It’s been a wonderful long weekend full of fantastic food surprises! Aberdeenshire is now at the height of summer and belting out the goodies, left right and centre. When I go for a bike ride I don’t need to take fruit with me anymore; just a pot and some yogurt, and the hedgerows provide the rest.

Mushroom-wise, the Chanterelles and Orange Birch Boletes are out, as well as several members of the Agaricus genus. I’ve been eating mushrooms and scrambled egg every day for the past week. It’s a simple and delicious meal!

On my ride yesterday I was treated to a huge patch of wild mint – absolutely tons and tons of it. I’ve taken enough leaves for a Kilner jar full, for John and me to enjoy as an after-dinner drink.

Also in the drinks department are Barberries. I never noticed them before but they’re actually growing in the hedges in our street. I’ve picked them to make cordial – it tastes like a cross between grapes and blackcurrant.

Talking of blackcurrants, I am preparing the ground for another round of wine making! Tonight I picked the required 1700 grams, and I’ve ordered the yeast online. When that arrives, brewing can commence!

Last but not least, I must share with you a beauty of an aubergine that’s growing on our windowsill. It’s not full size yet, but I often stare at it in wonder:

Aberdeenshire may not be the warmest place on Earth (thankfully not), but it has some of the finest wild produce. I feel very blessed to live here!

My raindance was effective – it has rained every single day since my last blog post! Not *all day* every day, but enough to make the natural world come alive. Suddenly, there is food everywhere! In the past week, we’ve eaten our own tatties and found a patch of wild strawberries. In the Shire I’ve picked blueberries and raspberries, and blackcurrants.

Today was fantastic! I cycled out with a pot of custard and a spoon, and added blueberries to it at Mill of Cammie. Straight from the bush into my bowl. I stood there grinning from ear to ear, in blissful enjoyment of fresh fruit.

Here in Scotland we have tiny insects called ‘midgies’ that make our life a misery when we’re out and about, so I dressed up like a grannie to stop them getting into my ears and neck. I like to think that car drivers passing by really thought I was an old grannie (or preferably a witch of some sort) as I’m more likely to be left in peace that way 😆.

Further along there were pink raspberries – the first of the season! I gobbled them up by the handful (and have been a bit gaseous since…).

On the way I also spotted chanterelles and field mushrooms, which I’ve just consumed in a one-pan scramble with 2 eggs.

All in all, a lot to be thankful for today. Tomorrow I’m heading out again to see what I can find! The title of this blog post is ’11 months and counting’ – this refers to the fact that I’ve lived supermarket free (with regards to my daily fruit) for nearly a year. Everything I’ve eaten over the winter and spring has been picked by us last summer, and stored in our freezer. Only now am I eating fresh fruit again. It’s amazing to realise that it is possible to get it all for free from our locality. Zero food miles! With all the new stuff appearing I am now certain that I’ll make it to 12 months, in 2 weeks’ time. Watch this space!

Last weekend marked the culmination of much fundraising activity for the River Dee Trust: I completed my Deeside Duathlon and raised over 700 pounds! It was an amazing two days and I’m so grateful to my John for his practical and emotional support on the ride.

The money goes towards planting saplings along the Dee’s tributaries. The salmon don’t know it yet, but their habitat is going to get better!

Here’s a short video that summarizes the event:

https://clipchamp.com/watch/Hi6xdyVAQzu

While I had been quite focused on ‘getting there’ on the way to Braemar, on the way home I started looking around for ‘forageables’. And I found a beauty! May I present to you a magnificent Verbascum:

Apart from the seeds, everything on this plant is edible, but most often used in medicinal form. I’ve taken a few leaves to dry for tea. Apparently it’s very good against urinary tract infections! I wish I had found the plant earlier, as this was exactly what I suffered from in the days before my duathlon. I’m now drinking Verbascum tea daily to get my ‘waterways’ back to good health.

I haven’t seen many mushrooms yet – the Scarletina’s seem to largely have passed us by (with one exception in Braemar). I’m hoping that a bit more rain in the coming week will bring them all out. When nobody is looking, I will do a rain dance 😆!

Summer has arrived! While our Aberdonian Spring was cold for a long time, the past few weeks have been not just warm, but hot. That’s a term we don’t often use here! It did not rain for nearly 4 weeks – the effects on the natural world had become noticeable. Cracks in the soil, birds changing their food preferences (my grape-aversive crows were now gobbling them up like they were going out of fashion), worryingly low river levels and an absence of mushrooms.

In an overnight display of mercy, finally the rains appeared. That morning, I set off for my cycling holiday to Braemar, delighting in the petrichor smell. Four days of hillwalking and wild swimming lay ahead! Here’s what I found on the first day when I went up Morrone:

I drank the mountain water that was freshly running down across the rock and peat, the best water you’ve ever tasted. I swam in the burn below the mountain and felt fully ‘one’ with the environment.

This coming week I will be once again raising funds for the River Dee Trust’s campaign of planting one million trees along the river’s tributaries. In Glen Shee this project is in full swing:

There are about a thousand saplings in this picture, with each one costing £2.50. This Friday and Saturday I will be doing a duathlon from sea to source (cycling the length of the Dee and back, swimming in 8 places) to raise money for 250 more trees. John will be cycling alongside me as support – and photographer! When I was in Braemar I had a bit of a shock to see myself on the front of the local newspaper where they announced it:

I will be reporting about it here on the blog, including a link to my Justgiving page in case anyone would like to support the cause. For now I’m going to try and get lots of rest to be ready for the long haul on Friday!

John and I have just finished making another batch of fermented Rosebay Willowherb tea. It’s a laborious process that involves stripping the leaves off the stem and rolling them up in the palm of your hand to break down the cell structures.

These little balls are put in a glass bowl and covered with a tea towel. Every 12 hours I give it a stir. Gradually, the leaves start to ferment and the smell changes. After 48 hours I stop the fermentation process by drying them in the oven at 90 degrees C.

What made this such a wonderful evening was that we listened to music while we stripped and rolled the leaves. Oboe concertos by Marcello and Albinoni, followed by Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto. Somehow music bypasses all thought and hits you right in your core. In my mind it is strongly related to how I experience the natural world, my Highland Cathedral. The sense of marvel and wonder I feel when observing new growth on a tree, perfectly shaped oyster mushrooms or a foxglove breaking through concrete, irrepressible – that’s a feeling that words cannot express, but music can.

Returning briefly to the Rosebay Willowherb: the resulting tea is beautifully coloured and delicately (but distinctly) flavoured. It’s our current favourite and I foresee many more music filled hours of ‘rolling leaves’ at the kitchen table!

That’s one Happy Forager with a bag full of St. George’s! My Facebook memory tells me that I’ve found them on exactly the same day last year. John made one of his fabulous fluffy mushroom omelettes to celebrate these beauties. I get a real buzz from finding them and cutting them off with my knife. Mushrooms are incredibly satisfying things to hold in your hand – the perfect shape, and they’re nice and cold. Just look at them:

Earlier on I had found something else while on the way to swim at Knockburn. It was absolutely huge and I still had a few hills to climb. I decided to leave it where it was and come back for it on my way home. It was not a mushroom….

Different countries and regions have their own names for these things, and in Scotland we call them ‘neep’. It’s grown for cattle feed and this one probably had fallen off a trailer. I felt so sorry for it, having grown this big and just being left to rot. So despite the colossal weight that made my bike feel decidedly out of balance, I cycled 15 miles home with it.

It turned out to be enough for several meals: first I made chips, and then soup, onto which we sprinkled some crispy haggis. It was fantastic!

Now that the beech and raspberry leaves are out, I will fill my jars this coming weekend. I’m also going to experiment with fermenting leaves of the Rosebay willow herb, so watch this space!

Greetings from Fog City! We’re going into day 3 now of a dense ‘haar’ (sea mist) that is enveloping Aberdeen and surroundings. Normally the wind is from the West, giving us crystal clear skies, especially in the morning. But an easterly breeze is now colliding with cold air on land, making it feel distinctly Autumnal.

Some trees are now in leaf, but many are still bare. The tomato, cucumber and cucamelon plants in the greenhouse look at me in bewilderment – 10 degrees Celsius is not what they signed up for!

I went for a very drizzly bike ride today to check on my rhubarb spots. The majority of the growth is still to come, but I’m running out of food in the freezer. So I collected just a few stalks to cook a kilner jar full, leaving the rest to get a bit bigger.

I also got some more sweet cicely to add to the rhubarb. The leaves felt wonderfully fresh in the rain.

There still are no St. George’s mushrooms, but I’m sure that when the wind changes and the sun heats up the soil, they will leap into action. Watch this space!

Today we’ve explored the ‘re-wilded’ land around the Beltie Burn.

When there was still a railway connection between Aberdeen and Torphins, the Beltie Burn ran alongside it in a straight line. An unnatural situation and, habitat wise, quite a desert. That’s why the River Dee Trust launched a project to restore the burn’s natural bends, including fallen trees to hold sediment and provide spawning places. In doing so they’ve also created a huge wetland area. Apparently, the day after completion, salmon were already spotted!

Against the brown sand and slaty stones, the smolts (juvenile salmon) have an almost perfect camouflage. But we got lucky! Holding their position while facing upstream, their movement looked effortless. We wished them well on their long journey to the Atlantic, hoping they will return to the Beltie Burn once more once they have reached adulthood and are ready to start a new generation.

While walking in this mist and drizzle filled landscape, we suddenly heard a deep bellowing sound – we looked at each other and went ‘Bittern!’

It was unmistakable but we didn’t hear it again so couldn’t record it. Here is a Youtube clip:

It’s amazing to think that this rare bird (who is more often heard than seen) may have taken up residence in this newly established habitat.

Other elusive lifeforms this week included more morels, which we turned into a risotto. Our kitchen is now fully complete and we enjoyed cooking together.

Still no St. George mushrooms, but last year we found them on John’s birthday, which is 3 weeks away… We will have to be patient, and some people struggle a bit with that 😆!

We wish you a good first week of May!

This morning I had a near-breakdown while out on my trike. The handlebars were coming loose and I didn’t have any tools with me, so after a phone consultation with the Chief Engineer at home, I decided to head back straight away.

And it so happened that my return journey perfectly coincided with a young blackbird’s first misfortunous attempt at flying. I found it on the fast South Deeside Road, in the path of oncoming traffic. It sat there with the dazed anticipation that chicks often have. I parked my trike in the verge and managed to catch the little thing. It fluttered (and pooped) and wasn’t obviously hurt, but it needed to be moved off the road. One more minute and it would have been toast. Once out of my hands away from the traffic, it fluttered to a safe space amongst beech leaves. I shan’t forget its little face!

Earlier in the week were some rescues of a different kind: tomato plants! Both Aldi and Co-op sell various fruit and veg plants, but they don’t look after them; the racks outside the store sport many dessicated-looking specimens. I cannot bear the waste of life. I always take them home. At Aldi it was a tomato plant with a near-broken stem (whom we called Shirley), and at Co-op it was a plant that barely resembled a living thing, now called Diamond. Both have now fully recovered from their ordeal and are thriving on the windowsill. This is what Diamond looked like when I got her:

But after a night in a bucket of water, she recovered:

I decided to email the respective supermarkets, hoping to persuade them to do something about this. I will keep you posted!

At that same Aldi site I struck gold from an unexpected corner: Black Morels were growing on the woodchips! I knew that this might be a likely habitat, but I never envisaged I would actually find them in the numbers that I did. They were everywhere! But very well camouflaged….

I’ve dried them on the stove and John is going to make a risotto with them once we have our kitchen fully up and running. I’m looking forward to trying them!

And finally, the mushrooms are also growing indoors: my parents sent me oyster spores and I’ve been saving up coffee grounds from John’s post-dinner concoction – apparently the oysters love feeding on it. Well, here’s the evidence, they’re going like the clappers:

We’re nearly into May now, which will mean lots of new leaves to forage, and hopefully the first St. George’s mushrooms. Every month brings its own delights in a wonderful array of produce and flavours!

The photo above epitomises the weekend – I was in full outdoor mode and nothing made me happier than scrambling through a boggy woodland with John (very much off-the-beaten-track), fording burns and clambering over logs, in search of chaga. All the while carrying a tenon saw!

In this kind of habitat I feel so fully at home that I lose the sense of where my body ends and the forest begins. When I grab hold of a moss-covered tree to help me get across the burn, my hand becomes the tree. In the forest there is no gender, I can be just a human. Or not even that, just a mammal in search of food.

When we struck gold, John was so kind as to assist the vertically challenged 😆.

Back home I chopped it into pieces and it’s now drying by the stove for about a week. Then I will grind it to a powder in the food processor, ready to be shipped to my Dad.

Yesterday was a different type of ‘nature immersion’, when I was Knockburn’s sole swimmer. Perfect blue skies, perfect inviting water, and soft Spring air. I managed 6 minutes, which is 5 minutes longer than what I did in February.

Afterwards I headed up onto the slopes around the loch to pick some gorse flowers. Now, this makes it sound like the proverbial walk in the park, but in reality it was screaming agony! Trying to feel my way around a gorse branch with numb hands (from swimming), while trying to avoid getting pricked was a non-starter. After a while I got better at it, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m typing this blog tonight with fingers that each have at least 4 splinters (and I can’t get them out).

It was wonderful being up there in the warm sun though, in total peace and all alone. Then to my delight, I found Horsetail in a boggy field:

These little asparagus-like shoots are the fertile parts of the plant. They are nice when fried for a few minutes and gobbled up straight from the pan. The vegetative part that follows on from these fertile shoots can be dried and used as tea (hurrah!).

Talking of tea, how is this for forager’s shelves:

Our new kitchen is not finished yet, but these shelves are up and I’ve been looking at them more than is good for me. In the summer all these jars will be full to the brim!

If you haven’t yet gotten into foraging, April is a good time to start as things start emerging. It’s easier to ID plants now as there aren’t quite as many around. I’m happy to help, just give me a shout!