Hello everyone and a warm welcome to the next (free) issue of The Seasonal Supplement. We’re so happy you’re here! This is the place where we pull together snippets from our journal that don’t make it into our longer articles: a mix of short stories; simple, joyful (occasionally fleeting) moments; cooking notes; rustic recipes; and, of course, photographs. Together they will give you a seasonal glimpse into life here on our smallholding in the hills of rural England. We hope you enjoy reading.
Saturday 3 February
Cutting back the birch trees
There is a little gathering of birch trees on the edge of the orchard, just next to the vegetable patch. A silver birch, with diamond-patterned bark; a paper-bark birch, complete with peeling trunk, and a less-flashy looking mystery variety of birch. Together they offer dappled summer shade, strong winter structure, and tiny bottles of springtime syrup (made by gathering and boiling down the sap). Both us and the animals love sitting under their branches. But they have started to grow into the orchard trees and shadow the vegetable patch too much, so after an initial cut back during the apple pruning in January, we decide to take off a few more of the lower branches. The wood will be sawn up, stacked, split, and stacked again. Heating for the cottage in several winter’s time.
Sunday 4 February
Stingers
Nettle removal is a regular job at this time of year. The colonising plants pop up everywhere here. They leave no flowerbed, grassed area, or hedgerow unrooted. In many ways we really like them. They are a free, super-healthy source of food. They attract plenty of wildlife. They make a good plant feed. And the ones we have growing here have a sting significantly more powerful than any nettle we have come across before, making us the proud owners of (possibly) the sting-iest nettles in Somerset. And there are plenty of spots on the smallholding where they are welcome to grow freely. But today we have found them in the alpine strawberry bed. They have cleverly snuck under, in between, and around the frilly-leafed plants. We aren’t keen on our summer strawberry-picking being riddled with stings, so we must pull them up. We follow the stems down to ground level, winkle them loose with a hand fork, and tug. Their wire-like yellow roots ping up from underneath the strawbs, flicking soil into the air. We manage to clear most of them, but no doubt a few got away. By the end our hands are fizzing with stings. It seems our flimsy gardening gloves were no match for the plant’s many needle-like hairs.
Friday 9 February
Apple Tree Collection
We’re driving to Devon this afternoon in bucketing rain and floods to collect an apple tree. The tree, the variety Sunset, is one that has been on our wishlist for a while. We are excited to finally bring one home and get its roots in the soil. We plant it out the following day. The continuing rain means there is no need to water it in.
Monday 12 February
Picking the first daffodils
Today is one of those perfect weather days. Crisp and sunny. It feels extra special because it is sandwiched between many days of rain. The weather has been soggy this last week, and more grey cloud and rainfall is forecast from tomorrow onwards. The swathe of daffodils that lines the stream edge is just about to flower. The first buds are beginning to split. We can see flashes of yellow. We pick a handful of stems and plonk them in a jam jar on the kitchen table. They flower the next day. The first daffs of the year.
Tuesday 13 February
Snow Pancakes
Today is Shrove Tuesday. Pancake day. This year we decided to put a twist on the traditional batter by adding a spoonful of ‘snow’. Snow pancakes were once a wintertime recipe in England. We first came across a mention of them in a history book about English food by Dorothy Hartley. If the small amount of information dotted about online is correct, they seem to have a connection to the Lake District in particular.
To make them, a simple pancake batter is whisked up in the usual way by mixing eggs* and milk into flour to make a creamy batter. A spoonful of freshly fallen clean snow is stirred in just before cooking. The resulting pancakes are supposed to be lighter than usual and bubbled with little holes, caused by the snow melting as it hits the pan, leaving tiny gaps in the batter.
We were a little dubious about the likelihood of this icy addition having a positive effect on the recipe, but the idea of snow pancakes was too charming to resist. Surely, they are a staple breakfast food in Narnia (C.S. Lewis must have just forgotten to add them into his books). So, in the absence of any flutters of snow here (and unsure of how safe snow consumption is these days anyway), we blitzed a few ice cubes to powder, and stirred that into the batter. The result? Pancakes with a few pinprick holes that taste slightly less rich than regular pancakes. We sprinkle over lemon and sugar and decide to revert to the original batter recipe next time, or at least until some actual snow appears and we can try again with the real thing.
*there’s also some suggestion that the batter was occasionally made without the eggs if they were in short supply.
Thursday 15 February
Buzzard
We see buzzards circling the skies here daily. Sometimes alone. Often in pairs, one soaring just below the other. We regularly spot them flying with a few crows in hot pursuit; the corvids bravely shooing the birds of prey away from their nesting sites. But recently, one of the local buzzards has taken a liking to hanging out in the sheep paddock. Buzzards are creatures of habit. They choose their favourite places and frequent them regularly. And so, it is often that we see our buzzard sitting on the wooden rails of one of the makeshift apple tree protectors. If we sit quietly nearby, we can get a good view.
Saturday 17 February
An Unexpected Find
We are out looking for some old furniture to buy for the cottage today. After a few hours of rummaging around various second-hand and vintage shops, it becomes clear our luck is out. There are no rustic wooden treasures to be found today. Just before we head home, we spot a few rows of plant pots for sale outside the last antique shop. Amongst silver-leafed lavenders and flowering tubs of rosemary, we spot a plant that is on our vegetable growing list for this year: a perennial kale (the variegated Daubenton variety) for a steal of a price. We buy two pots and head home, chuffed.
Sunday 18 February
Buzzing
We spot the first bumblebees of the year today. They are still a little dozy, evidenced by their occasional gentle collision with the cottage windows. Most have found their way onto the crocus flowers. It is wonderful to see them again.
Later in the day we hear buzzing inside the cottage. A sleepy queen wasp has ventured out from a hidey-hole and navigated her way to the honey-scented comfort of a beeswax candle, which she appears to be cuddling. We pop her outside and hope she won’t decide to set up a nest in the loft again.
Tuesday 20 February
First Blossom
Some flower buds have opened on one of the plum trees. A scattering of delicate white blossom. This tree is always the first in the orchard to bloom. A sign that spring isn’t far away.
A little break:
We’re going to take a short break from writing here on Substack. We hope you don’t mind. We just need a bit of time to catch up on some bits and bobs that need doing on the smallholding and in life more generally.
Paid subscribers: we will pause your subscriptions until we’re back. This just means that your subscription will be frozen while we’re away, so no time will pass on it and no payments will be taken. As soon as we ‘unpause’, the subscription will resume as usual.
Free Subscribers: this means that there will be no Seasonal Supplement in March. The next issue will come out in April.
We’ll be back on Sunday 28 April. But before we go…
A Seasonal Recipe
As the wild garlic is just starting to poke its leaves out of the ground here, and as we’ll be missing the chance to talk about wild garlic season when it gets into full swing in the coming weeks, we’ll leave you with a recipe for these delicious little savoury biscuits, so you have it to hand when the time comes. If you can’t get hold of any wild garlic, herbs could be subbed-in instead; a tablespoon of very finely chopped fresh rosemary and/or sage, or perhaps a spoonful of dried thyme or oregano.
Wild Garlic and Cheddar Biscuits
Makes Approx. 25 biscuits
Ingredients:
150g plain flour
Pinch of sea salt
100g unsalted butter (at room temperature), cubed
100g mature cheddar, finely grated
30g young wild garlic leaves*, finely chopped
1 egg yolk*
1 tbsp poppyseeds or linseeds
Method:
Mix the flour and salt together in a bowl and rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the mature cheddar, followed by the wild garlic leaves, and then the egg yolk and bring together to form a round ball of dough.
Roll the dough into a rough 15cm long cylinder using your hands, wrap in greaseproof or waxed paper, then put in the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes. The dough will keep for a couple of days in the fridge if you need it to and it freezes well too.
Remove the dough from the fridge and unwrap it, then slice it into ½ cm rounds. Lay each biscuit on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper and sprinkle a few poppyseeds or linseeds on the top of each.
Bake in the oven at 180°C for 12-15 minutes until patched golden, and transfer to a wire rack to cool. The biscuits will keep in a sealed container for a few days, but they are at their very best when eaten within a few hours of baking.
*If you need something to make with the egg white leftover from the recipe, the Rhubarb and Rosemary cocktail back in issue 5 of The Seasonal Supplement might be just the ticket.
**A handy guide for safely identifying wild garlic (allium ursinum) can be found here.
If you’ve enjoyed reading the newsletter, do let us know by pressing the little heart button below and if you’d like to leave a comment too, we’d absolutely love to hear from you.
Thanks so much for reading.
Wishing you all a wonderful couple of months ahead. We’re looking forward to writing to you all again at the end of April.
Kathy and Tom
You will be missed! Hope you get all your jobs done without too much rain! Looking forward to your return!
Looking forward to trying the wild garlic biscuits and wishing you a well earned and productive break at this busy time of year. Hope you get dry weather and spring sunshine :)