Marigold Wine and nostalgic jam pots

The marigold wine is not quite as clear as the carrot & apricot (it should have been decanted; we'll remember with the next bottle) but it tastes wonderful. It seems I made it a sweet wine. I wish I could find my wine-making notes. They are in the previous 'inner' for this notebook case that I bought in Florence seventeen or eighteen years ago, and they were very detailed: what yeast I used, how much sugar added, how long fermented, and so on. The current inner has mostly botanical notes.

my Florentine notebook cover

DivingDaughter came over from Edinburgh for a  couple of Christmassy days and she brought me some posh jam which caused a bout of sweet nostalgia.

It may seem for small pots of jam to cause nostalgia so here's the story. When my dad was very ill with lung cancer and we were still living in Oxfordshire, I would drive up to Poulton-le-Fylde on as many weekends as I could manage in my trusty old car, Diggory. Diggory had a personality and is remembered fondly by DerbyshireDaughter and DivingDaughter. He was still around and chugging along nicely when Toadlet was born. The photo below is of her with Diggory, or Diggory Old Bean, as I used to say when he was being temperatmental, as in: "Come on, Diggory Old Bean!"

Diggory continued chugging along for another five years after this photo was taken. Eventually we had to take him to the car graveyard, not because of engine failure, but because the cost of repairing the rusting chassis was going to be too much. At some point after this photo I tied a piece of string round two bits of the front grille to stop a rattle. It stayed there to the end, as did various bits of Blutak inside stopping more silly rattles.

What connection does this have to my dad's last illness? Well, on my Friday evening drives up north I would stop at a service station somewhere in the middle of the four-hour drive and have a scone with butter and jam and a pot of tea. I never used the whole of a motorway service station pot of jam so I'd bring them away with me and put them in Diggory's glove compartment. I always meant to take them into the house and use them up, and I think that sometimes happened, but they also accumulated in the glove compartment. Somehow the wee pots of jam in the glove compartment became part of Diggory's personality. And after my dad died, it would have seemed wrong, somehow, for there not to be a few small pots of jam in Diggory's glove compartment in memory of my dad.

Hey, Dad.

Wine from the Boggy Brae cellar part 2

an illustration of my carrot & apricots wine's viscosity

My 2004 Carrot & Apricot wine, bottled in July 2006, turned out good ten years on, and not just for the colours. Its high viscosity confirms its high alcohol content and it tasted good, in a 'robust' kind of way (Toad said "soft peach holding a war club" and, when he'd had a bit more "like maraschino cherries–full metal jacket variety"). We drank some with pasta and a carbonara type sauce made with Serrano ham and some smoked salmon but no Parmesan cheese. That was good too.

colours of carrot & apricot wine

Next for trial is some Marigold wine.

Wine in the cellar

Toad and I went down into the cellar yesterday. He was looking for a sheet of glass that he uses in some way for his painting projects. He's planning to paint a portrait of me when he can get a decent photo in decent daylight. Decent daylight tends to be in rather short supply at this time of year. He found his glass and he proceeded to paint it brown. No, I haven't any idea why either.

Anyway, I'd forgotten just how much of my home-made wine was down there. I had a winemaking stint when we lived in Oxfordshire and I had an allotment that was surrounded by berry bushes. We'd drunk most of the good stuff by the time we moved here so what's left has been sitting there for a decade in the hope it would improve with time. Toad brought up a bottle of apple wine and drank some of it quite happily. I had a sip and decided time had not improved it.

I suppose I could clear drains with it. Some of the colours are nice.

We also stored water down there because for the first couple of years here, until Scottish Water got its act together and replaced rotting Victorian pipe work along the peninsula, the number of times our water supply was off while they dealt with leaks all along the road was repeatedly inconvenient.

Electricity was off far too often too. That has also improved since power lines were laid underground instead of along parts of hillside with difficult access. The picture below was taken across the field next to the Boggy Brae one December day about six years ago. Those power lines are no longer there.

My reason for going into the cellar was to bring up some things that could be thrown out, like boxes of paperwork that we no longer need to hang on to. In parts of the cellar I can stand up, so long as I don't mind cobwebs in my hair. But if I want to walk about I have to duck to avoid joists and a muckle great metal beam that goes under half the house.

Steps down to the cellar and some bright green showing up during a short period of brightness between sleet showers this morning.

Painting the kitchen walls

The south-west wall of the kitchen used to look like this →
Now it looks like this ↓

There's another coat of paint to go on that length of skirting board and then that section is finished except for putting it back together, so to speak.
The dolphin blackboard, which is trademarked "Booth Design Workshop 1990" (no relation as far as I'm aware) will go back and so will the barometer that's underneath it in the picture. I wanted to get a new "Until Dawn" curtain by Tord Boontje until I looked at the price. I have some leftover bits but not enough white so will experiment with some that is black on the room-facing side and put it right back against the window. Summer afternoon sun through that window can be quite intense so it might work.

In this pic ←, taken in what counts as daylight on a rainy day in December, you can see the wall irregularity. The vertical ridge is there because there used to be a wall dividing off that end of the room. The high recessed window was for a tiny maid's room, apparently, that only had enough space for a bunk, a tiny bit of floor space and, presumably, some storage under the bunk for her few possessions.

Having already done the south-east wall (above and left), I suppose it could be said I've done a quarter, except that westwards of the dolphin's spot it gets a bit complicated!

west corner

I think I'll start on the north-east wall from the east corner before I get to the complicated bits!

east corner

The Lophocolea Stump part 2

These first two photos show the south-east slope as it was in the spring of 2006 before we moved here. The spruce stumps both still had at least some of their bark and were pretty bare on top.

SE slope and rotting lean-to 2006

May 2014

By the spring of 2014, the lower stump had a good covering of the liverwort, Variable-leaved Crestwort (Lophocolea heterophylla).

with snow, March 2015

In the slightly snowy photo above, you can see sections of the tree's trunk. In the August of 2014, when I was trying to identify one of the mosses on the spruce wood, I discovered a large ants' nest inside the wood and came across blue leafhoppers for the first time. Blogpost about that here.

I still haven't identified this one ↑, or if I did I've forgotten what its name is.

During the low light days of the winter of 2015-16, the stump covering of Variable-leaved Crestwort was a lovely bright spot

and its sides were becoming clothed in bryophytes, lichens and small plants like heath bedstraw.

Sporophytes of Lophocolea heterophylla, November 2015.

In late February this year I removed the length of hosepipe that I'd been 'storing' around the stump for some years after finding it lying about in the way of my scything efforts once too often. There was plenty of evidence of insect activity.

someone has been digging into the wood

By November this year the top of the stump looked like this. I saw a young magpie pulling bits of wood out just recently, presumably in search of tasty morsels to eat.

the Lophocolea stump in December 2016

Most recently the stump has been decorated with three (found another after taking that photo) small pumpkins that I found (mystifyingly!) near it. I later discovered that Toadlet had thrown them out of her bedroom window at one o'clock in the morning during a break from revising for exams! It's the sort of thing my dad said he called a "scream" when he was a university student ☺ in the 1950s.

Some things don't change!

The Honeysuckle Stump

When we first came here, there were two large stumps of spruce trees on the south-east slope. They had been Christmas trees that a long ago Boggy Brae family had not wanted to part with. Clearly they had been left to grow rather large and must have prevented a lot of light from getting to the house and garden. The photo to the left shows the upper stump which became the honeysuckle stump as honeysuckle began, of its own accord, to grow over it. At first I encouraged this. Some string I tied around the stump to hold up the honeysuckle shoots is visible in the snowy photo below from March 2008.

Gradually the amount of honeysuckle growing over the stump increased until the stump was hidden. A birch tree seeded next to the stump and ferns, including bracken. By last year there was a lot of plant but not a lot of flowering. This year I thought I'd let the birch tree grow so that the honeysuckle could grow up it but it still didn't flower much...

June 2015

...and this month I decided it needed a haircut. It was all getting a bit messy and just large–we'd be having reduced light problems again at this rate.

December 2016

So I backed the rattletrap, which already had fence wire from the fuchsia hacking down at the front (not finished yet), closer in to where I was working.

fence wire for the dump

Underneath all the honeysuckle stems I found two fungi growing on the stump–a lot of the pale yellow lumpy fungus and a hoof-type bracket fungus.

I shoved all the stems, the birch tree and various other gunk into Rattletrap, went inside to eat two rock buns and drink some tea, and then set off to the dump. A condenser (I think) that the boiler service man took out of the boiler went too.

Something tells me I'll be tidying up around this stump for a while yet.

The dark stuff among the honeysuckle stems is ivy.

Something also tells me that mudguard on the rattletrap needs a new piece of gaffer tape! 

The lower spruce stump is a whole nother story for another time. (I know 'nother' isn't officially a word; I think it needs to be; a whole other doesn't feel right!).

lower, or Lophocolea, spruce stump

After I'd returned from the dump and was eating lunch, I saw a wren troglodyting about in the debris left by the stump's haircut. That was nice.