Shelagh Lewins – Page 8

Russet, Cox and Discovery

The apple seeds are germinating like anything! I now have three or four boxes with five seeds each of the Gala apples, which have proved especially keen to get going. There are at least 10 more that need planting up – but every trip to the garden to put soil in pots is a bit of a big deal while it’s so cold! I’m managing to nip out and fill about two pots a day.

The Egremont Russets started to germinate a few days after being taken out of the fridge, so around 5th February, and I have got about 15 seeds in total germinated – pretty much all the ones I’d collected, which is an impressive rate. The Cox-like apples that I took from a doorstep in the nearby village of Aynho, and the Cox-like apples my friend Emma brought me from Scotland, are also sprouting and I have a couple of pots of those. The Discovery apples have also got going. Only the apples taken from the tree behind the forge at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming have yet to germinate. These are the ones that I was most doubtful of – the apples were picked very early in August, and the seeds at that time were soft and pale green. I kept the apples for a month or so and the last ones I ate had developed dark brown seeds. I still have hopes of them, after all they’ve only been out of the fridge for a week.

Apples are of course fully hardy, but it seems harsh to put them out right now with daytime temperatures around freezing, which is why they are lining up on the window sill for the time being.

The flooded meadow is now partly frozen over, thin ice that would not support a well-grown cat, but it’s quite dramatic when the sun is shining and the snow settling on the ice.

I don’t think the ice would be good for my coracle!

Quill

One of my historical re-enactment societies ran an online workshop on how to make and use a quill pen. With the help of kindly neighbours I scrounged up lovely white goose feathers for people, and had a go myself.

Freya showed us authentically made books, parchment, pen, penknife, ink and pigments, before guiding us in making our own pens. We also referred to this very useful online guide to making quill pens, with bonus cat.

The right-hand page is where I started, with huge letters, then I cut the nib finer.

I’m pretty chuffed with how I did! I had no real expectation of being able to make something usable on my first go, but by following Freya’s instructions carefully and taking my time, I made a genuine, functional pen and wrote some Anglo-Saxon texts. To practice writing, Freya provided a selection of quotes from the Old English poem known as Maxims II which I found curiously reminiscent of Hávamál in style.

Maxims II is a collection of statements about the world and how it works – from the social order to the weather, from the habits of different animals to the works of God. Probably written down in the mid 11 th century. It is found on two pages of the manuscript known as Cotton MS Tiberius B I (f.115r-v) and you can see it in magnificent high resolution here: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_tiberius_b_i_f112r

You can also find the transliterated OE text in a free ebook of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records from the University of Oxford Text Archive, which is where the transliterations here have been copied from: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/3009

These are the maxims I tried to write:

ellen sceal on eorle . ecg sceal wið hell
me . hilde gebidan
Courage must be in the noble warrior, blade must be against helmet, be in battle.

draca sceal on hlæwe . frod, frætwum wlanc.
The dragon must be in the barrow, wise, magnificent (proud?) with treasures

wulf sceal on bearowe . earm anhaga.
the wolf must be in the forest, wretched loner,

tungol sceal on heofenum . beorhte scinan . swa him bebead meotud.
The star must be in heaven, (must) shine brightly, as God ordered it.

Is seo forðgesceaft . digol and dyrne . drihten ana wat
The shape of the future is obscure and hidden, the Lord only knows (it).

fyrd sceal ætsomne . tírfæstra getrum.
The army must stay together, a troop of glory-firm (men).

Writing with a quill is an extremely physical process, so it’s very easy to lose track of where you are in a word – or sentence. I also tried my hand at marginalia.

February Gala

At the start of December 2020, I put six boxes of apple pips in the fridge to impose a fake winter and encourage them to germinate. Two months later, on the Feast of Saint Wærburh (that’s today), I hoiked them all out and inspected them. They all look fine, a bit of mould but still shiny damp apple seeds. And the galas from the Co-op have started sprouting! This made getting into the old privy where the plant labels live an urgent job, and Al manfully tackled it. Hurray! He opened the door! I thought we wouldn’t see the inside of the privy until spring, given how wet it’s been and how much the door had swelled up. And there were my labels, neatly packed in an old Chinese takeaway box.

Yesterday I enquired of all my friends how best to permanently label plants, given that “permanent marker” faded quite rapidly; I received a number of very interesting suggestions. At one point I thought I’d have to split hazel rods and write on them with lead pencil (not a bad option), suspecting that I wouldn’t realistically get round to collecting and cutting open aluminium cans and then punching letters into them (a cool idea but time-consuming), and feeling that buying paraloid to use as varnish was also not going to happen. So I hunted up an HB pencil from my craft box, before discovering that the plastic labels had come with a soft lead pencil that was far more suitable. I may take the time to go back and scratch the letters in with a compass or leather awl (whatever comes to hand first) as an extra step, but this will do for now. And I’ve stuck labels into the three Braeburns that I planted last summer, now that I have two different types of apple that need to be differentiated.

I’ve put 5 seeds in each pot; I hope that the roots will grow mainly downwards so it won’t be too hard to separate them when they are larger. However, if this germination rate keeps up I could easily find myself with 50 – 100 young apple trees to deal with. We can squeeze a few more into the orchard, and maybe another one in the garden, but 50? Hmm! Really it’s enough to plant a fair-sized wood!

Gala seeds from apples bought at the Kings Sutton Co-op, many starting to sprout

Gala apple seeds in soil, next to the hyacinths that formed part of our rent last year…

Snow and ice for St Tortgyth

On the eve of the Feast of St Tortgyth, winter visited Rumwoldstow.

OMG so much weeding to do…but not today…

Floods, snow and ice together on the meadow.

Fake winter

During the summer, I planted three braeburn seeds that had germinated in the apples (perhaps because they’d been shipped over from New Zealand in cold storage). And thus I embarked on the Quest for the Pippin of St Rumwold – to grow a variety of apple unique to Rumwoldstow. As apples don’t breed true, this will be a numbers game and will take probably five years to show results.

I wanted to try some British apples as being more likely to tolerate the climate and perhaps closer to traditional varieties, so collected seeds from various apples over the late summer and autumn. After October, British apples pretty much vanished from the shops, and I felt I had a pretty good number to be working with – if even one in ten germinates, I’ll have a lot of trees! I learned from t’internet that apple seeds need a period of cold to break their dormancy, and that 30 – 60 days in the fridge should do the trick.

I kept the seeds in plastic boxes, meaning they dried out which may not have been a good thing. On the 3rd December 2020, I gave them all about two hours soak in cold water, then drained them and laid them on moist kitchen towel in plastic boxes which I put in the back of the fridge. The plan is to leave them there until perhaps February 2021, checking them every week or so to make sure they aren’t dried out and in case any are germinating already, then take them out and see how many germinate.

Six types of apple seed ready to be refrigerated

August 2020
Apples from behind the forge at Hauksby. The forge burnt down a month or two after I collected the apples, and I don’t know if the tree was damaged. The apples are an early variety, green and red, and good to eat.

August 2020
Discovery apples from Morrisons. I didn’t note whether these were British, but it seems likely.

September 2020
Gala apples from the Coop. Similarly, I didn’t note if these were British but that’s my guess as to why I chose them.

September 2020
Apples I took from a box outside somebody’s garden in Aynho. They looked like Coxes.

October 2020
Egremont Russets from Morrisons; British.

October 2020
Apples brought by my friend Emma from Scotland. She describe them as Cox-like.

Medlar tasting

I picked all the remaining medlars early in November, after they’d had a couple of frosts, and because I noticed they were starting to drop off the tree. They’ve spent a few weeks bletting in a box on the kitchen windowsill. I ate a few in a zoom meeting just to confuse my friends, and they were pretty good – I think people were slightly surprised when after eating one, I then had another! The other day I decided that it was really time to tackle the remaining dozen or so.

The darker medlars are the soft ones, like those that have been cut open (to the right of the bowl)

Inspired by a friend who has a slightly older medlar tree and larger harvest, I scooped out the flesh and pushed it through a sieve, to remove the seeds (not many per fruit but they are annoying) and make the pulp look generally less unappetising. This wasn’t a quick job, and I’m not sure whether with more fruit you’d just get used to eating them as they ripen? But I wanted to try them on my long-suffering partner who has so far refused to tackle the pulp in its unprocessed state – and to be fair, it is finicky to eat and doesn’t look like much.

I ended up with a few tablespoons of brown mush. I have found medlars so far to have an unfamiliar, fruity but tangy flavour, and decided to soften the impact for my chosen victim by putting each portion of medlar puree on some tinned peaches, with a blob of vanilla ice cream by it. Unfortunately this turned out to be a bit of an own goal, in that the peaches and ice cream flavour smothered the medlar. I guess in small quantities it just isn’t that strong a flavour.

On the positive side, it was definitely inoffensive and I think medlar would be a good filling for a tart.

A few of the medlars were not yet bletted, the insides being mostly pale green. Next year, when I hope the tree will have more fruit (2 last year, 20-ish this year), I should have a better idea of how to judge blettedness from outer consistency.

The medlar tree is one of this year’s few orchard successes, as it’s been fully hardy and took no heed of the late frosts which destroyed the entire apple harvest. And it provides fresh fruit rich in vitamin C during November. While I can see why it fell from favour, I can also see it as a valued staple of the Anglo-Saxon orchard.

Last carrots of 2020

I harvested the last few carrots from the Rumwoldstow garden yesterday, as they’re starting to go manky in the ground, plus some beetroots.

The carrots and beets have been surprisingly successful, given the bed was only built this year and the seeds planted in July. The white beetroots are very tasty and the leaves make an excellent spinach substitute. And the fact that they’re providing fresh green veg in November is amazing – even with the mild weather it’s impressive.

Oh, the garden is so full of weeds and overgrown…I have been reluctant to cut back flowers because they feed bees, but I really do need to start tidying things up. Except that right now I have No Time…so it’ll probably be a New Year job.

The orchard is now resting, I guess. The sheep are long gone, all the fruit harvested.

Skirret for dinner

Back in 2019, Al bought me a packet of skirret seeds off the internet, and because I am not a confident gardener, the wonderful Freya germinated them and gave me back young plants. I planted these out round the garden, where they did OK and I gathered seeds and in the spring of 2020, germinated and planted out some more skirrets.

These plants are perennial and it was clear from the first-generation plants that I moved, that the roots take a while to develop. So I waited until now, November of 2020, to dig up one of 2019’s seedlings and try cooking the roots.

As I’d hoped, the plant was easily separated into three, and I replanted one section. However the roots were not that big.

Some plump roots but lots of little ones

White beetroot and skirret ready to be washed

I cut off the larger roots and washed them, then scrubbed them with an old toothbrsh. The soil came away fairly easily but it wasn’t a quick job, with so many little roots.

Roasted white beetroot and skirret. What’s left, anyway.

I roasted the beetroot and skirret in beef dripping, putting the beetroot chunks in first so they got half an hour or so, and the skirrets 10 – 15 minutes. The skirrets became very soft when cooked, and the texture was creamy and very pleasant, apart from the sinewy cores of the narrower roots. It’s pretty easy to eat the soft outer and leave the core.

The larger roots were soft all the way through. The flavour is indeed somewhat like parsnip but more peppery.

Our guest found a use for the cores – they can be used to floss your teeth!

Overall I’d say skirret is a success, but you’d need much bigger plants to make a meal – I served these as a side dish. I hope that by next year, or the year after, the older plants will be more productive. A skirret bed clearly takes several years to establish.

November flood

Early November and it’s the second flood of the year, and still weirdly warm in the sun. The trick with coracling is to find a day when the water is high enough, the sun is out and the wind is light; any kind of breeze and the Bootle-Bumtrinket just skitters away over the water…