The water in a burn, where it ruffles over stones

Describing the colour of someone's hair "...like the water in a burn, where it ruffles over the stones. Dark in the wavy spots, with bits of silver on the surface where the sun catches it" from Cross Stitch by Diana Gabaldon

Garden Seats at the Boggy Brae

Today's work space. I'm cutting back spiraea that is trying to take over. In the process I can get at brambles too and yank them out, make a new wood pile and photograph mosses (thus the tripod). Also in the process I can create find new garden seats, known at Boggy Brae as
"sit-upon-eries".

This one is the Grey Sallow sit-upon-ery

 Grey Sallow joins a fine tribe of garden
sit-upon-eries including this apple one, which is the first one I made discovered. It needs to be weeded!

Here is the rhododendron ponticum one. you can see its 'pontiness' (bridginess) here too.

There is potentially a wild cherry one here except that a foxglove has got there first. I might need to move that elsewhere.

The ridiculously monstrous cypress sit-upon-ery.

And, of course, the eucalyptus

(photo from last May).

Thr trunk now rests on that log under it.

There will be more. Coffee break over.

This morning's PJ wander... well, tramp anyway

...having thrust a double Ventile field coat over my dressing-gown and got my already thick-socked  feet into my Muck boots.

Oh, and don't forget the sawn off balaclava that I use as a garden hat. It is a double layer of closeknit cashmere so beautifully comfortable. I still have the neck bit, which I'll use as well, but separately, in winter.

From just outside back door

                                    From the top of the garden

From the highest point of the field. It really was these colours!

And then the colours softened quite quickly

Slight ground frost this morning

The south-east garden/field boundary. Where I'm standing to take the photo is where I scissor step over the fence.

Pemmican (Part 1) and a tray of Boggy Brae Flapjack

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Apparently proper Native American style pemmican is a total food.

Toad is making pemmican. He may decide to try an experiment of eating nothing but pemmican for a month or some other period of time. Part of the idea, as I understand it, is that he can take some pemmican to work and eat it during the day instead of drinking coffee throughout the day to stave off hunger. This eating, or rather, non-eating plan tends to fall through when work colleagues bring in cake to share and leave it on a table near Toad's desk. He's looking for a way to eat something more nourishing than cake. He doesn't take a packed lunch. I like coffee and cake but I have them as well as breakfast, lunch and dinner because my coffee experiments have not yet discovered this hunger-staving property that caffeine is supposed to have. It is true that I don't drink my coffee or tea very strong.

When I say "nothing but pemmican" there are provisos. In the first place, according to Toad who has presumably gleaned this information from somewhere, the beef of grain-fed cattle is not as nutrient (vitamin) rich as that of pastured cattle, and as he thinks the beef he bought is probably from grain-fed cattle, he says he would need to take a vitamin supplement as well during the pemmican experiment. Proviso the second is that I presume he would still be drinking coffee and tea, not to mention his winter evening tots of rum or whisky. But that is a presumption at the moment. Observation will bear it out or otherwise.

So, to get onto the pemmican-making method. I am an observer of this process so just describing here what I see. A couple of days ago Toad bought a lump of beef. Last night he thinly sliced some of the raw meat and hung the pieces from cocktail sticks suspended from an oven grid overnight in the bottom oven of the Rayburn on a very low heat setting. This morning I needed to turn up the heat of the Rayburn to cook some flapjack and then a slow-cooking chicken casserole so I had to take the partly dried beef out.

<< Here it is on the baking tray that was underneath it to catch any drips. It occurred to me that, since we have a pan rack above the Rayburn, I could hang the meat there to carry on drying during the day using the rising heat from my cooking, so I did that. See below:

<<Boggy Brae Flapjack. My son-out-law says I should set up a production line, it's that good.







250g salted butter
175g sugar
a dollop (heaped dessertspoon) of honey
a larger dollop (as much as will stick to a tablespoon) of golden syrup

Melt all of the above in a large pan.

While it is melting chuck handfuls of almonds, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, walnuts (or pecans), sunflower kernels, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds (whatever! I usually use all of those) into a blender and grind them up.

Weigh out 350g rolled oats
Add to the oats 2 teaspoons ground ginger (more if you like)
a teaspoon of ground cinnamon
a shake of ground nutmeg or allspice
2 teaspoons of ground coriander seeds.

When the butter and sugars have melted, remove the pan from the heat and mix in the oats, spices, nuts and seeds. Tip into a large baking pan lined with baking parchment. Bake at 325ºC/160ºF for about 20 minutes. My Rayburn oven doesn't cook evenly so I turn the tray round after 12 minutes.

Cut the flapjack into rectangles or triangles while it is still hot and leave to cool in the tin.

Fab with coffee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toadlet will not eat any of the above. She has eaten flapjack in the past. She favourite meat is Parma ham. Whether it is more favourite than Greggs' sausage rolls (which, according to her, are the best sausage rolls in the world) I have not yet established with any certainty.

I went in search of hazel leaves

The Woodland Trust was asking on Twitter if there were leaves still on hazel trees. There are some on the Boggy Brae hazel but I went "up the back" by the burn where there are older hazel plants to see what state they were in.

 Loads on young trees (left) and still plenty on older plants (below)

Poking around by the burn, which is splashy after all the rain we've had (which, for comparison, is a mere drip compared with what they've had up in the Highlands over the last couple of days),

and enjoying the rich Assam tea look it has in less tumbly parts of its wee ravine,

I came upon a robin. Actually, I think the robin came upon me. It certainly seemed to checking me out to see if I was turning up something tasty for it. So here's a game of

Spot the Robin

(click on the pics to enlarge)

Are you sure you didn't bring some mealworms?

Making my way back by this path–the burn and the wooded hillside to my right and the Boggy Brae garden to my left–I enjoyed the colours and crinkliness of what I know as Dog Lichen. I believe the dog part of the name means common, so common lichen, otherwise called Peltigera horizontalis/Flat-Fruited Dog Lichen, both by the burn and on rocks and trees back in the garden:

This sample is on one of the old railway sleepers
that the half-collapsed bridge is made of

The sample above and the one to the right are Boggy Brae samples.

Last of all, before coming in for a bowl of spicy lentil soup, I enjoyed the last of this year's Den Rose blossoms, a small flower, and very wet like everything else, but bonny for all that.

This morning's fungal finds

Three or four groups of these on the compost heap I now refer to as the "hare's foot heap". I've upped the red just a touch in this photo because I lked the light shining through the wild cherry leaf at the base of the toadstools.



Another group of the same below:

This orangey-yellow fungus

was catching the lght too

A "pinky" on the fallen eucalyptus trunk;
clues as to its identity would be much appreciated!

Fuligo septica on the chopped down cypress stump left, and to the right some wee yins on an old ash log.

This morning's light

From near the top of the field near my home
(click photos to enlarge)

The lower two photos were taken from near the bottom of my garden, which is level with the bottom of the field.

Thickpoint Grimmia and Cypress-leaved Plait-moss

On a blustery, showery day nipping out between blasts and downpours for bits of moss seemed like a reasonable idea. If I have identified the ones below correctly, they are numbers 29 and 14 (because of an earlier confusion) of my moss list, 209 and 208 of my boggybraewild list.

Thickpoint Grimmia/Schistidium crassipilum

(I think!)

I've spent quite a while trying to ascertain if this is Thickpoint Grimmia or some other moss. The description of it in the British Bryological Society guide (ISBN 978-0-9561310-1-0) does say that "neighbouring colonies" may look quite different from each other and possibly be confused with other species. So that's my excuse!

Here it is growing on a concrete step. Elsewhere on a brick. That's good as the book also says: "this species can be found throughout the country in man-made habitats".

To the right I've tried to show "the capsules largely hidden by the leaves that sheath them", which is, apparently, 'characteristic of' Schistidium species.

I also established that the Boggy Brae specimens have 16 peristome teeth which are sometimes reflexed on old capsules and sometimes not.

 Clickable pics to enlarge

Cypress-leaved Plait-moss/Hypnum cupressiforme

This little moss community is at the base of the dry stone wall that runs across our front terrace. This stone is facing south-east.

The Cypress-leaved Plait-moss is at top at the right-hand end. The moss at the top in the middle is a different species.

Hypnum cupressiforme/
Cypress-leaved Plait-moss growing on a dry stone wall

With some reflexed stonecrop that has not produced flowers this year. It usually does. Perhaps the weather wasn't warm/dry/wet enough at the right time this year? You can see some of the golden brownness of the H.cupressiforme shoots that its near relative H.andoi lacks.

A shoot of Hypnum cupressiforme, a good five and a half centimetres long despite The Book saying that shoots of this moss are "typically about 2cm long". There are longer ones too. No wonder I get confused!