The Glidd of Glood Blog

The Grim Reaper is a peasant

The other thing I have been doing to enhance my peasant credentials is learning to use a scythe.

I have this sort of bank outside the back of the house which I let grow wild in the summer. I can get the ride-on mower down it and sometimes even up it, but it always looks naff when I do, like a shorn patch of weeds. It’s dangerous for the mower too, as the bank is basically a large pile of rocks and stones – probably the fruit of some sort of excavation back in the day.

By letting it grow wild, it makes quite a nice contrast to the rest of the lawn, and even produces some wild flowers. Insects seem to like it that way, as does the cat who enjoys hiding in the long grasses and plants (to leap out and kill some unsuspecting creature no doubt).

But at the end of the season, the grasses and flowers start to die away and the whole thing looks very ragged. It is at this point that you need to cut it.  However, with the plants a couple of feet high, you can forget getting the mower on it. A neighbour once used a scythe on it which was very professional and only took him a few minutes. When I suggested another year that he might like to do the same thing, he came round with a strimmer. This was less satisfactory. I’ve got a small strimmer myself, so I could just as well have used that.

I also have a couple of scythes, which, like assorted rakes, ladders, and garden implements, were left by the previous occupants of the house. So I thought it was about time I started to use one.

A lot of scything still goes on in Switzerland, especially, from what I can see, the German speaking part. Quite often when taking my bike over some mountain pass, you will come across peasants in the fields cutting hay with scythes on some ridiculously steep slope. They give you a look as if to say “another cretin on  motorcycle up to no good”, although if they are younger they might be thinking “that looks like good fun – a lot more fun than doing all this scything”.

I figured that the scythe would need sharpening, seeing how it has been hanging up in the woodshed for at least the last 8 years and probably longer, so I looked up how to sharpen the thing on YouTube. This video also showed me the rudiments of using it and it didn’t look as though I would be that likely to scythe my foot off, so away I went.

 

Result: one scythed bank. Yes, it does look as if it has been given a haircut by some species of apprentice barber who should probably be trying to forge a career in some other field, but that’s good enough. It looks a damned site better now.

My next door neighbour, who is a bona fide peasant, seemed impressed with my efforts. That’s efforts, rather than results. Being a peasant is all a question of attitude. Peasants use scythes. Non-peasants and bourgeois interlopers use strimmers.

Making schnapps - a step towards peasantdom

I’m turning into a peasant.

I’ve always thought that this was a much funnier, if less likely, translation of “je deviens paysan” than “I’m becoming a farmer”. You always get taught in school that a farmer is “un fermier” in French. Well it may be, but no one around here says it much. It’s always “paysan”. I’m not really becoming a farmer, but I have been doing a couple of peasantish things recently which are doing my peasant credentials no harm at all.

Firstly, I have been “doing a barrel” (“faire un tonneau”). Not meaning, as you might have thought, that I have been rolling down Swiss mountainsides, or testing out waterfalls, but rather that I have been making schnapps. There are a lot of fruit trees in Switzerland and they seem to produce more fruit than the Swiss are inclined to eat, so they have a habit of turning it into fruit schnapps. It is the biggest spirit segment in the country. The colourless schnapps comes in a huge variety of flavours, but your local café can be expected to stock many of the following: pommes, prunes, williamine, abricotine, kirsch, coings, framboise. Apple, plum, pear, apricot, cherry, quince and raspberry if you prefer. Visitors to Switzerland should be encouraged to try these. There are others.

I have got quite a few fruit trees too: cherry, marello cherry, apple, pear, plum, quince and there comes a time when you just can’t make any more fruit tarts. Up until now I have always frozen what I can, but the freezer is full, so egged on by the local butcher who lent me a barrel, I set out to fill it with cherries.

It’s a long and time-consuming business. I don’t know how many cherries you can get in a 60 litre barrel, but I know it’s thousands, because I idly counted a thousand of them when I was picking. It turns out that even if your cherry tree is festooned with cherries, only some are right for putting in the barrel at any one time. The others are either not ripe enough, or overripe or bad. In fact, not being a professional cherry picker, it took me days to fill the barrel – days of concerted effort. I suspect I was a bit anal about it, and only put in cherries that I would happily have put on a tart. I don’t think you have to attain this level of fruit quality to produce decent kirsch. What you don’t want though, are the stalks. This is just as well, as generally, it’s not that easy to keep the stalk attached to the cherry.

Once your barrel is full, you leave it a couple of days or so, then add a bag of sugar mixed in with a litre of water. This is to kick start the fermentation. You should cover the barrel with its plastic lid and put a heavy stone on it. As any fule no, the fermentation process breaks the sugars in the fruit down into alcohol and carbon dioxide and if you don’t let the carbon dioxide escape from the barrel, the latter will explode eventually – which will give you a lot to clean up, never mind about the wasted days fruit picking. On the other hand, you desperately want to avoid air getting in. The heavy stone will ensure that the carbon dioxide, under massive pressure, will lift the stone enough to seep out of the barrel, whereas the air, under atmospheric pressure, is not strong enough to lift the stone to get in. This also means that you aren’t allowed to happily remove the lid on occasion to see how it is all coming along and to admire the bubbling cherries, or show your barrel off to visitors. Naturally, I found out all this rather late. The peasants seem to keep it all a little secret and are very vague about exactly what you are meant to be doing.

After a couple of weeks, the fermentation process should have stopped and you can seal up the barrel and take it to the local distillery. Because making schnapps is so traditional throughout Switzerland, there is bound to be a small distillery not far away which makes its business from distilling the barrels of fermented fruit provided by the local farmers. Here the distiller will write your name in chalk on the barrel lid and promise to ring you in a few days when he has distilled your barrel. It sits about outside in a courtyard containing the fruit of all the other local farmers. You are well on your way to becoming a peasant.

Full peasant status is achieved when you go to pick up your schnapps, or in my case, my kirsch. This is because quite apart from paying the distiller for his work, you also have to pay a tax to Bern on the quantity of alcohol produced. But…. If the schnapps comes from your own fruit trees instead of just from fruit you have bought for the purpose, you pay a lower rate of tax. You are officially recognised as being a peasant.

The distiller fills in a couple of forms for you and you pay him and take away your flagons of booze. But you still aren’t really allowed to drink it. You are then told that your schnapps will in fact improve over the next few months, if left somewhere in contact with the air. The more interaction there is with the air, the better, as this will smooth it out. Hence, you don’t want to seal up the flagons but put some cloth over them and store in a place where there is the most temperature variation, preferably an attic. I don’t have an attic, so my flagons are sitting in the woodshed. Best I can do.

So what’s the verdict? Well, I have ended up with about 12 litres of two different sorts of kirsch at 43% alcohol, since once I had filled up a barrel of cherries, I then went and bought another barrel and filled it with marello cherries. I didn’t know anything about the stone, the air, or the length of time necessary for fermentation. I did know that if I sealed the barrel it would blow up, so at least avoided that mistake. Consequently, the cherries had actually been left in the barrel a little too long, but more importantly, air had got in. This all means that the finished product was lower in alcohol than it would have been and doesn’t taste as good as it should. I have got 5 litres of kirsch.

The griottes on the other hand, hadn’t really finished fermentation when I took them to the distillery, so they had been pretty much surrounded by carbon dioxide and not air, even if I did keep lifting off the lid to have a look. They have turned out better and I have 7 litres of this sort of kirsch. So now I’m just waiting for Christmas when I can drink some of the stuff, but what I am going to do with 12 litres of kirsch I have no idea. Makes a lot of plum puddings, or fondues and will get you very drunk. More presents, I suppose. At the end of the day you spend your life around here making jams and such like for the pleasure of giving them away to all and sundry.

I’ll tell you about my other peasantish behaviour tomorrow. This post has gone on quite long enough.

 

Springtime in the garden - a Monty Don moment

Spring is completely sprung here, with the unseasonably dry and warm weather, and I have been very busy in the garden. This is currently looking pretty much under control, or as under control as I can really be bothered to make it, not aspiring to having the sort of garden that people pay money to come and visit.

I have taken a few rapid iPhone snaps and thought I would post them here with a few comments for the limited amount of people who may be interested:

The rampant wisteria is starting to flower, the laurel has been moved outside. The green tub next to it contains some sprouting artichoke seeds. I have had to cover the tub with chicken mesh as the cat thinks it's a great sunbathing spot. You can also see the seed-tray of tomatoes getting some sun, little pots of bigger tomatoes ditto and my herb rack - different thymes, parsley, rosemary, chives and mint.

 

The veg garden doesn't look that exciting, does it? But it is looking more exciting day by day, It already contains broad beans, carrots, onions, garlic, lettuces, radishes, cabbages, leeks, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts. Put it this way, a few weeks ago it looked like this:

I spent an entire day hand weeding it and moved some lettuces and carrots that had survived the winter (probably a waste of time). Then I got a friendly peasant to stick his cultivator on it which reduced days of back-breaking digging to a 15 minute job. There has been much further weeding, raking and fertilising. So it may currently look dull, but I'm pleased.

 

There's a good herbacious border along the house side of the veg garden, which gets minimal upkeep and attention. Various things flower at various times of the year - tulips at the moment.

 

There's this rock garden thing at the front of the house, courtesy of the previous owners, containing various odd plants. The heather is now past its best, but it was a major attraction for bees a couple of weeks ago. They move on and the spiders move in, spinning annoying webs overnight which almost cover the heather and have to be destroyed with a broom. This does not perturb them for long. That's a hazelnut bush in the middle, which planted itself. I quite like it. Hazel is virulent around here and I have two big ones so unsurprisingly quite a lot of further self-planted ones.

Just about got the magnolia before it finishes flowering. It is truly magnificent and has recovered completely from a late snowfall a few years ago which destroyed a big hunk of it. Behind it is one of the huge fir trees, and the female hazelnut tree. More wisteria on the veg garden fence. The "lawn" is what it is. Just about to kick off a project to prepare and reseed the bit under the hazel with a shade supporting variety of grass, but I suspect it will always be starved of water.

 

Looking over to the other monster fir tree, you can just see the male hazel behind the lilac - or is it a buddleia? I always get confused between the two. There are shrubs all the way down the drive on both sides. More pruning and weeding.

 

The other front garden. The quince tree on the left is starting to flower. It is always the last, and the quinces are the last fruit to pick in the garden. The hawthorn mound got pruned last year, I think, so happily won't bother this as it is a prickly nightmare. I sorted out the blackberry bushes on their trellis on the right. Behind this is an old pear tree which has just finished flowering and now seems festooned with nascent pears. A bit of an event, as I didn't used to get any until the hawthorn was brought under control. Behind the camera is a large morello cherry tree in flower (but obviously, you'll have to take my word for it). "Lawn" even more feeble in this neck of the woods. Just too much sun and not enough water in summer, and I can't water the whole garden.

 

The clematis is starting to flower seriously. A real success story, as I only put it in as a spindly twiggy thing a few years ago. It seems very happy on its south-facing wall. It's going to be a good year for apples, as there is major blossoming of the apple tree (one of two now). Sadly, these apples are cookers and there are only so many apples you can cook, so I spend much of the autumn picking up barrowloads of windfalls and putting them on the compost. There were almost no apples last year, for the first time ever, so I suppose the tree has had a rest. Under the apple tree is my wild hedge that I planted three years ago which is now really getting established. It was looking dodgy for a while.

 

Had to show my favourite tree - the "giant" sequoia or wellingtonia I planted about six years ago. It is actually more impressive than it looks here and is quite clearly very happy with no competition as all. Just behind it is the horse-chestnut I planted the same week - also happy. And that's another apple tree on the left but as it lives in the rented field, I don't have to bother picking up the windfalls. The grass is just grass here - no attempt at a lawn, although it is cut regularly. When I arrived all this was a cows' field.

 

In the foreground another williams pear tree which I planted three years ago. It has just flowered for the first time and a couple of hours ago, I noticed it is planning on producing a lot of pears. Oh joy. Behind it is a huge cherry tree now covered in little green cherries. The bush on the left is a rampant honeysuckle I planted to hide a hideous metal telegraph support pole. It has surpassed my wildest imaginings. Down the slope from that it a weeping maple I got given as a twig and planted, little thinking that it would grow into a huge tree. Poor thing. It keeps getting bits broken off by storms, but just produces a new replacement top branch. There must be something about the site it likes.

Right. That's the Monty Don moment over. I may or may not put up some more pictures as and when things change. I leave you with what the cherry tree was looking like a couple of weeks ago.

Tomato update

Thought I should give you a rapid tomato update. Not amazingly interesting, I know, but if I don’t you will think that they have all died or failed to come up. (The original post is here.)

This is what they look like now:

No, I’m not cheating. I transplanted some of the bigger ones to the plastic pots that the other herbs I bought came in. The only hassle is that the weather is great during the day, but quite chilly at night, so I have been ferrying the tomatoes in and out of the house recently. Anyway, it is all going according to plan. I don’t need 20 odd tomato plants, so I suspect that there will be some lucky recipients soon. At the garden centre, I noticed that tomato plants were CHF 2.50 each, so I have calculated that I now have CHF 60 worth. Not an earth shattering saving perhaps, but it all counts.

 

Look! Magic Tomatoes!

It’s quite astonishing! In a way.

Decided to get ahead this year and kick off the tomatoes early. So I got out the seed tray and put a little potting mixture in it and then bought a packet of tomato seeds to supplement the ones I already had. I pressed a seed into each compartment, covered them over and added a little water. Then I covered the tray with the transparent plastic lid and put it by the kitchen window. Took about 10 minutes.

Five days later and look! A couple of minuscule tomato plants!

I know this is as banal as gardening gets. Big deal, you say. So you’ve got a couple of germinated tomato seeds.  Well yes. But on the other hand, no. It’s absolutely magic. I know you can barely see the plants on the photo, but in a few months, that seed will have converted into kilos of free tomatoes. I will wait until the little plants are big enough to transplant, then I’ll put them in flowerpots and later transfer them to the veggie patch. Whack in a stick to hold the thing up, sit back and let the sun do the work.

A few months from now, I’ll chop the tomatoes, add some of the basil I will have grown and some garlic, simmer it all in a pan and I’ll have tomato sauce for my homemade pizzas which will have cost peanuts, or more correctly, a packet of tomato seeds. Or I can feel a tomato, mozzarella and basil salad coming on.

In the meantime, I will have all the fun of watching the things grow on a daily basis. I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to do this. Pretty much everyone eats tomatoes – about as many people who eat pizza. Materials required: a noddy plastic seed tray, a small bag of potting mixture and some seeds. Effort required: about on a par with boiling an egg. Space required: one kitchen windowsill and later a small patch of balcony or patio to put the flowerpots on. You don't have to transfer them. You can cheerfully grow tomatoes in a flowerpot if you don't have a vegetable patch.

But if you really insist on buying shrinkwrapped, tasteless Dutch ones from Tesco for ££££s, well, it’s up to you, isn’t it?

Don’t worry. I’ll update you with tomato plant progress so that when it’s all too late, you can see what you missed.

 

Beanz meanz Kenya

We didn’t buy Kenyan beans when I was a kid. In fact, we didn’t buy beans. This was because my father grew all the beans his family needed. Runner, broad, yellow, french, we had beans by the trugload. He even bought a small hand-turned machine for slicing them, such was the prolific nature of the veg patch and the quantity that he was freezing. He used to keep records on the quantities of beans (and anything else come to that) produced – untold kilos of the things.

I have taken a leaf out of the old man’s book and now grow my own too. And I can tell you, that in as much as you can bend over and push a bean into the ground, anyone can do it. They might need watering in a drought, and runners need a couple of bamboo canes to climb up, but that is surely about it. It sounds cool to say “I grow my own beans” but let’s face it, they pretty much grow themselves.

The bean is a miracle vegetable, a paragon of leverage. Put in one, get out pounds upon pounds of the things. Where do they all come from? I can’t help feeling that Jack and the Bean Stalk must have evolved as a myth owing to the sheer something-for-nothing nature of the bean: put in a bean, produce untold riches. Pretty much anyone could be planting beans. Surely a flower pot, or a piece of earth somewhere and you’re away. Even one flower pot will probably get you a fair few free meals.

So tell me, how is it that supermarket beans come from Kenya, both here in Switzerland and in the UK? I just can’t figure it out. Why isn’t everyone falling over themselves to grow beans? When was the last time you saw a bean field? No disrespect to the Kenyans, but you surely don’t have to travel all the way to Kenya to pick up a bean? It’s a total mystery. Surely it would make a lot more sense for the Kenyans to eat their own beans.

Equally mysterious though, is the fact that should we stop eating Kenyan beans, according to some, then this will ruin the livelihood of the poor Kenyan bean farmers with dire consequences to them. According to others, should we continue flying aeroplanes to go and pick them up, then we will trash the planet with dire consequences to all of us. I’m not sure that I understand the difference between buying Kenyan beans from poor people (not Tesco, obviously) and buying cheap Chinese goods from other poor people. Should I be doing more of this to save the world? Something tells me not.

Maybe there is an opening in European bean farming. I shall have to look into this. In the meantime, my advice is to find a small redundant piece of earth in your vicinity – preferably belonging to you – and stick a few beans in it. If you want to marvel at how the sun will feed you for free, put in some runners (so long as they can climb up something), stand back, and watch.

Life isn't a bowl of cherries

But it might be a tree of cherries. There are more on my tree than can possibly be eaten. Even the birds have given up. After freezing them, making pots of jam and stuffing my face with them, there still seem to be more than ever. It can't help but make you cheerful, and then guilty as you see all this potentially expensive food rot on the branches. Oh well.

 

Plant trees - you know it makes sense

Right, starter for 10.

What is the difference between a new car and a new tree? Apart from the obvious fact that you can’t get anywhere much in a tree. And the cost, no doubt (although if you get serious about trees, you can part with quite a lot of cash if you really try). 

No, the essential difference is that  the car, from the moment you get it out of the showroom, all shiny and sparkling, is going to go downhill. Every day that goes by, it will become a lesser car. It doesn’t matter how much you pay for it, it is something that is going to be consumed with use. Not so with the tree. Every day that goes by, it will improve, becoming a greater tree.

You will eventually tire of the car and want a new one – and this will cost you a lot of money. The tree on the other hand, will be a constant source of enjoyment throughout its life and more likely, yours. It will change with the seasons, which will ensure that you never get bored of it. Even when its leaves fall off in the winter – assuming that you opt for a deciduous variety – you can still admire it covered in frost or snow. And you can look forward to the first leaves in spring, the blossom and its full summer glory. This fun will be repeated, at no expense, every year.

You also get an added moral bonus. Whereas the car will plague your conscience with the amount of CO2  and pollution it is emitting, the tree will actually be improving the environment, contributing in its own small way to the reduction of global warming. The bigger and more fun the car, the more damage it is likely to be doing; the bigger and more fun the tree, the more good it is doing. The car will require fettling, maintenance and expense to keep itself in decent working order. The tree will be quite happy with free sunshine and rain.

What’s not to like?

About 3 years ago I planted a larch, a horse chestnut and a sequoia. Total cost about £500, or rather less than some of my garage bills. I reckon that this is the best money I have spent since I don’t remember when. These last two weekends, I have planted a pear tree (more free fruit), and a hedgerow with about a dozen different shrubs.

Of course, the pear tree currently looks like a stick, and the hedgerow is a line of twigs. But then, this is the month of March. What it means though, is that now I am going to have all the fun of watching the leaves appear and the bushes thicken, and then seeing what they produce in the way of flowers (I suspect that the pear tree might not do much in this respect this year). I am also going to have the benefit of attracting all sorts of small birds and possibly hedgehogs and other small creatures for my greater delight.

The difference between the car and the tree is almost philosophical. It is the difference between consumption and creation. Consumption gives you an immediate hit of pleasure but it tends not to last and is even often compensated by a feeling of deflation. Think eating lots of chocolate, drinking too much, looking at too much TV, or emptying your bank account in shops buying stuff you don’t really need. Creation on the other hand normally requires some effort (digging all those holes for the trees and hedge wore me out physically, and I didn’t much like doing it in a north wind), but the rewards are longer lasting and have no side-effects.

The credit crunch has come as a result of unbridled spending  - people basically consuming before they had the means to pay for it. It has been born of a society that has promulgated the untruth that you can consume your way to happiness. We know deep down this to be rubbish, but if enough people tell you it isn’t… Tree planters on the other hand are referred to as… what ?...tree-huggers. Dull tedious people who are vegetarian and cycle everywhere.  Could this be because they go against the prevailing consumerist zeitgeist ? Society has never looked kindly upon dissidents.

Of course, in a society that moves faster and faster, the idea of something that distils its pleasure in bite-sized morsels year after year is hard to understand. So many people think that they won’t be around to enjoy the tree in its full-grown splendour. Maybe so, but someone else will. And if no one had ever had a long-term view, there would be no trees to enjoy planted by other people. Why not do something for others for a change? The great cathedrals that are some of the most fabulous and enjoyable buildings, were constructed over generations. People worked a lifetime on them in the knowledge that they would never see them completed. Thankfully, in the old days, people had a longer-term view of things or we would never have them now. A little of that attitude and you should soon be down the garden centre.