A week in and little has changed – seems like I’m going toi have to do some fine-tuning.
The intention was to narrow down my workload and achieve more by focussing relentlessly on getting results. The reality was that I’ve been given more to do and I’m still sprinkling my effort lightly over too many projects. Sprinkiling lightly seems to work with fairy dust, but in real life it doesn’t bring many results.
On the other hand, we did make nettle soup today, something I’d been meaning to do for two years. I’m hoping to move on to other nettle products as the year progresses. With luck, they will appear on my new nettles page, but considering my track record the result may well be that one of the other pages disappears.
It’s been a productive week with two days delivering the college course, a day of Woodland Trust training and a school so far. I’ve even had chance to try out my new soup and soda bread lesson, which went a lot quicker than I thought it was going to do. I’m going to be running it twice more next week so I’ll have to add a few bits.
Meanwhile Julia has landed me with running a party for twenty five-year-olds tomorrow – looking at lambs, making butter and being generally nice. It’s not really my forte.
Latest news on the guinea fowl is that several have gone in the pot and were delicious. The survivors are currently engaged in escspe-related activities and the outside group has risen to eight. They are so successful at escaping that we have been accused of helping them. If you remember when I first pased an opinion on the captivity I said that in a battle of wits my money was on the birds – seems I’m right.
This a picture of guinea fowl at liberty during a solar eclipse. Not much different to a normal picture of guinea fowl but I was bored after borrowing a welding mask and staring at the sun with a bit missing so just took some random photos.
And how was the nettle soup? We tried nettle tops as a veg and thought they were a bit stringy I seem to remember. I don’t think our nettles are big enough to bother with yet. The ransoms (wild garlic) are looking good for soup though.
Ours are around two inches high so I took the top inch – I don’t think they have had chance to get stringy. I’m having to ration them out as we’ve promised two groups we’ll do nettle soup next week. Seems to be popular! We planted ramsons three but they didn’t prosper so we have to forage in our local country park.
Might be for the best – they would probably take over if they got established. Another real pest, if you look at it that way, is ground elder, but that does make a nice veg (especially with lardons and plenty of butter).
That’s something else I’ve been meaning to eat – we have plenty of it in the back garden. Don’t think I’ll be taking it to the farm though!
No!