Shelagh Lewins – Rumwoldstow

Meadowsweet mead

It is late July and the meadowsweet is in full flower. Many years ago, I made meadowsweet wine and it was good, so now I’m having a go at a mead. I read that:

…the name is in fact a corruption of the old medieval name “meadesweet”, stemming from the days when the plant was added during the brewing of mead, as a flavouring agent.
Various parts of the plant have been used medicinally for centuries, primarily for the relief of pain and fever, but other uses have included the treatment of gastrointestinal complaints, including peptic ulceration, and the treatment of diarrhoea. Its anti-inflammatory effects can be accounted for by the fact that all parts of the plant contain several salicylate compounds, including salicylic acid itself. In 1897, when Felix Hoffmann produced acetylsalicylic acid, he used salicin produced from meadowsweet plants. This led to the development of the brand name Aspirin, which was derived from the botanical name at the time for meadowsweet, Spiraea ulmaria.
https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/opinion/the-anti-inflamatory-properties-of-meadowsweet

One may hope therefore that this mead will be its own hangover cure.

However from the same source I note:

Because of the high levels of salicylates, preparations containing meadowsweet extracts are contraindicated in patients taking warfarin, and also in those already taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Extracts of the plant have been to cause bronchospasm, therefore caution is advised in its use by asthma sufferers.

…which is kind of important information…oh hear this, ye “it’s natural so of course it’s safe” brigade…

I foolishly gave away my copy of C J J Berry’s indispensable “First Steps in Winemaking” so I am not working to an exact recipe. I gathered a small basket of open flowers, and have boiled 5 litres of water which is now cooling.

My next job is to empty 6 jars of local set honey (340 g each, for a total of 2.04 kg) into the pan, and when it’s tepid, add the meadowsweet and yeast. I’ll be using Mangrove Jack’s Mead Yeast, same as I used for the apple and medlar mead that I started back in January of this year (2024 / 924). Yes, for a truly authentic brew I would rely on natural yeasts, but I haven’t the confidence.

Dinner from the new oven

Having briefly tested Al’s amazing new wood-fired bread oven, we tried it out more thoroughly a few days later.

The oven in use! With the ambitious plaited loaf just visible

Rack of lamb and sausages cooking in a cast iron skillet. Fast and good.

The master baker with an ambitious sweet plaited loaf ready to go in

My baking skills extended as far as the single-anchovy mini pizza with chopped garlic, leek and cheese.

First Firing

Al has built the Roman-style bread oven! Or as you might describe it, a budget pizza oven off the internet, mahoosively gussied up with fancy stonework, extra insulation and render. It had its first firing on the 4th July, basically to dry it out and see how well a fire would burn and heat it. Just so we cooked *something*, I mixed up some scone dough and stirred in a handful of dried raisins.

Modern scones are quite inauthentic as baking powder was Not A Thing in the early medieval days. Breads would be unleavened, or raised with yeast. And they were a bit burned in places, and slightly underdone in others. But fresh out of the oven with some medlar jam, they were delicious.

Five flowers

The blossom on the first seedling to produce flowers has opened. Some sixty-ish seedlings are NOT flowering, and vary between Nothing and Lots Of Leaves. But this Gala pippin is giving it a good go. Here’s a photo from a couple of days ago.

Gala pippin’s first blossoms, Tuesday 9th April 2024

The same blossoms, Sunday 14th April 2024

The quince tree is starting to flower (mainly on the west side)

The established apple tree (variety unknown) is also in bloom

Local menace Tinky come to tell us what’s what

Hungry gapples

The apple store is empty! It’s the end of March, just before Easter so we’re in the tail end of Lent (from the Old English ‘lencten’ meaning ‘when the days lengthen’ i.e. spring), and I took the last two apples out of the store in the gatehouse. This is the time of year known as the Hungry Gap (which may explain why Lent is in this season – make a virtue of a necessity), as the stored food runs low and there’s not much in season yet. Well, there are plenty of nettles, and I imagine the early medieval people would have cooked and eaten them along with other spring greens. Protein from eggs? But not so much bulk food, unless you had a good harvest and good fortune storing it.

Quite a lot of the apples weren’t eatable, as the flesh turned brown, or bruises spread across the entire fruit. But the bottom couple of drawers seem to have fared better, with the apple flesh still white and crisp. Maybe it was that bit cooler?

The bulk of last year’s apples were Bramleys, which ripen up into a very pleasant eating apple in defiance of the supermarket practice of only selling them green (and huge!). My Bramleys varied between VAST MONSTERS and cute little things.

This year I hope we’ll get more of the other varieties, just for, well, variety, and also because some of them may be better keepers – and older varieties, closer to what our Anglo-Saxon nuns would have known.

The last two apples: despite appearances, the penultimate apple (left) was good inside. Yes these are Bramleys!

The very last apple! With the medlar and apple mead, which is still blopping away

The final apple was a beaut! Very tasty.

The orchard did well; the apples have kept me going at about 1 per day plus crumbles and apple sauce, since 1 August 2023 to 26 March 2024. The trees were affected by a late air frost, or something, and didn’t produce at their maximum, though the Bramley did pretty darn well. Some of my friends reported having no harvest at all last year, so Rumwoldstow was luckier than many.

What we didn’t get was pears; the older two (planted in 2018) flowered and set fruit, but dropped them all. When they were pruned, it transpired that they must have not been planted properly because there was a pot-shaped block of earth with the tree coming out of it, which wobbled alarmingly. Our pruner, Michael, suggested that the trees dropped their fruit because they didn’t feel stable enough to carry them, and also that perhaps because the ground is so wet, they hadn’t felt it necessary to send roots out searching for water. Al and Michael staked them up to be more stable, also the quince was a bit sideways so they staked that too. Fingers crossed this will help them. The two apple trees (Wyken Pippin and Hambledon Deux Ans) look fine; they may have been planted from bare roots? It shows the importance of spreading the roots from a pot-bound tree when planting it out. I’ll have to bear this in mind when the seedlings are being set loose on the world, wherever and whenever that ends up being.

The pear trees are in blossom, as are the plum and damsons. The apples are just starting to bud.

Pears: Winter Nelis (left), Jargonelle (right)

Floodwaters rising again after torrents of rain yesterday. Medlar (left) and plum (right, Rivers Early Prolific)

So yeah, a very strong sense of ending and renewal.

Buds

Look carefully at the photo…do you see them? Yes, the first ever flower buds from one of my apple tree seedlings! These were grown from apples collected in 2020 and germinated in 2021, so they are now three years old. I need to do an audit and empty out the pots of those that died over the winter but I must still have a good 50 saplings in pots dotted around the patio.

It’s unlikely that these flowers will produce fruit but it’s still very exciting to see one of the little trees take this step forward!

The leftmost tree is the one with the buds – the one in a terracotta pot. Grown from a seed from a Gala apple

A new Hnef

No, I didn’t sneeze…my main Christmas present this year was a set of BEAUTIFUL handmade glass gaming pieces from Tillerman Beads. These are based on finds from grave 750 at the Viking-age town of Birka in Sweden and are about the fanciest gaming set you can have unless you’re going for carved ivory or gold (as in some sagas). I’ve long had a glass Hnef (the name given in Icelandic sagas to the centre piece) but it is machine-made and very regular. The pieces that accompany it are simple glass “pebbles” sold as pot toppers, which closely resemble some Roman pieces. This set is a much better match for the original finds.

The grave at Birka contained 8 dark pieces, 17 light ones. Al gave me 9 dark pieces and 17 light ones, which provides a spare of each colour if you are playing tablut, and also allows you to play merels or nine men’s morris. Tablut is the version of the game that Carl Linneus recorded and is played on a 9×9 board with 8 defenders, 16 attackers.

If you’d like to know more about the game of “hnefatafl” (it has several names and variants) you can read my article about the possible origin of the name “Hnefatafl” and see the other replica glass “Hnef” on my website. And of course there are lots of web pages out there with information about the game

Wintery bits and bobs

Here are a few photos from the last month of things in and around Rumwoldstow. It’s the off season but it’s still always interesting to take a wander down and see what’s occurring!

A pony in the neighbours’ meadow, which is called Barton
(the meadow, not the pony)

Bird’s nest, recovered from the top of the pivot stone in the gatehouse

It rained last night…the River Cherwell is about as high as I’ve seen it…all the lower part of the orchard is flooded and it’s raining again now!

Medlar jelly

Despite the general distractions of life, I managed to gather a fair proportion of the medlars, which by November were falling from the tree. The medlar is the only new tree so far to give a good crop of fruit. Most of the fruit trees were planted in 2018, so they’re five years old, and generally look healthy, and flower well, but are giving between “some” and “no” fruit (YES “Fairleigh” damson tree I AM looking at you).

I put the medlars in the utility room and within a couple of weeks they had “bletted” and were ready to eat / use. Raw medlars are good with cheese, but I don’t regularly eat a cheese course after dinner, so wanted to find some other way to use them.

The medlars are strangely attractive to ladybirds

The freshly gathered fruit – still firm and green in the middle, no good to eat yet

Medlars are tasty, but even once you’ve bletted them, they are not easy to eat; the pulp inside the “hip” is good, but there are plenty of seeds and fibrous bits. So this year, I tried boiling them medlars for syrup.

The medlars rise to the top as they cook, and can be squished with a spoon

Post squishing, the fruit sink down again…

I strained the juice overnight through muslin. It’s a shame to waste so much of the fruit pulp, but I just did not have the time or energy to separate pulp from skin, seeds and fibre this year. The juice didn’t look particularly promising, but I froze a box of it to use later for a flavoured mead, and made the rest into jelly.

8 lbs medlars and 11 pints water yielded about 6 pints of juice.

Medlar Jelly

3 pints strained medlar juice
3 lbs granulated sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 bottle (125 ml) “Certo” apple pectin.

I boiled the jelly for a good hour and a half before it finally reached a setting point. This was much longer than I expected, as the Certo is meant to reduce cooking time and improve set. On initial tasting, I thought there was too much lemon juice, but actually it’s fine. The jelly gradually turned a very pleasing clear orangy colour, and has a delicate flavour. It’s a bit stickier than would be ideal because of the long boiling – it’s on the verge of turning into caramel – another time, maybe more Certo? For traditional jellies like blackberry, I use unripe apples in August / September, which are chock full of pectin. As the medlars aren’t ready to use until December, the apples are far too ripe to provide pectin.

The finished jelly, with two medlars that I left uncooked for their story value (and indeed gave to a friend a few weeks later)

The rest of the juice is in the freezer and I plan to try making a mead with honey, medlar juice and apples. This will be a longer term project!

Booth me up, baby

A monastery can never have too many outbuildings. Obviously! Al’s latest construction is something that was originally conceived as a log store with a working area in the middle, but it’s coming out as more of a generally useful covered space with good light.

Great use of an old pergola for the main frame

The Great Booth is not quite finished – Al is still collecting the last few extra-long pallets to break down for roof timbers – but doesn’t it look great?