One of the nicest smells around is garlic. It will hit you occasionally while on a walk in woods and it is sublime.
Should I grow it? I recently read an article saying that it is traditional to plant garlic on the shortest day and enjoy it on the longest. More practically, an allotment website tells me the time is now, although the job will easily hold over until November. I'll give it a go.
The days are getting shorter as we edge towards winter. I find it almost impossible to go out in the garden when I get home from work. Soon my opportunities will be restricted to the weekends when we put the clocks back (or is it forward? And do we get another hour in bed or an hour less? You know, that twice-yearly argument).
Carrying out an inspection this morning, before the rain came on, I discovered three or four holes in the vegetable patch. One was quite deep. Susan says it will have been squirrels as they like burying things. This squirrel neither buried anything or covered it up. What was the point?
The red cabbage I pickled has proved to be delicious and I shall make some more soon. Continuing my new regime, I shall be knocking up a Christmas cake this afternoon with ingredients all sourced from the shop. It's a recipe by Stephen Jackson, owner of the Weavers Shed restaurant in Golcar, Huddersfield, and it just struck me, 'This is something I could do'. A good thing about it is that it involves beer and there should be a decent amount left over.
My mate Alex 'Pip' Paton (he's a bit posh but knows about gardening) came bearing gifts.
As well as a pile of magazines including The Oldie (I like it and I'm but a young 'un), he had some vegetable stuff for me. There's was a splendid Reader's Digest Gardening Year, a couple of catalogues and the 50th anniversary edition of Organic Way - good reading material.
With his package of gifts was a bunch of chives ready to plant out. I can do it now, he says, so I will. Apparently, they will die back a bit and then thrive later on.
He's noticed that I've been reading Maye E Bruce's book on compost and suggests I should try Gardening with Compost, by F C King. The author's name sounds suspiciously made up to me.
I've been musing over the pickling and the sheer cost of it.
We of course had only two or three jam jars, so had to obtain more receptacles. Luckily, Wilkinson's had a sale on and we were able to pick up some Kilner jars at a cheap price. What a fine object is a Kilner jar, there's something deeply satisfying about holding one in your hand.
Then, as mentioned before, there was the driving about to find pickling onions and all the petrol that entailed. Not to mention carbon footprints, I suppose. And the vinegar, salt and pickling spices.
It might have been cheaper to go online and order a jar of Fortnum and Masons best (I'll be fashionable here and not include an apostrophe).
But (and there had to be a but, didn't there?) I would have missed out on the sheer satisfaction of achieving something.
I've taken the pickling idea a stage further - and actually done it. Two big jars of pickled onions and two small ones of pickled red cabbage are on their way. The kitchen has a certain pungency to it and our dog and cat seem to want to go out all the time.
It was a lot harder than we both thought to get pickling onions, the first three shops not having any. Not only that, but they didn't seem to have had any (at least not on that day). Maybe it's a tad too early for them, I don't know. We finally got lucky in the fourth shop we visited. It was evident there had been a run on them so perhaps shops that don't stock pickling onions are missing a trick or two.
The recipe I used for the onions came originally from Susan's great-grandmother, so it's authentic Derbyshire stuff. The recipe for the red cabbage is from a book put together by the Halifax Courier and was one sent in by a reader, c1960. The old ways are best.
There's been a lot of talk on the news today about share prices plunging, banks in trouble and the whole country of Iceland going belly up in the economic crisis. I'm pulling up my imaginary drawbridge, comfortable in the knowledge that I have pickled onions and cabbage to keep us going.
My attention has turned to the possibility of pickling onions. I'm going to give it a go.
Seems like it will be a satisfying process and not all that difficult to do, except everyone seems to have their own favourite method of doing it. I'll just have to think what's best for me and get on with it.
One slight trouble is that we don't seem to have that many jars, although it's possible there's a stack somewhere in the cellar. Must go and have a root round.
Needless to say, I didn't get to Dewsbury Onion Fair today. Never mind, there's always next year.
