Elemental Grace

A walk on the wild side

April 5, 2009

It’s been quite a harrowing and highly stressful week for a number of reasons that I can’t really talk about in a public forum such as a blog, but given that it was I decided that today was going to be a bit of a break from the madness of building, painting, decorating and sewing. So after a leisurely breakfast, reading my new book, the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley I decided that since the weather was nice that I would take the dogs out for a nice long walk over Tor Woods, which stretch out towards Glastonbury and the Mendip hills.

Along the way, I caught up with a lady who lives down the road and has a beagle and wandered off into the woods for fun times and conversation. While we were down there, we discovered acres of wild garlic, carpeting the woodland floor. It was astonishingly beautiful mixed in with clumps of wood anenomes and primroses and the scent … well you couldn’t have missed it for miles! I’m quite excited, as it’s the first real patch of wild garlic that I’ve found and though I have eaten it before and found it delicious, I’ve never cooked with it and have been excitingly looking for recipes that I can use it in. I found a great one for minute steak with wild garlic and lemon mayonnaise, which I am definitely going to have to try. It sounds heavenly.

While we were out, we also found some great hedgerows with blackberry bushes, which bodes well for my jam and liqueur season next autumn. Now all I need to do is find some blackthorn bushes for sloe season and I’m pretty much set, although I have a hankering to find out more about mushrooms, because this strikes me as a fairly ideal sort of location if only I knew a bit more about which mushroom was which. I am still slightly nervous of picking the wrong ones!

Since I seem to be in the mood for plants and flowers and things of that nature (no pun intended), I went herb shopping at yesterday’s market for herbs that grow well in shade as I don’t get much direct sunlight. So I have some lovage, sorrel, apple mint, oregano and lemon balm, and I’m really looking forward to experimenting with them and really livening up my palate!

Clearly, I must be fated to have a greenfingered weekend as a lady a couple of villages along is giving away an old traditional rosebush for replanting and I cannot think of anything more beautiful to plant in the garden. Fingers crossed for it, that it lives through the ordeal.

So, please keep your fingers crossed for me as it’s the first day of my new job tomorrow and I’m slightly nervous. Possibly less so about the job than leaving the hounds but it has to be done!  I will endeavour to get some photos up of the painting and building as it progresses this week (hopefully the new boiler will be in by Wednesday!) but in the meantime, bear with me!

Love to all.

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