eating anything yourself. Ideally get a couple of books from a few years ago, before the rise in AI-generated misinformation. The internet seems to be awash with questionable foraging resources these days, which is one reason I prefer older books to modern websites and apps; I feel they are more trustworthy. That’s not to say there aren’t good resources online, you just have to be a bit careful.

Now, back to the garlic…

Wild Garlic is found in damp woodlands throughout most of the British Isles. The leaves are between 10 and 25 centimetres long and 4-7cm wide, with two or three growing from each bulb. There is a single flower stem, up to 50cm tall, with 6-20 flowers at the end of it. All parts of the plant are edible: flowers, seedpods, stems, leaves, and bulbs.1

It has several other common names, including Ramsons and Bear Garlic – hence the specific name ursinum from the Latin word for bear. This apparently comes from the brown bear’s fondness for the bulbs.

I know of a few good patches of Wild Garlic on the island, but my favourite one is in a wooded area at the back of my friends’ property. It’s situated on a hill that slopes down towards the sea, and I can hear birds chirping in the still-bare tree branches and the ferry coming and going as I pick away. It’s a wonderful place to escape from the madness of the world for a little while.

The plants carpet the ground thickly; I always start off trying to avoid standing on any, but there are so many they’re impossible to avoid! I soon give up and enjoy the scent of garlic from the crushed leaves beneath my feet. This is a big patch, and after my son and I have filled our bags, there’s no noticeable difference at all. I’ve relocated some bulbs from their garden to mine, in an attempt to establish a nice patch of it in my “orchard”. (I’ve put “orchard” in inverted commas because really it’s just a bit of my back garden with a couple of fruit trees and bushes in it!) They seem to be settling in well and the patch is gradually increasing in size each year.

Now, what to do with it all?!

There are so many ways to use Wild Garlic fresh, such as adding to scrambled eggs, omelette, or quiche; putting it on top of pizza; adding to risotto, soups and stews; in bread; in scone dough (along with some grated cheese)... Actually, you know what, just add it to any savoury dish and you’re unlikely to be disappointed! I made some lovely “Spring Soup” on the equinox last month, using Wild Garlic, Chickweed, Nettles and Sorrel that I had picked.

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Raw oysters served with a generous squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkling of Wild Garlic flowers are absolutely delicious.

Every year I like to preserve some too so I can enjoy it later on, and I think the easiest way to do this is to pickle it. Pack a sterilised jar with chopped Wild Garlic, then make your pickling liquid by heating some apple cider vinegar with a bit of salt, sugar and chilli flakes. Pour the hot liquid over the garlic, and seal with a vinegar-proof lid. Leave for two weeks before eating. Refrigerate once opened.

Pesto is another favourite. I know it’s traditionally made with pine nuts, but I use cashews because they are generally much cheaper. It’s also traditionally made using basil rather than Wild Garlic, so let’s not be too strict about things, okay? I have a couple of hazel trees in my garden and one of my goals is to be able to use their nuts in pesto. It’s a long-term goal since they are yet to actually produce any nuts at all!

I made half-a-dozen portions of pesto at the weekend and we had one for dinner with spaghetti, then I put the rest of them into the freezer for later use. I’ve since picked more Wild Garlic and made a second batch for the freezer, so we have plenty to last us over the next few months. Pesto-pasta is a quick and easy meal to produce after a long busy day in the garden when I don’t have much energy left for cooking up anything fancy.

I’ve also fermented some Wild Garlic: I rubbed a tablespoonful of sea salt into half a kilogram of leaves, packed it into a jar along with all the liquid that had oozed out, and it’s sitting in the fridge at the moment. I’ll probably leave it another week or so before I start eating it. The instructions I followed last year said to leave the leaves whole but because they get chewy when they’re fermented, they were actually quite difficult to eat. I have learned from my mistake, and this year I chopped all the leaves up across the way, into 1-2cm wide pieces, before rubbing in the salt. This has made it much easier to eat and we’re getting through the jar quickly; I must make some more!

A couple of years ago I experimented with seawater-fermented Wild Garlic flowers, which I was definitely more keen on than other members of my family were. It’s something I’d like to try again though.

The final way I have preserved it so far this year is in salt, which is another really quick and easy thing to do. Just wuzz up your garlic leaves with half your sea salt until it’s well combined, then add the rest of the salt. Spread it out on a tray to dry - I put mine into the turned-off top oven while the main oven was on underneath cooking dinner, so it got heated gently to help dry it out.

There are still a few more weeks of “Wild Garlic With Everything Season” so I’m hoping to pick some more this weekend to use in meals throughout the next week, and if the flowers are ready, I’ll maybe give seawater-fermenting them another go. A friend gave me a new book yesterday - a belated birthday present - called “Wild Garlic Recipes: A Cookbook for Spring Foragers” by Eleanor Hayes so I now have many, many new recipes to try out!

What is your favourite way to eat Wild Garlic?

Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend x

Moth of the Week: V-Pug (Chloroclystis v-ata)

I couldn’t think of any garlic-themed moths for this week’s MOTW, but there is a fresh-spring-leaf-coloured one that can be on the wing at this time of year: the beautiful green V-Pug, which gets its name from the dark V-shaped marks on the forewings.

I’ve only seen this species once: a freshly-emerged individual in my porch on the 16th of April 2014. Looking through my various books, however, the flight season seems to be more late spring into summer - May to July - so it’s possible the warmth of my house caused this one to emerge earlier than usual.

The larvae feed on a range of flowers, including brambles, clematis, yarrow and elder.

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Back in the 1950s, pasta was not an everyday food in Britain. Approximately 8 million people watched the programme when it aired on April 1^st 1957, and hundreds of people phoned the BBC the next day asking for more information about growing their own spaghetti tree. Apparently they were told to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.1

Obviously this was an April Fool’s Day joke, but did you know that you CAN go out and harvest your own spaghetti?! I did just this a couple of weeks ago with a friend. Now before you all start to think I’m completely mad, let me explain. The type of spaghetti we went foraging for wasn’t made from pasta; it was a type of seaweed.

Seaweeds are an essential part of marine ecosystems. They provide food and shelter for aquatic life, produce oxygen, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, filter harmful pollutants, improve water quality, and can reduce storm damage along coasts. Some of them are also suitable for human consumption.

Over 12,000 species of seaweed have been described globally, and they are divided into three groups. Green seaweeds (Chlorophyceae) are generally found in shallower water closer to the top of the shore, and include species such as Sea Lettuce. The red seaweeds (Rhodophyceae) can actually be a range of colours, including bright pink, dark brown, olive green or pale grey-white, but as the name suggests, are most commonly a deep red. The brown seaweeds (Phaeophyceae) include large species such as fucoids and kelps, some of which can grow to several metres long.

There are over 600 species of seaweed found in the seas around Britain. The good news is that none of the ones you can reach easily on foot around our shores are toxic, but just because something isn’t going to kill you, doesn’t necessarily mean you actually want to eat it! Some seaweeds are definitely more edible that others.

My “target species” for this recent foraging trip was Himanthalia elongata, usually known as Thongweed or Sea Spaghetti, which is a common brown seaweed found around the coast of Britain and Ireland, except for south-east England. It grows on rocks near the bottom of the intertidal zone on moderately exposed shores, in areas with strong tidal currents.

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The seaweed has two different stages. The first of these is a button-shaped thallus measuring a couple of centimetres in diameter, which is attached to the rocks by a short stem, know as a stipe. This “button” can take up to two years to reach maturity. From it, two long strap-like reproductive fronds are formed in the autumn – the second stage. These grow quickly from February to May, and can reach a length of up to two metres. These long fronds are the “spaghetti” that we were looking for, although since the fronds are slightly flattened I suppose it would be more accurate to call it “sea linguini”...2

At low tide we squelched across the muddy sand to “Cow Island”, then picked our way over the rocks round the edge of the shore. Some of the rocks were still covered with the last of the Winter Laver (Porphyra linearis), which made them ankle-breakingly slippery. We made our way to “Spaghetti Junction” – I have my own names for all my favourite foraging spots! The original Spaghetti Junction can be found on the M6 motorway in Birmingham – it’s a completely mad bit of road engineering and really does look like a pile of spaghetti from above!

Despite the low tide, the Sea Spaghetti was only just within reach and I regretted not bringing the boat hook with me to pull it in closer. I managed to grab a couple of handfuls of it, narrowly avoiding falling head-first into the water, and cut off 30cm or so from the ends of the fronds. Harvesting the fronds in this way doesn’t kill the seaweed, and it will continue to grow.

I only harvest Sea Spaghetti when the fronds look a solid yellow-brown colour without too many spots on them. If they have a very speckled appearance, this is a sign that they are releasing gametes, which they usually do from June until winter. I find the texture just isn’t so good for eating then, as the fronds are starting to decay. Sea Spaghetti lives for 2-3 years, and reproduces once before dying.

We harvested a couple of handfuls, enough for a meal. I’ve tried to dry Sea Spaghetti unsuccessfully in the past, so I find it’s better to just gather a small amount as and when I want to eat it.

Mission complete, we headed back to the house, stopping to admire some Dotted Sea Hares in a rockpool on the way. Sea Hares (Aplysia punctata) are a species of sea slug found around most of the coast of Britain and Ireland. We often see large numbers of them in spring, when they come closer inshore to breed. The one in the picture below really was living up to both its common and scientific names, being one of the spottiest individuals I’ve ever seen. (Punctata is a term used in biology to describe organisms or structures that have many spots, dots, or small pores.)

Humans have been eating seaweed for millennia, and in the past it would have been a valuable year-round source of nutrition. The earliest evidence of human consumption is to be found at a 12,000 year old site in Chile3. In Europe, there’s evidence that people ate seaweed regularly from Mesolithic times (beginning around 10,000 years ago) up until the Middle Ages. By the 1800s it seems to have completely fallen out of fashion, and has never really entered our diets in a big way again. This is a shame as it contains high levels of minerals, vitamins, and trace elements. Sea Spaghetti in particular is described as being a good source of calcium and magnesium.

So, what do you do with Sea Spaghetti once you’ve harvested it?

Well, there’s a major clue in the name! The easiest way is to use it as a gluten-free spaghetti alternative: simply boil it for about seven minutes. It changes from brownish-yellow to a brilliant bright green when put into hot water. You could also do a half-and-half mix of Sea Spaghetti and “traditional” pasta spaghetti.

I ate mine with some chopped-up chickweed stirred into it, a jar of home-canned mackerel, a sprinkling of porcini powder (it is always a good idea to make friends with people who will share their homemade porcini powder with you!), a drizzle of olive oil and a bit of grated cheese. Not a completely wild meal – I haven’t yet been able to forage for oil or cheese – but I was pretty pleased with it.

I’ve been trying for a while to incorporate more seaweed into my diet, and Sea Spaghetti is a really easy way to do this. Rather than just being a little sprinkling of something that I add at the end, it is a main component of the meal – a “proper” food rather than just a little extra flavouring. And it’s free, local, healthy, tasty… what’s not to love?!

Prannie Rhatigan’s Irish Seaweed Kitchen book has some other interesting recipes for it that I’d like to try some time, including “Sea Spaghetti and Carrot Salad”, “Sea Spaghetti and Cheese Straws”, and the very intriguing “Christmas Puddings with Brandied Sea Spaghetti”! I will let you know if I do attempt any of them...

Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend. Our weather forecast has been showing gusts of wind of up to 70mph for the next couple of days, so I’m going to go out now and make sure there’s nothing lying around the garden that could blow away!

Cat x

Moth of the Week: Sandy Carpet (Perizoma flavofasciata)

Now I know I said I was going to try to make these “Moths of the Week” seasonally appropriate ones, but since this week’s post is about foraging by the sea, I thought the Sandy Carpet was quite fitting! This is a really pretty little geometrid moth, although the sandy part of it’s name refers to the colour, rather than an association with beaches.

It is fairly common and well-distributed throughout southern Scotland, England, Wales, and parts of Ireland. According to ukmoths.org.uk it inhabits woodland, commons, chalky ground and other dry areas, so it’s quite surprising that it is sometimes very numerous in my often very wet garden! It is on the wing at dusk in June and July.

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[rustle rustle]

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Hello!”

“Aaagh!”

“Don’t worry dear, you’re safe in here. There’s no need to panic.”

“Umm, okay. But where exactly is ‘here’?”

“It’s a moth trap. It’s my first time here too, but my mother told me all about it. Legend has it that on dry calm nights, the human who lives in the house there – that big white stone thing – will put this trap out in our garden –”

“Bright light bright light!”

“Yes, it has a bright light. Irresistible, isn’t it?! Lots of moths will go into the trap, just like we did. In the morning the human will make excited noises when she looks at us, and will show us to the other humans in the house. Some of us will have our photo taken and will end up on this thing called ‘the world wide web’ – don’t look so worried, dear, it’s not like a spider’s web – in fact I’m not quite sure what it is, but the humans seem to spend a lot of time on it... Anyway, after that, you’re free to go. The best thing to do now though is just settle down and rest until morning.”

“Oh, okay. I’m Clouded Drab, by the way. What’s your name?”

“I’m Early Grey. And I don’t think you look drab at all, dear. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble at all ending up on the front cover of Moths Weekly!”

[vibrates wings] “Why, thank you very much!”

And that, I imagine, is what goes on in my moth trap at night. Sometimes things get even friendlier and in the morning I find eggs that have been laid on the cardboard eggboxes, but this is a family-friendly publication...!

It has been a very slow start to the mothing season here. My first attempt at putting the trap out resulted in a total catch of one moth – a Hebrew Character – a couple of weeks ago. I decided to try my luck again last Friday night (March 20^th) and put the trap out in the middle of the side garden. It was calm, moonless, and oh so dark, with a layer of clouds obscuring the stars.

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While I was setting the trap up, my son ran around with the butterfly net, and soon appeared with the first moth of the night: a Dotted Border (Agriopis marginaria). As the name suggests, this moth has a dotted border – a row of dark spots along the edges of both the fore- and hind-wings. It is a common and widespread species throughout the British Isles, and is found in a range of habitats including woodland, scrub, gardens, heathland, moorland, and scrubby calcareous grassland. It overwinters as a pupa underground before emerging in late winter or early spring. Adults are on the wing from February to April, or at least, the males are! As with several other species of moth that come out during the colder months, the females are flightless and just have wing stumps.

I was up early the next morning to see what visitors were waiting for me in the trap, and I wasn’t disappointed: there were a total of 14 Early Greys, 3 Clouded Drabs, 2 Hebrew Characters, and 1 Red Chestnut.

Like the Dotted Border, the Early Grey (Xylocampa areola) has a rather boringly descriptive name: it’s grey, and it flies early in the year! You may remember that it was “Moth of the Week” in last Friday’s post about daffodils. It is another species that is common throughout Britain and readily comes to light, sometimes in large numbers. I regularly catch half-a-dozen or so at a time, and my record is 15 of them on the 28^th of March 2019.

While the two species just mentioned don’t have particularly exciting names, I think the poor Clouded Drab (Orthosia incerta) really drew the short straw when names were being handed out! While it is a generally brown species, it is actually highly variable with several different forms (although admittedly, some of them could be described as being a bit, well, drab!) The specific part of the scientific name, incerta, is Latin for “not fixed” or “uncertain” and refers to this variability.

For more information about the Clouded Drab, I highly recommend checking out this recent post by Dennis Chanter. In fact, I recommend losing yourself down a mothy rabbit-hole for a while and reading all of his highly informative posts!

Next up from the trap we have the Hebrew Character (Orthosia gothica), who wears a name badge: the black markings on the forewings apparently resemble the Hebrew letter nun, the equivalent of our letter ‘n’. This isn’t reflected in the scientific name though, as Linnaeus, who named it, saw the mark as being more gothic hence the specific name gothica. This moth comes to both light and sugar and often flies even in very cold conditions. The usual flight season is March to early June, but small numbers sometimes emerge during mild spells in late autumn or early winter.

Finally, we have the Red Chestnut (Cerastis rubricosa), which is also described in my guidebook as being “common throughout”. The ground colour of the wings is usually a rich reddish-brown, but in upland areas and parts of Scotland darker, purplish, or greyish forms are more common. The moth overwinters as a pupa in a strong, silk-lined cocoon. There is a single generation on the wing from late February to May, and the adults can sometimes be seen feeding on sallow catkins. While wild larvae are seldom found, they have been recorded feeding on herbaceous and woody plants such as sallows, bilberry, and bedstraws.

There was one last surprise waiting for me at the bottom of the trap: a slug! I think it might be a Dusky Slug (Arion subfuscus) but I’m not entirely sure. Please let me know if you have other suggestions.

That’s all for today – there’s no “Moth of the Week” as the whole post has been about moths! Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.

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Since we’re definitely in spring now, however you choose to look at it, today’s post is a celebration of daffodils, those most ubiquitous of springtime flowers.

Let’s start with a poem:

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: -
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

This poem by William Wordsworth is possibly one of the most well-known in the English-speaking world, but I have to admit that when I looked online to check I had got the first few lines right, I was surprised to discover there were a further three verses! I’m sure I must have known them at some point in the past, but lately I’ve been feeling like I’ve forgotten as least as many things as I have ever known...

The poem was written in 1804, although it was inspired by a walk with his younger sister two years earlier, on the 15^th of April 1802, where they encountered a mass of daffodils on the shore of Ullswater in the Lake District, England.

Daffodils are a common sight in most parts of the country in springtime. Narcissus pseudonarcissus is the only species that is native to Britain, although according to my Collins Wild Flower Guide there are another three introduced species: the Tenby Daffodil (Narcissus obvallaris), Spanish Daffodil (Narcissus hispanicus), and Pheasant-Eye (Narcissus poeticus). There are also numerous hybrids, cultivars and varieties which are becoming increasingly naturalised in the countryside.

I can understand why Wordsworth was so captivated by them: their sunshine-yellow faces really do lift the spirits, and even on a dull day they seem to almost glow.

The sun is shining from a cloudless blue sky as I’m writing this, which makes a change from the recent wall-to-wall cloud – definitely not any lonely clouds! – we’ve experienced lately. The daffodils have been taking quite a hammering, with strong winds and heavy rain battering them to the ground. My son collects any he sees with broken stems, rather than leaving them on the ground to rot or be munched by slugs, and on Mother’s Day last Sunday he presented me with a large mixed bunch of them.

I decided to photograph all the different varieties: there are quite a few! I counted at least a dozen different ones: some with short wide petals, others with long skinny petals, flat stumpy or long frilly trumpets, and ranging from bright orange through various shades of yellow to almost pure white.

Several of them are pictured below, so please enjoy this spring equinox celebration of the diversity of daffodils found within a short distance of my home.

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The first one here is most similar to the native daffodil with its pale yellow petals and bright golden-yellow trumpet, while the next one could be the introduced Spanish daffodil.

Then we have a few more different ones…

The two above look quite similar, but there’s a big difference in size between them:

Because they are so abundant and bloom at a time when many other flowers aren’t available, you might think that daffodils would be very attractive to newly-emerged bumblebees and other hungry insects. However, they aren’t actually all that great for pollinators. Because they reproduce by dividing their bulbs, they have lost the need to be pollinated by insects.

Over the years plant breeders have also selected traits such as colour and size of the flower rather than nectar production, so some varieties actually produce very little or no nectar at all. Some “fancy daffodils”, rather than having a single trumpet, have multiple layers of frilly petals in their centre. If you look at the mass of petals in the middle of the ones pictured below, you can see that it would be quite a struggle for a bee or other insect to get inside to where the nectar and pollen are, if there was any. (The same applies to other plant varieties – quite often the “double-bloomed” ones aren’t great for insects, so choose single blooms to help pollinators!)

Which is your favourite? Mine are the ones with the orange middles. I think I might go out for a wander with my camera soon and see if I can spot any more different ones in other people’s gardens!

Moth of the Week: Early Grey (Xylocampa areola)

This is one of those moths that has quite a boringly descriptive name: it appears early in the year, being on the wing from March until May, and it is grey! I think it’s actually a really pretty little noctuid moth, and just calling it “grey” doesn’t do it justice. It has lovely markings if you get the chance to look at it closely.

Back in the days when I would post on Flickr, a photo of an Early Grey moth used to be one of my most viewed pictures there. I think it would turn up in searches when people tried to find out how to prevent their hair turning grey… (My advice is: either embrace it, or cover your head with moths so no-one notices your hair.)

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Behind who or what, I’m never entirely sure.

I have been growing food here for long enough to know that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to sowing seeds, and there is absolutely no point in comparing myself to someone who gardens in, say, the south of England. Our conditions are just too different. I also know by now that the best way to get over my “feeling of mild panic” is to actually get out there and sow some seeds!

I don’t use grow-lights or heat mats, so everything I grow has to be able to germinate without additional heat. The only exceptions to this are tomatoes and chillies, which I sowed in my very small propagator a couple of weeks ago. Everything else has to cope with the ambient temperature and is either sown direct into the ground, or in trays in the unheated potting shed. It’s still too early to direct-sow things like carrots and parsnips as the ground is too cold and the weather has no idea what it’s doing at the moment (so far this morning we’ve had rain, wind, conversation-stopping hailstones battering off the windows, bright sunshine, and one very impressive rumble of thunder), but there are a few things I can start off in the shelter of the potting shed at this time of year.

So, I headed out into the sunshine with a handful of seed packets and spent an enjoyable hour or so pootling about, sowing lettuce, spinach beet, red and green cabbage, chard, cauliflower, beetroot, Russian kale, and cavolo nero.

I’ll direct-sow more of each of these straight into the ground in a few weeks time, but sometimes I just need to get things started to ease my mind. And yes, it did make me feel much calmer and keep the panic at bay, despite the ever-present background noise in my head of global political unrest (more on that in a moment).

There are a multitude of reasons why I grow some of my own food – not all, but as much as I can.

It is metres rather than miles from my garden to my kitchen so I miss out on all the pollution associated with transport, and I can also avoid plastic packaging. Homegrown really does taste better, and is actually better for me in many cases. As soon as fruit and vegetables are harvested, they start to lose nutrients. It can be days or sometimes even weeks before they turn up in our shops. By growing my own food I can harvest it at the optimum time, in peak condition, and get the maximum nutritional benefit.

I know how my food has been grown, and what fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals have been used on it: seaweed, nettle feed and homemade compost for fertiliser, and absolutely zero for the other two.

I also save money: a packet of 200 cauliflower seeds is cheaper than buying the same amount of them from the shop. Because I have an established garden that requires minimal inputs bought in from outside, and I save some of my own seeds, it works out even cheaper.

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Now I know that if you’ve been paying even a tiny bit of attention to the current global political situation then a general “feeling of mild panic” is probably putting it, well, mildly.

Oil and gas prices have rocketed over the last couple of weeks, which will have the knock-on effect of increasing food prices. This isn’t just due to the rise in transport costs, but also on-farm costs and the fact that nitrogen fertilisers are made using natural gas.

According to an article I read recently by Alex Evans of The Good Apocalypse Guide

“Britain is one of the least food self-sufficient countries in Europe. In 2021, we were only 54% food self-sufficient — compared to 75% in the Netherlands, 80% in Spain, and 100% in the US, France, and Australia (meaning they could manage without imports altogether, if push really came to shove).”

How many more reasons do I need to get my hands into the soil?!

It will be a couple of months until I can eat the first fruits of my labours, but any seeds I sow now will help to create a buffer between my bank account and those inevitable price rises. I have also worked hard over the years to increase the range of perennial crops in my garden and improve my foraging knowledge, both of which help to decrease my reliance on having to buy food.

I am, however, under absolutely no illusions that I will ever be completely self-sufficient (see last December’s post about How Much Food I *Actually* Grow) and to be honest, I’m pretty sure that that isn’t really the point of what I’m trying to do here.

In her recent article Homesteads Bring Resilience, Egypt Krohn says it perfectly:

“Here’s the thing: no man is an island, and as I’ve written about here before, self-sufficiency is a fallacy. My husband and I, no matter how many skills we learn, will never be able to support our family’s needs 100% on our own for any meaningful length of the time. All the same, the more our household can produce ourselves, on our own land, in our own community, the more resilient we become to the vagrancies of global just-in-time supply chains, and rising fuel costs, and potential global disruptions as we, in all likelihood, slip further into global war. The more stable we are, the less we will need to draw on community resources, and the more we can in fact help our neighbors.”

I highly recommend reading the whole article, and I agree whole-heartedly with what she says. Anything I can grow, forage or make for myself and my family means leaving something on a supermarket shelf for someone else who maybe doesn’t have the time, space or skills to do it themselves. It’s not about the impossible goal of complete self-sufficiency; it’s about reducing pressure on systems that other people may rely on more than I do.

And if you too have also been feeling unsettled by what you see and hear in the news, then I strongly recommend sticking a few seeds into the soil, and in doing so, increase your resilience to whatever may be coming.

Have a good weekend, and happy planting x

Moth of the Week: Yellow Horned moth (Achlya flavicornis)

This species is one of the very first moths to ever come to my trap, way back in the spring of 2013. My trap then was a very very basic plastic-bucket-and-upside-down-lightshade contraption, which I then modified over the next several years before I finally invested in a “proper” trap last spring.

The Yellow Horned moth gets its name from the colour of its antennae, although I always think they look much more orange than yellow. It is fairly common throughout Britain, being on the wing in March and April, and is found on heathland and in woodland where the larval foodplants of Silver Birch (Betula pendula) and Downy Birch (Betula pubescens) occur. In the picture below the adult moth is seen sitting on a birch twig in my garden.

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Today’s post is about one particular seasonal event that I eagerly anticipate each year: the appearance of the first fresh green nettle tops. I used to really dislike nettles - I have too many childhood memories of bare legs covered in stinging red lumps. However, I have developed a growing appreciation for them over the last few years as they have a multitude of uses, from food to fibre to medicine to wildlife habitat.

Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) are found in Europe, Asia, North Africa and North America. They thrive in damp, nitrogen-rich habitats: woodlands, fens, ditches, riverbanks, streamsides, and areas associated with human habitation on fertile or enriched soils. Despite being so common – or possibly because of it - they can often be overlooked.

The generic name Urtica comes from the Latin word uro meaning “to burn”, and refers to one of their most distinguishing features. Nettle leaves and stems are covered in little stinging hairs which can be very painful if you accidentally brush against them, but if handled carefully and harvested using gloves and scissors, you can easily avoid being stung. The sting is rendered harmless after plunging in boiling water, or once the nettles have dried out after a day or two. If you do get stung, pressing a scrunched-up dock (Rumex obtusifolius) or plantain (Plantago major) leaf on the affected area can help to soothe it.

While nettles are available almost all year round, it is best to only harvest the fresh growth in spring; later in the year the leaves contain “cystoliths” - calcium oxalate crystals - that make them taste gritty and can cause kidney problems. One of my favourite ways to use these young leaves is in nettle soup, and it is something we look forward to every year. It is a lovely treat after a winter of not many fresh greens.

Nettle soup is really easy to make, and there are many different variations out there. If you’re the sort of person who likes to follow an exact recipe then I apologise, because I tend to use different quantities of things each time I make it, depending on what I can grab from the garden, fridge, and/or kitchen cupboards. I am going to share my very rough recipe though, which is as follows: Gently cook some onion and garlic, then add vegetable stock along with a chopped carrot and some potato to make it a bit more substantial. When the carrot and potato is soft add a good handful of chopped nettles, cook for a further couple of minutes, then blend until smooth. It should be a wonderful fresh green colour. I sometimes also add in sorrel and wild garlic leaves, if they’re available.

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I also love using young nettle leaves in “wild pesto”, along with a combination of chickweed, sorrel, wild garlic, dandelion leaves, fat hen, and whatever else I can get my hands on at the time! Just dunk the nettle leaves in boiling water first, to get rid of the sting.

In herbalism, nettle is classed as a “nutritive” herb, because it is very nutrient-dense and nourishing. There is evidence that they have been used as a natural remedy for over 2000 years1, but it has probably been for much longer.

In her excellent book “The Wilderness Cure”2 Monica Wilde mentions eating nettles several times during her year of only consuming wild food. At one point she describes playing a game called “Desert Island Plants”, the premise of which is you are stranded on an island, with magical soil and climate where anything grows, but you are limited to just ten plants to provide you with all your needs for the rest of your life. Which plants would you choose?

Monica says she always has nettle as one of her top two plants (the other being coconut) as it can provide food, cloth, string, rope, and “a variety of medicines, from an antihistamine and an anti-inflammatory antiarthritic, to a mood tonic and kidney restorative. And, if a Man Friday washes up, it will keep his prostate happy!”

An unusual use for nettles is mentioned in “Healing Threads” by Mary Beith3. She says: “So far as I know, its use as a cure for insomnia was unique to the Highlands [of Scotland]. For this, the nettle leaves were chopped very small and mixed with switched egg white. The mixture was then applied to the temples and forehead.”

Nettles contain Vitamins A, B, C and K, and the minerals iron, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and manganese. They also contain magnesium, which controls brain function. According to an article on Mother Earth News4 a study found that making tea using 500ml of water and 20g of dried nettle leaves, steeped for 30 minutes, contains 76mg of magnesium, which represents about 20-25% of men’s and women’s daily requirements respectively, and is apparently quite remarkable for a beverage.

I have to admit I’m not a big fan of nettle tea (unless I add so much mint I can’t actually taste it!) but they are a vital component of the Spring Herb Beer that I make every year. You can find the recipe for it in this post here.

Feeding nettle seed to chickens is supposed to improve their condition and encourage them to lay. Nettles are dioecious, meaning there are separate male and female plants, so only half the plants you see - the female ones – will have seeds. I find the seeds a bit of a faff to collect, but they are nice dried and added to bread dough. I am yet to see an increase in my egg production though…

Domestic cows that are allowed to roam freely have been observed selectively feeding on nettles after giving birth. It is thought that this is because the iron content can help after blood loss.

Nettles are also great for wildlife. My “Field Guide to the Caterpillars of Great Britain and Ireland”5 book lists over forty butterfly and moth species that utilise nettle as a larval food plant, including Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell and Red Admiral butterflies, and White Ermine, Garden Tiger, Burnished Brass, Beautiful Golden Y, Hebrew Character, and Frosted Orange moths, to name just a few! These are pictured below, from top left to bottom right.

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You can also make plant food from nettles. They are what is known as a “dynamic accumulator” - they take up nutrients from deep in the soil and store it within their leaves. Making nettle plant food is a great way to make these nutrients available to other plants. Just fill a bucket with chopped nettles, top up with water (ideally rain water), and leave for a couple of weeks until it’s nice and smelly. Strain and dilute the liquid, then feed it to your plants. I usually dilute mine using a ratio of approximately 10 parts water to one part nettle liquid, but I often just judge it by eye, depending on how dark brown the liquid is.

Below is a short video I shared on Instagram a couple of years ago showing how I make nettle plant food:

As for fibre, this is something that I definitely want to investigate further! Records of stinging nettles being used to make cloth in Britain date back as far as 13916, but it was a time-consuming process and other fabrics such as linen and hemp became more popular. I would love to try making some rope or string from nettle stems, but it’s something that requires a bit more research. There is a fair amount of information online, but I don’t think I have the time to fall down that particular rabbit-hole right now. Maybe one day I’ll get around to it! (In case anyone asks, I am aware of The Nettle Dress film, but I haven’t seen it yet. I really want to.)

One of my favourite Hans Christian Andersen fairytales is called “The Wild Swans”, and nettles play a central role in the storyline. As with many such tales, there is a beautiful princess, a wicked stepmother, and a curse. In this case, Eliza’s father the king takes a new wife, who is jealous of her stepchildren. She sends Eliza away, and turns her eleven brothers into swans. The only way for Eliza to break the magic spell is to weave them shirts of cloth made from nettles that she must gather from graveyards, something which leads to her being accused of being a witch, and sentenced to death by burning at the stake. Don’t worry though; it all works out in the end!

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

Moth of the Week: Common Nettle-Tap (Anthophila fabiciana)

Considering the subject of this week’s article, it only seems fair to choose a moth that is associated with nettles! The Common Nettle-Tap is small, with a wingspan of just 10-15mm. It’s a day-flying species, and is on the wing from May right through the summer. Large numbers of them can sometimes be seen around nettles, which are the larval foodplant.

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I spent an enjoyable half-hour or so down on my hands and knees in amongst the leaf litter a couple of days ago, photographing the snowdrops. These were taken with my “proper” camera: a Nikon D300s, 50mm f/1.8 lens, and extension tubes so I could get up close and personal. The extension tubes make the depth of field ridiculously shallow, which I really like in these pictures. I picked a few of the flowers and popped them into a little crystal vase on the dining table, to brighten the place up a bit.

On Monday night I was walking the half-mile home back down the track in the darkness and rain after a line-dancing class at the Village Hall (I’m terrible at it but it is really good fun!) and had to step over several newts and toads – they are heading off on their annual migration to their breeding ponds. I hope some of them choose to utilise the new pond we dug in our garden last year.

I love seeing all these seasonal events occurring, and I try to keep my own life in tune with the annual cycle of the seasons, as much as I can.

I’ve been trying to write a post about seasonal living for a while, but I’ve been struggling to find the words. It’s one of those phrases that I come across quite a lot, but what does it actually mean? The first definition that popped up online was “Living seasonally means living in pace with the changing seasons throughout the year.”1 Well, living in a place like this, it can sometimes be impossible to ignore the seasons - especially if they’re blowing past at 70mph and taking your chimney hat with them! And I’m sure you’ve all heard my frequent mentions of cancelled ferries this winter... So how do I decide what would be classed as “seasonal living” and what is just my everyday life? Where do I draw the line between the two? Is there a line between them?

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It is a huge topic – it’s life, after all! - but at the same time I think a lot of it is really quite obvious. For example, I cycle to and from work a lot less frequently in winter because it is dark, wet, windy, and the roads can be slippery and dangerous. I grow a lot more food in summer because, well, that’s when a lot more things grow! But then, I buy bananas year-round so am I actually a fraud for even considering writing this piece?!

Eating what is available from my local landscape (including my garden) at any given time is probably the biggest way in which I try to live in tune with the seasons. Walking around the fruit and vegetable aisles of my local supermarket with their plastic crates piled high with produce imported from all around the world, I’d be hard-pressed to tell what time of year it was. But a trip to the “garden supermarket” leaves me in no doubt whatsoever.

At the moment we are eating a lot of soups and stews made using kale and sunchokes harvested fresh from the earth, garnished with the first small tender wild garlic leaves from around the base of the pear tree. There are just a handful of winter squash left sitting on the dining room windowsill, and we’re steadily munching our way through the jars of food I preserved last year.

Seasonal living encourages patience and letting go of control: no matter how much I might crave a fresh sun-warmed strawberry in March, it just isn’t going to happen! I have to wait and trust nature, the weather, and the garden, to do their thing.

But rather than writing about what I do to try and “live seasonally”, I think I want to write about how it makes me feel.

I suppose the most important part of living seasonally for me is the feeling of connection it gives me to my local landscape; the sense of belonging that only comes from knowing a place intimately; from paying attention to the environment and how it changes throughout the year.

By its very nature, seasonal living is repetitive: the same things will happen at (roughly) the same time each year, and in turn, I will do the same things at the same time, year after year. There is a certain amount of comfort to this (and maybe it is one of the reasons why I enjoy moth trapping so much? I love seeing old familiar faces popping up in the trap each year.)

Winter storms will inevitably wash mountains of seaweed up onto the shore, and I will gather it up by the wheelbarrow-load and pile it onto the vegetable beds where it will rot down, ready for another growing season. In spring I will forage for fresh greens – chickweed, wild garlic, nettles and others – and sow lots of seeds. During summer I will be busy in the garden and I will start preserving the first crops, something which carries over into autumn when every spare inch of space in the kitchen is covered in produce waiting to be eaten, canned, dried, or frozen. Then comes winter again, and snuggling down by the fire... I spend more time reading, planning, and dreaming in winter than at other times of the year. It is a slow, quiet season, but I can feel my energy levels starting to increase with the daylight, and with each new green shoot.

To some people, this sort of repetitiveness year after year may sound incredibly boring, but I love it. I sometimes feel that modern life is trying to turn us humans into machines, but living seasonally allows me to feel more in touch with the animal I know I am.

It grounds me, it roots me, it increases my sense of belonging to this place. It makes me slow down and pay attention to what is happening around me. I notice things changing throughout the year, and I can anticipate when and where things will happen.

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Over the last fourteen years I have walked up and down this track hundreds – no, thousands – of times; first pushing a buggy and trying to avoid all the potholes; then holding the hand of a toddler and stopping to poke about in every ditch and splash in every puddle; now with an almost-as-tall-as-me teenager who is still equally keen on grubbing about in ditches looking for newts.

I know this little piece of land. I know where the cuckoo-flower will bloom in the verges, and each April we’ll go out to see who can spot the first Orange-Tip butterfly egg hiding just below the flowers. I know where the sundews will reappear on the banks of the ditches, their sticky leaves waiting to catch unsuspecting insects to provide the plants with nutrients not available from the poor soil in which they grow.

This paying attention to the details of nature’s calendar means I don’t miss out on all these small seasonal joys. Things I have enjoyed noticing over the last week or two include yellow hazel catkins blowing gently in the breeze; song thrushes, robins, and blackbirds singing from the bare branches; the way the sun rises above the mainland hills just a little bit earlier and just a little bit further north each morning; and the bright orange flowers on the witch hazels, which look like they could be the offspring of the pompom on the hat I knitted for my husband a few years ago!

So there you go. I’m not sure if this ended up being so much about living seasonally as being about slowing down, noticing, and a sense of belonging. But maybe that’s what seasonal living actually is? Or maybe it’s all just “life”, and it’s silly to always try to label and compartmentalise things.

Moth of the Week: Stigmella aurella

For this week’s featured moth, I’m sticking with the theme of paying attention to the small things around you, although I have chosen a species that I have never actually seen!

There still aren’t very many moths out and about at this time of year, but there are signs of them if you look closely enough. The white squiggle pictured below is called a “leaf mine” and it is the trace left behind by a tiny little micromoth caterpillar that lived within the layers of this bramble leaf, before it pupated and emerged as an adult moth. Different species of leafminer leave different trails, and I’m pretty sure this one was made by Stigmella aurella. You can see how the trail has changed as the caterpillar grew, starting off narrow at the top and getting wider down towards my thumb. I have never seen the adult moth!

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“You don’t have a slug problem, you have a duck deficiency.”

The above quote by permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison is one of my favourites, although it has a slight flaw. Since first getting ducks over ten years ago and realising just how great they are, I think that no matter how many I have I will ALWAYS feel like I have a duck deficiency, no matter the slug situation…

At the moment we have four ducks: Clover, Quacky, Cherry and Bramble (more about her later!). Three are Khaki Campbells, while Clover is an Aylesbury x Pekin. In the past we also had a couple of Indian Runner ducks which we absolutely loved, but unfortunately they weren’t really all that well suited to our weather – the poor things would blow over in the wind!

All our ducks are important members of the Garden Maintenance Team. They don’t get a free run of the garden all the time – they have their own area with a pond where they spend most of their time – but we do let them through regularly to carry out their slug-munching duties. To be honest I haven’t actually seen many slugs this past year, so mostly they’re let through to the main garden for their flappy-footed entertainment value. While their webbed feet can flatten delicate plants, they’re nowhere near as destructive as the scratchy-toed chickens.

There are other benefits to keeping ducks. When looking for food they probe their beaks down into the soil, helping to aerate it. They produce a LOT of manure, which is rich in potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous, and therefore good for vegetables. When I clean out their house I add the bedding to the compost pile to rot down, before spreading it on the raised beds.

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In hot, dry weather I position containers of water around the garden. As well as providing water for the ducks to drink, they also like to splash it around which waters the ground. And if they’re hanging out in a particular area, they will poop more there, fertilising the soil. I like to move the containers around the bases of the various fruit trees, so they get an extra bit of watering and fertilising.

The ducks aren’t such prolific layers as our hens are, and last year they all stopped laying at the same time in August. However, they then started up again unexpectedly in December and we were getting 2-4 eggs per day until a couple of weeks ago. This was a very welcome surprise as we often have a total egg-break during mid-winter, as the hens have usually all stopped by then as well.

Compared to chicken eggs, duck eggs have a much bigger yolk so I always prefer to use them to make mayonnaise. They also make excellent scrambled egg, and are great in baking. The only way I haven’t really enjoyed eating them is fried: I find that the white tends to go a bit rubbery.

In return for this pest control, fertiliser, entertainment, and lovely eggs, the ducks get food, shelter, and a nice place to live Everyone seems pretty happy with this arrangement!

As with any animals that we bring into our lives, we have a responsibility to look after them for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, come rain or shine. The ducks need let out of their house every morning, and shut in again every evening to keep them safe from predators (we’re lucky not to have many predators on the island, but we have had the occasional problem with American Mink in the past). When it’s dark and sleeting this really isn’t the most fun job, especially as the ducks can get a bit spooked by the wind so sometimes we end up chasing them round the willow tree a few times with a torch before they actually go into their house!

Last week we noticed that Bramble, one of our Khaki Campbells, had a bit of a limp. We caught her and gave her a bath in the sink to get her feet all clean (February is “mud season” around here) and upon examination we noticed that she had a bit of bumblefoot, a relatively common condition that can affect ducks if they get a cut or scratch on their webs. I also removed a small spiky thorn that was hiding in a fold of her webs, and was probably quite uncomfortable. Her foot looked a little bit swollen around where the thorn had been so I picked some Ribwort Plantain (Plantago lanceolata) from the garden and made a poultice, which we held in place with a bandage around her foot. She looked very cute! She slept in a box in the dining room for the next few evenings, and spent the days in a pen in the polytunnel as her limp improved.

After a couple of days in “Duck Hospital” I went up to the polytunnel to check on her, and found her standing outside of her little pen. She then flew straight out of the door, ran up the hill and flew down over the fence into the duck run to join her friends. I guess that means she was feeling better! She’s now happily squelching about in the mud with the others.

Moth of the Week: Pale Brindled Beauty (Phigalia pilosia)

This species, pictured below, is often one of the first to turn up in my trap each year. As with several other moths that emerge in winter, the females are wingless and flightless. The males are on the wing from January to March, and seek out the females who have climbed up trees. They are found in a range of habitats, including, gardens, broadleaved woodland and scrubland.

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed so far - I bought myself some paintbrushes to use in my “100 Pages Challenge”.

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Some of the statistics relating to clothing and overconsumption are quite shocking: Apparently there are currently enough clothes on the planet to clothe the next six generations. Thanks to the rise of fast - and more recently ultra-fast - fashion we are buying more clothing than in the past (60% more than 15 years ago), but keeping it for half as long. In fact, one UK study found that clothing is only worn an average of 7 times before it’s discarded, and in the UK alone, an estimated 350,000 tonnes of clothing is dumped annually.

Worldwide, 100 billion pieces of clothing are produced per year, and 60% of these are made from plastic (such as polyester or acrylic). These items shed microfibres every time they are washed, contributing to the global microplastics problem. Microplastics have been found in the food we eat, the water we drink, in human brains and testicles... Some clothing has also been found to contain toxic chemicals, several times higher than the safe limits.

We have too many clothes, and they may even be poisoning us! And that’s before we even take into consideration the dangerous conditions many garment workers have to endure...

The average person wears 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time. I am definitely guilty of wearing some items more than others: I rotate through a couple of pairs of jeans, a favourite dress and skirt, a few hand-knitted jumpers, and a handful of long-sleeved tshirts (I’ll move back to the short-sleeved end of the drawer round about Easter!). These items all get a lot of wear, and I want them to last a lot longer than that reported figure of 7 wears. Because of where I live, popping to a shop to buy a couple of new items isn’t really an option, and I’m not a fan of online clothes shopping (I want to try something on before I buy it).

And this is where mending comes in: to prolong the life of my clothes. Other than sewing on the occasional escaped button, it is something I only really got into after my son was born. He would (and still does!) wear holes through the knees of his trousers at a ridiculous rate, so learning how to patch them became something of a necessity. Basic repairs like this are actually really straightforward, but I never particularly enjoyed it until I stumbled across “visible mending”, which changed my whole opinion of it – I didn’t need to make my mends perfect and invisible; I could make them into a feature!1 This gave me so much more freedom to be creative, and it seems animal-themed mends have become my specialty.

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In fact, mending changed my whole attitude towards clothing. Before buying any item – new or second-hand - as well as asking myself if I actually need it, I now also ask “Do I like it enough to spend time mending it in the future? Is it good enough quality to be worth mending?” I only buy things if the answer to these questions is “Yes”. This has resulted in me buying far fewer clothes, but buying better quality items. I think this is a really important mind-shift. Clothing shouldn’t be treated as throwaway; we should value it, look after it, treat it with respect.

It’s pretty clear we can’t continue with our current levels of overconsumption: the photos of mountains of discarded fast fashion in the Global South are horrifying. In a world full of advertisements constantly telling us we need more more more, mending is an act of rebellion. It is a way of saying, “Actually, I don’t need more. What I have already is good enough.”

I know I’m not going to save the world single-handedly by darning my socks and patching my jeans, but it’s a step in the right direction – a step towards the sort of world I want to live in.

If you’re going to do serious amounts of darning I have a handy hint for you: I highly recommend getting hold of a Speedweve, or darning loom (pictured below). This is an inexpensive tool, available in many places online, which really does make darning holes so much quicker and easier.

Thank you for reading, and happy mending!

Moth of the Week

I’ve decided to start a new feature in these newsletters called “Moth of the Week”, where I will share a photo and a little bit of information about a particular species. I will try to choose a species that will be around at this time of year, but because this week’s post was all about mending I have decided to start with the micro-moth Tinea semifulvella, which belongs to the same family as the dreaded clothes moths. Of the 63 species in this family, only a small handful actually causes any damage to our clothes, and it is the larvae, not the adult moths. Not that that makes them any less annoying...!

Clothes moths evolved in the wild to feed on fur, hair, wool and feathers. We’ve created a perfect habitat for them in our homes and wardrobes, so I guess we can’t really blame them for taking advantage of the situation! Tinea semifulvella is not one of the clothes-munchers, instead being found in woodland, hedgerows, gardens and grassland, rather than in houses. The larvae feed on feathers in birds’ nests. I think it’s a rather pretty little thing.

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The easiest way to tell the two species apart is to look at their dorsal and pectoral fins: in a Conger Eel the dorsal fin (the one on the back) starts just slightly behind the pectoral fins, while in a Common Eel there is quite a large gap between them.

Common Eels have quite complicated – and rather fascinating – life cycles. The five stages of their development (larva, glass eel, elver, yellow eel and silver eel) were originally thought to all be different species.

The stage most commonly encountered is the yellow eel, which is the feeding and growing phase found in rivers, lakes and estuaries. These are typically around 45-65cm long, but can reach over a metre. As they approach maturity, at an age of 4-10 years, they change into silver eels and migrate down rivers to the sea in autumn.

Silver eels don’t stay around the coast for long, but instead migrate several thousand miles to what is thought to be their main breeding ground in the Sargasso Sea. Eggs are laid and fertilised in the deep water there, although no-one has ever seen a spawning eel or knows exactly where it occurs! The adults then all die. The Sargasso Sea itself is unusual, having the unique distinction of being the only named sea with no shoreline. It is an area of the Atlantic Ocean, bounded by four currents: the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Current, Canary Current, and North Equatorial Current, which form an ocean gyre.

The eggs hatch during March and April and the tiny transparent leaf-shaped larva, known as a leptocephalus, rises to the surface to feed on plankton. Over the next year they gradually float back to Europe in the Gulf Steam, by which time they have developed into glass eels. They then change into elvers and make their way up rivers, before turning into yellow eels when they have found a suitable habitat. The yellow eels spend the next few years growing and feeding before turning into silver eels, and the cycle continues. I am not entirely sure but I think the ones we have encountered will be at the elver stage, and are about to head up the freshwater stream that enters the oyster bay near where we have been seeing them.

Like those eels, when I was younger I did feel the desire to travel to far-flung places. At age eighteen I went off to New Zealand on a gap year between school and university – pretty much as far away from my home in the north-east of Scotland as it’s possible to get! Incidentally, I met my husband there: we were both volunteering with the Department of Conservation in the Bay of Islands. These days, I’ve lost the urge to travel and instead I am trying to become more and more like a limpet.

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Limpets are one of my favourite seashore creatures. When I studied Coastal Marine Biology at university (yes, I pretty much have a degree in rockpooling!) I would always, given the option, choose limpets when we had to do fieldwork. They may not be as active as the eels I’ve written about above, but in their own way, they are interesting little animals.

You’d be hard pressed to not come across limpets on a trip to the shore here, their pointy shells reminiscent of groups of tents camped out on the rocks. Limpets are gastropods, a class of molluscs which contains between 65,000 and 80,000 living species – the second-largest class of animals after the insects. Gastropods include slugs and snails, and the name comes from the Greek words gaster and pous, meaning stomach and foot.

After a planktonic larval stage limpets settle on rocks in the intertidal zone, where each one produces a custom-made “home scar”. This is a depression on the rock where it lives, formed by abrasion between the rock and their shell. This creates a perfect, air-tight seal to ensure the limpet doesn’t lose moisture and dry out when exposed to the air at low tide. Sometimes I spot empty rings on the rocks, made by long-dead limpets, and when I find an empty limpet shell washed up on the beach I think it is beautiful to think that somewhere out there, there is a little piece of the world that fits that shell perfectly.

Limpets clamp down firmly onto the rocks using a combination of suction and sticky mucus. If you’ve ever tried to prise one off a rock, you’ll know that they hold on VERY tightly! Their shell is excellent protection against predators such as seabirds and crabs, but they also have another defence mechanism: they can lift up their shell and stomp it down hard, giving a painful nip on the arm to any starfish that thinks it might be able to get a quick meal. The shape of their shell gives a clue to their surroundings: taller and pointier on sheltered shores; shorter and flatter in more exposed places.

Limpets feed at high tide when they are submerged underwater, by scraping algae off the rocks using their toothed tongue, called a radula. The teeth on this radula have been found to be made from an iron-based mineral (called goethite) and protein composite, and it is the strongest biological material ever tested. They graze on algal sporelings, particularly those of Ulva and Fucus species. Their grazing activity plays an important role in the ecology of the seashore, by ensuring that no one species becomes dominant (this is an example of the “Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis”, where diversity is highest when disturbance is just right: not too high, not too low). They tend not to travel more than a metre or so from their home scar on these feeding expeditions, and find their way back by following a trail of mucus they leave behind them.

Sometimes you will see limpets with little frondy tufts or patches of encrusting algae growing on their shells. I like to imagine them having conversations with each other about the latest fashionable seaweed headgear.

You may be wondering why I want to be a limpet! I do already have a couple of things in common with them –I live by the sea and regularly find bits of seaweed in my hair!

Limpets are completely at one with their environment, a level of connectedness I aspire to. I’m anthropomorphising hugely here, but I admire their ability to hunker down and weather whatever storms life throws at them.

When I first heard the term “home scar” a couple of decades ago, I didn’t really like it – I just thought it sounded a bit violent. And describing something as “a scar on the landscape” is never a positive thing, is it? But you can also think of a scar as being somewhere that healing has occurred, so by that logic, a home scar could be a place of recovery, comfort, and safety, rather than violence. Over the years I have well and truly settled into my home scar here, and I don’t particularly like straying too far from it. My house is my shell: the strong stone walls protect my soft body from the elements. (As I write this, the wind is howling in the chimney as yet another storm batters against the windows, coating them with salty spray.) I have found my rock, and I am sticking to it!

I haven’t quite got as far as getting all my food from within a few metres of my doorstep, but I am trying to make my garden as productive as possible, and to leave my mark on this landscape in as positive a way as I can. I want to be as limpet-esque as I can be, by living in ways that benefit and increase the diversity of my local environment. As with everything, it is a work in progress.

If you’d like to see some of my other posts about sealife, you can click here to find out more about oysters, or here to read out about an alien-looking creature my son and I found washed up on the shore last summer!

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

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This time last year we were coming out of a four-day-long powercut, thanks to Storm Eowyn. Powercuts can happen at any time of year here, not just due to winter weather: the cable between the island and the mainland could be dredged up by a careless fishing boat, a transformer on one of the electricity poles could explode... In the almost-fourteen years I’ve lived here we’ve had two four-day powercuts, a handful of 24-48 hour ones, and multiple ones just lasting a couple of hours. I like to think I’m pretty good at coping with most things so while anything under 24 hours doesn’t really bother me, as someone who is used to having electricity all the time at the flick of a switch four days was definitely pushing the limits of comfort! It’s now become our benchmark, I guess, of what we want to be prepared for.

We check the weather forecast almost obsessively in winter, to see if it looks like the ferry will be running to get the Boy to – and more importantly, home from – school on the mainland. Any prediction of high winds is a sign to get ready, just in case! We obviously can’t predict a powercut, but Tuesday just past seemed like a likely candidate: winds of up to 66mph were forecast for much of the day as Storm Chandra popped in to say hello. Monday afternoon was spent collecting up the random buckets and other stuff that gathers and somehow multiplies in the garden, and stowing it away safely in the shed.

We don’t have the freezing temperatures that some parts of the northern hemisphere have experienced lately, but I woke up in the morning to the sound of the east wind rattling the roof slates, and when I looked out the window, clouds of seaspray were blowing across the field from the waves crashing on the rocks.

We are generally quite well-prepared now for this sort of thing, and are able to provide pretty easily for our three main priorities of light, heat, and food during a power outage. Life is made so much easier by the fact we have solar panels and batteries, so while we obviously don’t get electricity from the grid during a powercut, we can still make use of whatever the panels are currently producing plus anything that is stored in the batteries, via the backup port on the inverter. We try to conserve this electricity, especially if we’re in the short dark days of winter when we’re not generating much. We keep the fridge-freezer plugged in and can charge up torches and batteries but don’t use the heating, electric hot water heater, or any high-energy appliances. We’re in the process of getting a transfer switch installed so that we can still use our “normal” wall sockets and lights during a powercut, but it’s going to be a couple of months until our preferred electrician is able to make it over (see my previous post about things sometimes taking a while - tradespeople included!)

Until that happens, we rely on candles and torches for our lighting when the grid is down. Every so often I have a candle-making session, where I melt down all the random bits of wax I have lying around and make them into new tealights. A few years ago I bought some reusable tealight cases, wicks and those little metal wick holders for this purpose. While you’ll need new wick each time you make new candles, if you’re careful you can reuse the metal tealight cases and wick holders from standard tealights a few times. I also buy boxes of taper candle “seconds” from Etsy which have tiny little blemishes but still burn absolutely fine, and I make sure I always have a good supply of them. I also make sure I know where they are so I can find them in the dark, and have plenty matches for lighting them!

Last week my son melted down the wax outer from one of our Christmas cheeses and made a couple of tealights, as a bit of an experiment. He should have been at school but the ferry was off - yet again – so I’m putting it down as a Chemistry / Home Ec homeschool activity! The wax didn’t really work all that well in candles so I’ll add it to my “firelighter pot” where it will get mixed with pencil sharpenings, old matchsticks, dried orange peel etc and made into firelighters at some point.

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When it comes to food, keeping the fridge-freezer plugged in and running off whatever limited power we have is our main priority and not having to worry so much about it was a huge weight off my mind during last year’s four-day powercut, but if it’s midwinter and dark then there’s always the possibility that we may run out of electricity from the batteries. Fridges and freezers both hold their temperature best when full. If there is space in your freezer you can fill the gaps with plastic bottles full of water which will freeze solid and help keep the temperature down, although this obviously has to be done *before* the power goes off! During powercuts it’s best not to open your freezer at all and open the fridge as little as possible.

Power outages are when all those hours spent with my pressure canner pay off: I have jars and jars of shelf-stable soup and vegetables that just need reheated. I don’t really want to have to spend a lot of time working by candle- or torch-light in the kitchen to produce a meal! We have a gas cooker that runs off propane cylinders (there’s no mains gas on the island). The hob works fine without electricity; you just need to light the rings with a match rather than the little clicky button on the cooker. The gas oven does need electricity – I guess it has a pump or something in it that needs power. If we desperately wanted to use the oven we could plug it in to the backup supply, but it’s not a priority when we’re trying to conserve electricity.

We can also heat things using the woodburning stove in the dining room: toasting bread in it using our old brass toasting fork is something of a novelty for my son, and we make hot chocolate and popcorn on top of the stove too as a treat during powercuts. As an extra backup we have a small gas camping stove with spare canisters, and a kelly kettle to boil water. The kelly kettle is great – it just needs a handful of twigs from the garden to fuel it.

For heat, we’ve got electric storage heaters which don’t work during a powercut, so most rooms get pretty cold. The stove1 in the dining room is our main source of heating for that room, and we always have plenty wood for it in the woodstore. If it looks like it’s going to be stormy, extra logs are brought in and stacked up around the stove: it’s not far from the front door to the woodstore, but when it’s chucking down and blowing a hoolie, it’s far enough! We then spend our time in the dining room, rather than the other colder rooms. Keeping curtains drawn helps keep in heat, as do draught excluders at the bottoms of doors.

Blankets and hot water bottles are great for keeping you warm, and can make going to bed in a cold room a much nicer experience. We heat the water for them using either the stove, hob, or kelly kettle. Hot water bottles don’t last forever though, as I discovered recently when I emptied my son’s one and pieces of rubber fell out of it into the sink. I generally prefer to buy things second-hand but wasn’t sure about a hot water bottle as I wouldn’t know how much it had been used or how long it would last. I managed to find an unused one, still with labels attached, on Vinted for half the price of if I’d got it in a shop. It’s got a white fluffy rabbit cover, and in case anyone’s interested, my one is a long skinny one with a fluffy sausage dog cover!

Finally, what about entertainment when there’s no power? During the day, we do what we usually do anyway and if the weather allows, try to spend as much time outside as possible: we go for walks up the track and around the shore, we play in the garden, we chop more firewood (they do say that wood keeps you warm multiple times!), and we sometimes take the kelly kettle down to the beach and make ourselves a cup of tea there.

If it’s dark or just too horrible to go outside then we stay in the warm dining room and do jigsaws, read books by torchlight, or play cards and board games. Our favourite games are Sorry, Rummikub, and Labyrinth. We’ve recently added Ticket to Ride and Mycelia2 to our collection.

This post isn’t supposed to be any sort of survival guide at all, but if, like me, you’re used to having unlimited electricity at the touch of a button, I highly recommend being ready for when it’s suddenly not available. I think everyone should have, as a bare minimum:

• Backup sources of light such as torches (with spare batteries) and candles (and a way to light them!)

• A way to heat food and water, such as a gas camping stove (with spare gas cylinders), and food that can be easily heated without too much effort (tins of soup etc).

• Some sort of source of heat, such as a pile of blankets and a hot water bottle that you can fill with water heated on your camping stove.

I’m sure I’ve missed other things from that little list above - please let me know in the comments below if there’s anything else you would add as a “powercut essential”. And by the way, our power didn’t actually go off at all on Tuesday. It is *always* good to be prepared though! Hopefully we are now getting towards the end of storm season, but you never know…

Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend everyone.

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

Buy Me A Coffee

Things like rural poverty, low wages, and a lack of investment in services are obviously real issues that do have an impact on places like this, but I mean this to be more of a light-hearted rant (if such a thing is possible!) so I haven’t mentioned them, apart from now.

Just like my post last summer about Living Sustainably on a Little Island, not all of these are exclusive to island living – some of them will apply equally to any small or rural community.

So, let’s begin!

All plans are ferry-dependent. All plans that involve going to the mainland, that is! Storms, mechanical difficulties, or issues with navigation lights (the current ongoing saga) can all impact the ferry’s schedule. Especially during winter, it is liable to disruption due to the weather, so you will spend a ridiculous amount of time checking the weather forecast. Even on a calm sunny day, a thick bank of fog can come rolling up the sound to thwart your plans, leaving you stuck on the wrong side of the water. (This happened a couple of years ago on the annual Gardens Open Day – it was a beautiful summer’s day on the island but we were surrounded by a ring of fog so nobody could get here because the ferry was cancelled!) If the weather is co-operating, there’s still the possibility the ferry will be full because the bin lorry or milk tanker or a tractor with a trailer is in front of you in the queue, so you have to wait for the next one. Being ferry-dependent can mean that...

School can be an issue. There is a primary school here on the island, but high-school age kids have to go to the mainland. When we moved here, I’m sure I remember someone saying that the schoolkids usually missed two or three days of school each winter due to the weather. As I type this my son is pootling about in the garden instead of being at school, because the first four ferries were cancelled this morning. He has already missed five days so far this year – and it’s only the 23^rd of January! But hey, he can grow food and catch fish, and he’s good at fixing things. Everything else is going to be done by AI soon anyway, so he doesn’t really need school, does he?!

There’s a limited number of people to choose from. With the population of this island being around 170 people, choice of who to be friends with is much more limited than in a city! At the moment there are a good number of people living here that I absolutely adore, some I’m neutral about, and others that are a bit “meh.” Even if you don’t get on with someone, you’re quite likely to bump into them in the shop or pub at some point, so it’s best to just smile and say hello to everyone! These people are my community, and even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, they’re the people who will be here if there’s ever any sort of emergency. And depending on the type of emergency, I do have a shortlist of who I would eat first… Related to this (not the eating bit)...

People can know more about your life than you do! This can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. It’s great if people know what’s going on in your life so they can offer help and support if necessary, but sometimes if people don’t know something, they’ll just fill in the gaps themselves.

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Long, tiring day at work? Can’t be bothered cooking dinner? Fancy a takeaway? Tough! You can’t just order something from just eat or deliveroo or whoever else is available on the mainland. Thankfully, options aren’t completely non-existent, but are pretty limited during the winter. A local chef and his wife do takeaway pizza from their kitchen sometimes, and there’s a seafood takeaway by the shop which is open occasionally at this time of year (both are open much more frequently during the summer). The pizzas are great, as are the prawn baps and salmon bagels! Seasonality in general is an issue, with things being open much more during the busy tourist season.

Tourists. This is a beautiful island, and people want to visit it. That’s great! Several local businesses rely on tourists. The vast majority of visitors I’ve spoken to over the years have been lovely people who just want a nice relaxing holiday spent wandering around, visiting beaches, and enjoying a drink in the pub. But sometimes people go into “tourist mode” and completely forget that people live here and have to get on with their day-to-day lives, so please don’t wander aimlessly down the middle of the road, and get out of the way when there’s a car coming towards you!

Fancy a trip to the cinema? Tough! You’ll have to wait three months for the Screen Machine – a cinema on the back of a truck that travels around rural Scotland – to visit. Okay, you could go to the mainland, but film screening times often don’t fit in with ferries. And with the price of cinema snacks these days, who can afford to have to stay overnight somewhere too?!

Deliveries can take forever to arrive. And annoyingly, sometimes Amazon is the only place that will deliver something without adding on a ridiculous “island surcharge”. Bezos does not need my money and I really dislike giving any of it to him! Some things you just can’t get delivered here: when we bought George, our tortoise, we had to get him delivered to my in-laws on the mainland, and then my husband went over to collect him. (He has little legs and it would have taken him a long time to walk here, plus I’m not sure if he would have been allowed on the ferry unattended...) And finally…

Mud, glorious mud. Now this is one that could definitely apply to places other than islands, but Oh. My. Goodness. You will spend nine months of the year wading through mud, and it gets EVERYWHERE. When we moved into our house, it had a cream carpet in the porch. I have no idea how the previous tenant had managed to keep it clean, because within about a month of us living here, it was brown. We replaced it with something more practical pretty quickly.

So there you have it – a bit of the reality of living on a little island. I hope nobody interprets this as me being grumpy, bitter, and hating my life, because like I said at the start, I do love it here and would not want to live anywhere else!

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

Buy Me A Coffee

It has been a mild, wet and windy winter so far, which seems to be the new normal here. There have only been a handful of mornings when the ground has been frosty and the duck pond has had a thin coating of ice. The ducks are unfazed by this, and weren’t bothered either by the light dusting of snow we received at the start of the month. The chickens, on the other hand, were most unimpressed!

Winter for me is mostly about preparing the garden for the coming growing season. The weather generally hasn’t been conducive to spending hours at a time outside, but there are still a few things that need done. The empty vegetable beds have been covered with a thick layer of seaweed, brought up from the shore one wheelbarrow-load at a time. The seaweed creates a barrier between the soil surface and the incessant rain we’ve been having lately, preventing the soil from being washed away, as well as adding organic matter and nutrients that may have been depleted during the previous growing season back into the ground. Just below the surface, the earthworms and other invertebrates are busy breaking it down. I’ll also add a layer of homemade compost to the soil when I start planting things out in spring.

There is still a small amount of harvesting to do in January. I have two different varieties of perennial kale (Daubenton’s and Taunton Dean) and they are providing us with fresh greenery at the moment. I have a couple of Ruby Chard plants which aren’t looking too healthy right now, so I’ll probably chop them right down and feed the leaves to the chickens. They should start producing new leaves once the days have lengthened a bit more.

The main crop that gets harvested at this time of year is Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem Artichokes. After an incredibly poor yield in 2024/25 I’m pleased to report that they are back to their usual levels of production, i.e. so many more than we can eat! This month I’ve canned 5 litres of Sunchoke and Potato soup, and 8 pints of Sunchoke chunks to use in stews etc in the future. We’ve also regularly been eating them roasted, which I think is my favourite way. I’ve dug up approximately 6.5kg so far from their 1m² bed, and there’s still quite a lot to go! Once I’ve harvested the rest of them I’ll replant a few of the nicest, smoothest ones, then add a layer of seaweed to this bed too.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment – or maybe just a fool! – I have continued to keep track of the weights of everything I’ve been harvesting. I can’t help it; the blank pages in the notebook were sitting there looking at me! Plus, I want to know if last year’s total of 57% of our total fruit and veg requirements was a good, bad, or average year, so I need more data.

Last July I wrote about making dandelion root coffee from some plants I weeded out of my vegetable beds. During the winter dandelions store energy in the form of starch in their roots, so at this time of year they are much chunkier than during the summer. A couple of weeks ago I dug up a few that I had deliberately not removed from my onion bed last year, and made myself some more coffee. The roots were certainly much bigger than last time, but it’s a good thing this isn’t the only thing I drink as I would need to grow an awful lot more dandelions to keep me going. Once it was properly dried and powdered, there really wasn’t very much in the jar!

A quick stroll around the garden this morning revealed Rhubarb and autumn-planted Garlic popping up through their layers of seaweed, and lots of buds on the Blackcurrant bushes.

One thing I try NOT to do in winter is tidy the garden too much. Many insects survive the colder months by hiding inside dried hollow plant stems, or amongst piles of fallen leaves and twigs on the ground. It may look a bit messy, but these are important habitats for invertebrates. Several species of moth overwinter as pupa buried in the soil, so it’s best not to dig over your beds at this time of year. Apart from adding that layer of seaweed I mentioned earlier, I try to leave the soil as undisturbed as possible as excessive digging can also damage the soil structure.

Early-flowering plants are a welcome source of nectar for any insects that pop out on mild, sunny days. I have a pale pink heather bush in my garden that has been flowering since December, and it is a bumblebee magnet in early spring.

There are a few indoor garden-related jobs to do. I sorted through my box of seeds last weekend to see what I need to buy for this growing season: just carrots, parsnips and onions, I think. I usually buy onion sets rather than seeds, but I really must try growing them from seed some time!

This year I will again buy my seeds from Seeds of Scotland, a relatively new company based just north of Inverness. Their vegetable, herb and flower seeds are grown using organic practices, and they grow a selection of Scottish heritage varieties as well as other varieties from elsewhere that are well-suited to the Scottish climate. A gardening friend once told me that for best results (in the UK at least) you should try to get seeds that were grown to the north-east of where you are, and Seeds of Scotland fits that criteria. I had good success with their peas, beetroot and uchiki kuri squash last year, so I’m happy to buy from them again.

I have a few new things to try this year, which are the result of the annual “seeds for oysters” swap I do each year with some friends I met through Instagram. (I wrote about this in my recent post about The Non-Monetary Economy.) The latest parcel contained a good selection: broad and runner bean mixes, Peppermint Chard, Tartary Buckwheat, Sculpit, Tiger Nuts, and rooted cuttings of Chilean Guava and Saskatoon Berry. There was also an early variety of mange tout called “Fried Welten”, which I’ll plant into the polytunnel soon.

It’s always tempting to plant seeds too early, but I will be holding off until the end of the month before digging the propagator out from the cupboard under the stairs, and planting my chilli seeds in it. They’re always the first ones I sow, as they require a long growing period. My biggest challenge with them is preventing the seedlings from becoming etiolated due to insufficient light – oh for a south-facing windowsill! The variety of chilli I grow is a Bulgarian heirloom variety called “Luti Kombichki”, and the seeds first came to me as the result of a previous oyster swap!

Finally, this weekend I am planning on going “Orchard Wassailing” with some friends. This is a pagan tradition I’ve heard of but have never taken part in, with it being much more popular in the apple orchards of southern England rather than here in Scotland. The word “wassail” comes from the Old English ‘waes hael’ meaning ‘good health’ or ‘be well’. It takes place around either the 6^th of January – the traditional “Twelfth Night” – or the 17^th January, the “Old Twelfth Night” from the Julian calendar before it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar in 1752. The time between Hallowe’en and the end of the Christmas period is a time when the veil between the human world and the spirit world is believed to be at its thinnest, reaching a peak on Twelfth Night.

At the heart of it, wassailing is a fertility ritual for orchards to try and get a good harvest the following autumn. It involves a lot of singing, dancing and drum-banging to dispel the last of any spirits which may be lingering and causing harm. Offerings of cider are made to the trees, to encourage their fertility for the coming season. We’re going to do it in my garden, and I’ll let you know in autumn if it works!

I hope you all have a good weekend, whatever you’re up to. Thanks for reading and take care x

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

Buy Me A Coffee

There have been exceptions over the years, such as drawing birthday and anniversary cards for my son and husband, but mostly I have instead spent my non-working time doing other, more “useful” activities: growing food, knitting jumpers and socks, and the like. While I suppose those are still creative pursuits, they’re different to just sitting down quietly and producing something that is entirely for myself, and doesn’t necessarily have any “purpose” in the wider world.

So, at my request, my husband gave me a blank notebook as a Solstice gift, purchased from a local art shop. My aim is to regularly make time for creativity, even just five or ten minutes at a time, and hopefully by the end of the year this book will be full of drawings and doodles. I’ve decided to call this The 100 Pages Project, as I feel that if it has a name, I will be much more likely to stick with it! That’s only two pages per week to fill the book over the next twelve months, which I don’t think is an unreasonable goal.

I have to say that I’m not really a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions – I’m just not convinced that the cold, dark, dreary days of mid-winter are a good time to be making decisions you then feel obliged to stick to for the rest of the year, or abandon and then feel guilty about... I do, however, want to spend less time looking at screens this year, and judging by the number of posts I’ve come across on Substack recently about living a more “analogue” life, it seems that there are a lot of people out there who feel the same! I’m hoping this project - I’m definitely NOT calling it a resolution! - will help me achieve this goal by giving me something to do with my hands other than scrolling, and is something I’ll be easily able to stick with as it doesn’t require a set amount of time each day and can fit in around other activities. And if the book takes more than a year to fill, that’s fine too!

I’m looking forward to having a go with all sorts of different media - watercolours, pencils, charcoal etc - and I have only one rule: I’m not allowed to remove pages from the book. Even if I really don’t like what I’ve just produced, it has to stay! This way I’ll be able to look back, and hopefully see an improvement in my skills.

Now, let’s have a look at what I’ve done so far!

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Page 1: Putting a mark on that first clean white page was quite daunting, but I’m sure many of you will not be surprised one little bit to see that I started off with some moths! My husband recently told me that the collective noun for moths is an eclipse, which I think is quite beautiful. So Page 1 contains a selection of moths – an eclipse of moths - drawn from my imagination. I raided my son’s craft box for the gold and silver stars, and cut up some little sticky gold circles to make the phases of the moon at the top of the page.

Page 2: This is a coloured pencil drawing of a small group of Oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) on the shore. They are one of my favourite birds: they always look so clean and elegant, and I love hearing their kleep-kleep calls and watching them probing about in the sand and seaweed with their bright orange beaks. The generic name Haematopus comes from the Ancient Greek words “haima” and “pous”, meaning blood and foot respectively, and refers to the colour of their legs, which matches their beak.

Page 3: A quick charcoal drawing – homemade charcoal, of course! – of some Silver Birch (Betula pendula) trees. I think their monochrome trunks are beautiful against the bare winter landscape.

Page 4: I was starting to slightly regret my “no removing any pages” rule here. I started off trying to make it look realistic, but that idea quickly went out of the window when I seemed to completely forget what a fish looked like while I was half-way through drawing this! It’s drawn with my homemade oak gall ink, then coloured in with coloured pencils (again raided from my son’s craft box).

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Page 5: On the 1st of January I dug out my old set of watercolour paints that I hadn’t used for many years. I wasn’t particularly happy with the landscape that I was trying to paint - I could definitely do with a bit of practice! - so I cut some pictures of geese out of my latest Scottish Wildlife Trust magazine and stuck them on. I like it a lot more now! I’m hoping that my watercolour skills will improve over the next twelve months as I try it more. That is, after all, one of the purposes of this project. And even if I don’t improve, hopefully I will still have had fun (and if the paintings are really bad, there’s always the option of cutting up more magazines to embellish them with…)

Page 6: By now you’ve probably noticed a bit of a theme going on here. I always seem to be drawn towards nature, and Page 6 is no exception. This is another picture drawn from my imagination, so it’s not supposed to be any bird species in particular.

Page 7: I shared this picture in my Notes a couple of days ago; it is a pencil/ charcoal/ coloured pencil drawing of a photo I took at the weekend, when I woke up to a light dusting of snow (that’s about the most snow we ever get here, what with being so close to the sea and the warming influence of the Gulf Stream). The drawing doesn’t actually look like there’s any snow at all though… does anyone have any tips for drawing white snow on white paper?!

So there we have it - seven down, ninety-three to go! I’d love to know if any of you have any similar projects on the go; let me know in the comments below if you want. Or is there anything in particular you’d like me to try and draw? (What on earth have I just got myself into by asking that question?!)

Finally, I want to say a huge thank-you to the person who donated to my ko-fi this week. I will probably be going over to the mainland next week, and I am planning on popping in to the art shop and buying myself a couple of new paintbrushes.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a good weekend.

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

Buy Me A Coffee

My growing space isn’t huge: we live on approximately half an acre, although some of that is taken up by the house, duck pond, a couple of sheds and other such things. My main production area measures approximately 5x10 metres, and I have another handful of beds scattered around which contain perennials such as rhubarb, kale, and a few berry bushes. I have a 3x6 metre polytunnel, something which I see as essential for growing tomatoes, squash, and some varieties of beans, in the Scottish climate. There was an established plum tree in the garden when we moved in, and we’ve added another plum, a couple of apples, a pear, a cherry, a couple of elders, and several blackcurrant, gooseberry, and blueberry bushes.

My target weight that I wanted to reach by the end of the year was 438kg of produce. In the UK, the average portion size of fresh fruit and vegetables is 80g. It’s recommended that people eat five portions of fruit and vegetables per day, which works out as 400g per person per day. We’re a family of three, so our fifteen portions weighs 1.2kg. Multiply this by 365 days, and you get an annual total of 438kg. So, that is what I aimed for.

I should note here that I also included food that I foraged from elsewhere on the island: wild garlic from my friends’ garden; seaweed from around the shore; brambles, haws, sloes and rowan berries from local hedgerows. I guess it is therefore probably more accurate to call this “How Much Food I Don’t Buy” rather than “How Much Food I Grow”. I should mention too that while I did try to record everything, some things didn’t make it as far as the kitchen scales: fresh strawberries eaten off the plant, crisp apples munched straight from the tree etc. I also didn’t record things like small amounts of fresh herbs, slug-eaten outer cabbage leaves that went straight to the chickens, or the multiple handfuls of lettuce, kale, dandelions and other greenery that George the tortoise ate. I think these things that didn’t get weighed probably add up to about the same as the food I foraged. All that to say, it’s kind of accurate, but not completely so!

I feel I should also point out that growing food is not my job – I already have a part-time one of those, plus my husband and I have our own business (our oyster farm). While gardening, harvesting, and preserving are important parts of my life, they are things that have to fit in around the rest of my life. Some numbers are lower than I would have hoped for, because I didn’t always have the necessary time to devote to my garden.

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Now, let’s get onto some of those numbers. I tried to insert a table with all the figures, but that appears to be beyond my limited computer skills.

As was to be expected, the year started off quite slowly with just cabbage, kale, Egyptian Walking Onions, and sunchokes being harvested in January. February saw the arrival of spring greens and foraged Wild Garlic – it was early in 2025! I picked a total of 1.12kg of Wild Garlic during the season when it was available. Things picked up gradually as spring progressed: 2kg of Purple Sprouting Broccoli, 1.44kg of Perennial Cauliflower, 3.84kg of rhubarb (most of my crowns are just getting established; I’m hoping for much more in 2026).

The numbers started rising as summer berries made an appearance, with 5.36kg of blackcurrants and 1.28kg of gooseberries. At the moment I only have a couple of decent-sized bushes of each; I’m waiting for my smaller ones, taken from cuttings, to become established and start producing lots of fruit. Garlic was harvested in June, and my hundred or so bulbs weighed in at 2.8kg1. I also grew 15.664kg of onions, which should keep us going for a year.

The hot sunny summer meant it was a good year for tomatoes, and I harvested 27.329kg of them from my polytunnel. I wrote about tomatoes previously in this post – due to space restrictions I am never going to be self-sufficient in them, and this is probably about the maximum yield of them I am ever going to achieve. Plums also did well, with just shy of 21kg from my two trees. This was enough for bottling, making jam and a couple of varieties of chutney, and eating a lot of them as-is (quite a few never made it to the kitchen scales!). The wasps also had a fair few, and the chickens too. You can read about The Plum Tree Rules here.

Beetroot was another noticeable success compared to previous years, with 8.14kg. I was able to can some for the first time, and we’ve been enjoying it all winter. Beetroot, cheddar, and “nomato” rosehip sauce sourdough pizza has become a firm Friday night favourite! There are also still a few beetroots in the ground.

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A few late-summer and autumn harvests pushed me closer to my target of 438kg: 20.251kg of courgettes and marrows, 26.417kg of apples (mostly from our own trees, but a couple of kilos were foraged from around the island), 18.689kg of various varieties of squash (I would like to grow more but have limited space in the polytunnel. I’m on the hunt for a highly-productive-outdoors-in-Scotland variety), and 5.76kg of brambles. I don’t cultivate them; instead I just allow them to grow wild in the hedges and edges of the garden. I would usually have picked more of them but they were early this year, then it started raining in mid-August just as the schools went back and didn’t stop for weeks. By then they had all turned to mush and it was too late to harvest any more.

There were just over 9kg of various types of beans – that is their prepared weight, e.g. broad beans out of their pods. I was hoping for more: the Majorcan Pea Beans, Borlotti, and Climbing French Beans in the polytunnel did well, but my outdoor ones weren’t so productive. My Runner Beans and Purple French Beans were flattened by Storm Floris at the beginning of August and while I lost a couple of the runner plants the rest of them did mostly recover, but the French Beans weren’t so lucky. Storm Floris also put an end to my dreams of a spectacular pear harvest – most of them were blown off the tree while they were still tiny.

I almost forgot to mention potatoes! If I wanted to grow enough of them I would need to dig up a lot more of my garden and, while I’m happy to do that, I’m not the only person who lives here! My husband and son like having some space to kick a football around in. In 2025 I only planted one small bed with potatoes, knowing that I would also have volunteer ones popping up all through my other beds. No matter how hard I try, I never manage to dig them all up! I grew 23.269kg of potatoes, which kept us going from June through September.

I briefly mentioned Sunchokes at the start as one of my January crops, but that was just the tail-end of the previous year’s harvest. So far this winter I’ve dug up just over 3kg of them, and I reckon that is less than a quarter of the bed so far. I’m actually pressure-canning a load of potato and sunchoke soup as I type this...

It’s not included in my total but just out of interest I also kept a note of non-plant food, such as how many eggs we got from our hens and ducks throughout the year: 721 and 146 respectively. Allowing for one egg per person per day, this is approximately 80% of our egg needs. Time to convince my husband we need to get a couple more hens, I think! We foraged for just over a kilogram of mussels (Mytilus edulis) and caught two edible crabs (Carcinus maenas) in our creels, and a few fishing trips resulted in four pollack (Pollachius pollachius) and 90 mackerel (Scomber scombrus). I canned up 29 jars of mackerel and we’ve been enjoying them regularly.

Now, what about my overall total? As of today – December 29th – I have recorded a total of just shy of 250kg (249.989kg, to be precise!) of “food that I didn’t buy”, the vast majority of which has been grown on my own half-acre. Remember that my target was 438kg. This works out as 57% of the fruit and vegetable needs for my family of three, which I guess isn’t actually too bad. At least now when someone asks “So, how much of your own food do you grow?” I have an answer for them!

There are definitely areas for improvement: I’d like at least one more apple tree, and I know that my strawberry bed could do with attention. Hopefully as my new berry bushes become established I’ll be able to get a lot more from them, although as I sit here looking at the dresser I can still see a good number of jars of fruit I bottled a few months ago. There’s also still food in the ground: the last couple of red cabbages; perennial kale; those beetroots and sunchokes I mentioned. We’re not self-sufficient and are never going to be, and I am okay with that. It’s not going to stop me trying to grow even more in 2026 though!

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I try to run my moth trap in my garden a couple of times a month from spring through to autumn, and then a couple of times during the winter, if the weather, moon, work, and life all align. This year the regular trapping season began at the start of March, and ended rather abruptly in September when this seemingly near-constant rain began. I’ve only managed to run it once since then (in mid-October) which makes a total of 18 times overall - definitely a bit less than I was aiming for. But hey, sometimes life just takes over!

This year I trapped a total of 920 individual moths of 150 different species in my garden, of which 11 were new-to-me. Some of these new species have made it onto this Top Ten list, while other spaces are taken up by old favourites that always make me happy when I see them each year.

You’ll notice that all the moths that feature on the list are macro-moths, and most of them are big, bright, colourful ones, because they are the ones that always catch my eye in the trap. That’s not to say the smaller, browner ones aren’t pretty in their own way; I just wouldn’t say any of them are my favourites. The lack of micro-moths on the list is mostly down to my inability to accurately identify a lot of them to species level - I’m sure my garden total would increase significantly if I put a bit more time and energy into trying to get positive IDs for them. But as I said earlier, life just sometimes gets in the way!

So without further ado, let’s begin!

This is a very picture-heavy post and I’m being told it is too long for email. If you can’t see it all, you should be able to click “View entire message” to read the entirety of it. Or, you can enjoy it in the app or online. All photos shown here are my own, but they were not all taken this year.

10. Drinker (Euthrix potatoria) May 30^th, June 19^th and 28^th.

The name. The floofiness. What’s not to love?! The name apparently comes from the caterpillars’ habit of drinking dewdrops from grass stems, but I have also heard it is because of the adult moth’s bumbling flight, like it is a bit drunk. Either way, they are a firm favourite and I really couldn’t miss them off this list.

9. Scallop Shell (Rheumaptera undulata) 19^th July.

This moth is described in my guidebook1 as being “widespread but rather thinly distributed” and is only an occasional visitor to my garden. They have the sort of markings that make my eyes go funny if I look too closely, so while I’m always happy to see them, I just can’t look at them for too long...

8. Elephant Hawkmoth (Deilephila elpenor) May 16^th and 30^th, June 19^th, July 12^th.

A perfect moth to get non-moth-ers excited, these most definitely do NOT fall into the “brown and boring” category: they’re big and pink and green. I tend to see a few every year, and they are one of those species that just makes you go “Wow!” Their name comes from the caterpillars’ resemblance to an elephant’s trunk, but I actually think elephant trunks look like caterpillars and am thinking of starting a campaign to get elephants renamed as “Caterpillar-Noses”.

7. Slender Brindle (Apamea scolopacina) July 19^th. New species.

I saw my first one of this species at a moth-trapping event at a local nature reserve on the mainland. Then, the following week, one turned up in my trap! It looked slightly different to the one I’d seen at the event, so in case you were wondering, I didn’t sneak it home with me just so I could increase my garden total! They’re not particularly stunning to look at but I can see how the markings would camouflage them well against tree bark, and it is always nice to meet a new moth.

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6. Bordered White (Bupalus piniaria). 30^th May. New species.

Those antennae. I have nothing more to add. OK, I should probably add that this is a male which is why the antennae are so impressive, but because it was a new species for me, I would have still been excited if it was a female. The antennae are used to detect pheromones produced by the female moth. Despite being described as “common throughout”, it has take over a decade for me to see one!

5. Buff-tip (Phalera bucephala) May 9^th and 16^th, June 19^th.

It’s a moth that looks like a bit of broken birch twig. How could I not include it in this list?!

4. Green Silver-lines (Pseudoips prasinania) May 30^th.

I have a soft spot for the green moths, and this one is no exception. They are a beautiful shade of green, and have fluffy little faces too. It’s a win-win. This is another moth that my field guide describes as being “common throughout”, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than one in a year.

3. Birch Mocha (Cyclophora albipunctata) May 9^th.

I’d admired this moth in my book for years and had hoped to eventually get one in my trap, as there is an abundance of birch trees round here. It’s a perfect example of why you should always check the area around your trap: instead of being inside it, the moth was resting on a green plastic bucket a couple of metres away from the trap. It’s not the most photogenic background, but it’s still a beautiful delicate little moth and I was very happy to finally be able to tick it off.

2. Garden Tiger (Arctia caja) July 12^th and 19^th.

Garden Tiger moths have undergone quite a widespread decline over the last few decades, and this was the first I’d seen since July 2022. I was VERY excited when I spotted it nestled amongst the eggboxes. I even wrote a whole Moth Trap Diaries post about it – click here if you want to read it. And then one turned up the following week too! They have amazing colouration: bright orange hindwings with blue eyespots, which they keep hidden under black- or brown-and-white giraffe-print upperwings, unless they are startled in which case they flash them to scare away potential predators.

1. Common Emerald (Hemithea aestivaria) July 11^th. New species.

Full credit goes to my son for catching this moth in the driveway with the butterfly net, on a night when I didn’t have the trap out. Despite the name, it’s not common here at all: according to my County Recorder, this is the only Scottish record outwith Dumfries and Galloway. Despite looking a bit worse for wear, it’s a worthy winner of the top spot.

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Someone – you know who you are! – requested that I do a Top 50 rather than just a Top 10. So here are a few others that didn’t quite make the list:

Canary-Shouldered Thorn (Ennomos alniaria) The yellow floof. The little beaky mouth.

Light Emerald (Campaea margaritata) Another green one – I really can’t resist them.

Swallow-tailed Moth (Ourapteryx sambucaria) Probably actually definitely a fairy.

The Herald (Scoliopteryx) I always imagine them blowing a on a tiny little trumpet to announce their arrival in the trap: toot-toot-tooooot!

Finally, a special mention has to go to the Uncertain moth (Hoplodrina alsines). Yes, that is actually its real name! I think I had one in the trap on July 19^th, but I’m not entirely sure. I am a bit uncertain of my Uncertain.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll join me for more mothing in the New Year.

If you want any more mothiness, my previous moth-related posts can be found below:

Posts here are always going to be free, but if you like what I write and/or find it useful, I’ve added a ko-fi button below if you want to show your appreciation. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! xx

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