Signs I like #29 - Ducks Crossing!

When it comes to road signs, I am, not surprisingly given the primary focus of this blog, quite interested in those related to protecting both wildlife and motorists from unwanted interactions. In most cases, this is primarily to protect the wildlife. In some instances, however, such as deer, there are potentially serious, even fatal, implications of accidental comings-together, both for the animal and the vehicle's occupants. In this series of Signs I Like" posts, I've previously included the funky signs in the Outer Hebrides, warning of otters crossing the roads at "pinchpoints" such as coastal causeways.

Today, the sign I like is on the business park where I work in Stirling where it points out the likelihood of encountering ducks crossing the road. It is particularly important at this time of year as female mallards walk their large broods of ducklings from their hidden nest sites across the business park, down to the small pond at the entrance to the business park. We had a mother duck walking her family of eight suckling past the office window last week - very sweet!

I took this photo in the pouring rain - very appropriate weather for ducks!

Wild food from the Park – Look back in hunger... a review of 2011

And so we’ve finally reached the end of our year-long attempt to find wild food from our local park, the King’s Park in Stirling, every month of the year, and to produce some edible (or drinkable!) produce from what we collected. And, if you’ve been reading my intermittent (and usually extremely late) posts on this project through 2011, you’ll know that we managed it. Furthermore, some of what came out of the efforts was surprisingly tasty and we’ll be revisiting a number again next year. There were some good “do-ers”, available throughout the year or appearing as expected, when expected, such as the ever-available jelly-ear fungus, and the ever-reliable wild sorrel, elderflower and raspberries, the latter two of which we’ve been gathering for many years from the Park.

Some of our high points were:

• using 30 plant species (including 12 wild plants) in a wild spring green soufflé
• discovering the nectar of the gods that is honeysuckle cordial (more please, more!)
• wild garlic and walnut pesto and, for that matter, hazel and beechnut pesto too
• the golden honey smell of lime blossom on one warm July morning
• finding previously undiscovered wild plum, greengage and crab apple trees and bushes
• making new ‘things’ like sloe and apple cheese, and Autumn’s end jelly (my own creation!)
• coming home to O’s chardonnay jelly with wild raspberries, a real warm summer’s evening treat after a long day sitting about in a green room at BBC Scotland with the Heart of Scotland choir, waiting to be filmed with John Barrowman (two new experiences in one day!)

There were a couple of things we won’t be repeating – especially our meadowsweet cordial recipe – more medicinal than enjoyable – and we probably won’t be bothering trying to gather hazelnuts locally as these were more trouble than the efforts and returns merited, thanks to the Park’s highly efficient grey squirrels.

So, how did the year pan out in terms of the use of different wild foods in each month? The following table shows how the availability of different food sources changed as the year rolled on. Red boxes show where we collected and ate something, and blue boxes where we found, but didn’t collect (e.g. for reasons of time that month, or to avoid repeating experiences from previous months - variety is the spice of life, whether eating wild food or blogging about it!). Clicking on the table should open a larger version:

It’s an interesting pattern, showing that there’s real variation of opportunity. The weather also had a significant effect on this. In January, for example, everything was frozen solid during the most extreme winter for decades, including the jelly ear fungus that was our only successful find that month. By April, lots of fresh greens were available, but by July, many had disappeared or matured into poorly-edible fibrous toughness; edible blossoms had appeared by summer though, and Autumn was full of nuts, berries, hips and haws. The extremely wet Autumn greatly shortened the season for, and the crop of, blackberries – many went mildewy or rotted quickly.

The absence of edible fungal species in the Park is a big disappointment, with the honourable exception of jelly ear fungus on dead elder wood. There are many oak, beech and birch trees in the Park, all of which can and should host edible fungi that we would trust ourselves to identify. I think we may need to go a bit deeper into some of the denser areas of woodland next year to see if there’s more safely edible fungi available than we know of.

There were a couple of opportunities for which we ran out of time– the first, I’ve tried before and which is a little underwhelming, would have been acorn coffee. I still have some left from last year, and it is a bit like a malt drink with most of the flavour removed. The other failed opportunity was to try to make the drink, dandelion and burdock, made from the long roots of both plants in autumn after a summer of storing energy and flavour. Maybe next year!

One thought that struck me often throughout the year, and one which drove me back to read Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman's BBC book: ‘Wild Food’, was how difficult it would be to have a properly balanced diet from what we found to be available – protein was in relatively short supply for most of the year, although mycoprotein was available every month from the fungi. But I don’t know how much of a healthy diet’s protein is available from fungal sources. Of course, a true ‘hunter-gatherer’ diet would have included birds and their eggs, fish, shellfish and mammals. In the case of the Park, this latter option could have included roe deer, rabbits and grey squirrels – indeed, the King’s Park is a remnant of the much larger original deer park (forest) where the high and mighty residents from the Royal Household and Court in Stirling Castle would, in medieval times, have hunted for roe deer and, maybe, wild boar. But we weren’t hunting (it’s almost certainly banned in the Park, even for rabbits) and most of the birds are now protected by law, along with their eggs! Hazelnuts would have provided a good and readily storable protein source if they hadn’t been taken by the grey squirrels first.

Perhaps even more difficult to identify than protein sources, however, are obvious large-scale sources of complex carbohydrates, such as starch. Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman do, however, describe how many wild grass species (after all, the wild ancestors of our few domesticated grain crop species) were collected, processed and eaten by the early pre-agricultural peoples of Britain. A number of the grass species they describe can be found in the Park, for example the tufter hair-grass Deschampsia cespitosa . There are also plants with complex carbohydrate storage ‘organs’, such as the pignut, distributed widely in the Park and which we’ve previously collected there and eaten. We just ran out of time during the late-Spring season for pignut, and didn’t really think about the grasses until it was a bit too late. Also, I suspect the grasses might be a lot of work for a poor return. At least the berries, wild plums and greengages would provide fruit sugars in a form that could be dried and stored as dried fruit, and blossoms provide some light, fresh, sugar-rich food during their season. Also, our ancestors would have braved wild honey bee hives for the honey – but I’m not going there!

But despite all the missed opportunities, the nutritional gaps that total dependence on the Park would have created, and the time and effort involved (although most collecting was actually done on dog walking excursions, much to Ella’s impatient disgust), I hope it was obvious from the blog posts that we had a lot of fun with this. We made some really interesting discoveries, both in recipes and wild food sources in the Park, and we have picked up some new culinary experiences and cookery skills. We’ll definitely be carrying on with an expanded range of wild food that we collect and eat, though I won’t necessarily be blogging about it in quite as much detail as I have this year!

Wild food from the park – December

Aha! Finally, it’s December and we only had to find one more wild food source this month to complete our year-long project. This December’s weather is somewhat different to last year’s. On the 22nd of December, I checked with the Twitter blogger ‘Stirling Weather’ who posts tweets on, well, you work it out. They confirmed that the temperature that day in 2011 was a full 20 degrees Celsius warmer than the same date in 2010. Thos extreme winter temperatures in December 2010 were maintained into January 2011, making our wild food searches somewhat problematic. As I reported though, we did manage to find jelly ear fungus that saved the project foundering before it had barely begun. And so, as we reached December, jelly ear fungi once again proved to be a reliable source of winter wild food. We cooked them with some ordinary white field (supermarket) mushrooms and included them in a pasta dish:



A final use for jelly-ear fungus– with commercial white mushrooms in a pasta dish

As we only had a couple of days of frost in December (it was actually remarkably mild), wild sorrel remained available, as did the wall plant ivy-leaved toadflax which we’ve eaten before and which is edible but uninteresting. We included leaves from both plants in a vegetable soup in late December, to bring our year-long wild food project to a successful if reasonably unspectacular finish:

Wild sorrel and ivy-leaved toadflax in vegetable soup

I’ll shortly post a review and discussion of the whole year’s ‘Wild Food from the Park’ experiences.



Wild food from the park – November

So, with November, we were nearly there for a full year of wild food from the Park. If you’d asked me in January if November was likely to yield much wild food, I suspect that I would not have been hopeful of finding much beyond some meagre greenery and a few jelly ear fungi. But, as you’ll see, a long extended tail of a mild Autumn left us with a relative cornucopia of delights in November... which does make for a more interesting blog!


In a previous attempt to use the wild food in our park, we tried to make some hawthorn jelly sweets using a recipe in Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book. On that occasion, the haws (collected late in the season) were rather sparse and quite dry and the resultant sweets were a bit of a disappointment. This year, we were able to pick them a bit earlier, so the moisture content was higher. But there was, again, quite a poor hawthorn harvest in King’s Park’s. So, we supplemented these with hawthorn berries, or haws, from East Lothian, where the hawthorn bushes were so red this year with big, plump haws that they looked more like cherry trees. On a visit to see family, I collected a couple of kilogrammes of hawthorn berries from the Longniddry-to-Haddington railway walk, which is lined for much of its length with hawthorns and which, in October this year, was distinguished by dense, bright red drifts of haws. This photo is a bit out of focus but it shows the lovely, fat, red hawthorn berries:

 The recipe calls for the boiling of the haws with water, straining the resultant mash, then boiling the resultant liquid with sugar until it thickens. It is then poured into moulds or onto a flat tray to set – a bit like a fruit leather, I guess. The resultant sweets are then rolled/coated in icing sugar to stop them sticking and the final result is not unlike Turkish Delight! And did I mention, surprisingly tasty?

We did a bit of both – here are some hawthorn jellies produced in silicon moulds:

and here’s the process of forming it into a sheet and cutting it up (free tip: kitchen scissors proved more effective than a knife):

Just as with the start of this project in January and February, when we were able to harvest jelly ear (or Jew’s ear) fungus, even in the coldest weather (when everything else in the Park was frozen solid between -10° and -20° C for weeks), as the rest of the wild food harvest began to dwindle in November as winter approached, so we were able to collect many large, freshly-emerged jelly ear fungi from dead elder trees or broken-off branches. We used them with some of the wild chanterelles we collected earlier (not from the Park) in a potato and wild mushroom ‘au gratin’ dish from Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book. Finely-sliced potatoes are layered with wild mushrooms and garlic in a casserole dish, cream poured over the top, parmesan grated on top and the lot is baked in a hot oven:

The jelly ear fungi, although quite tasty, have a tendency to rubbery chewiness when cooked (we normally cut them up very small), but prepared this way, they were quite tender.


One of my favourite discoveries this year has been a large area of wild garlic in a relatively inaccessible corner of the Park, and the riotously-tasty wild garlic pesto we made from some of it in April (here). I’ll definitely be making more (much more) in 2012, now that I know we have such a large local supply of wild garlic. That experience made me keen to explore other possible pesto ingredients from the Park. One of the key ingredients of ‘true’ pesto is pine nuts. Obviously, that’s a difficult wild food ingredient to source locally but I couldn’t help thinking that the few beech nuts (or ‘mast’) that we started to find in the Park from late September were very like pine nuts in look, texture and even to some extent in taste. Now, as I wrote about in the September wild food post, most of the beech mast cases we looked at were empty or contained hollow beechnut cases but a few had little beech nuts and we began to collect them, along with the few hazelnuts we could find that hadn’t been snaffled by the darned grey squirrels. Comments on Twitter by TV gardening broadcaster Toby Buckland and in the Guardian newspaper’s nature diary suggested that 2011 was, at least in the south of Britain, looking like a classic ‘beech mast year’, with a prodigious crop of beech nuts. I had high hopes, therefore, of a great opportunity to make lots of beech nut pesto but, by late November, our local crop proved to be thin pickings, it was obvious that we weren’t going to find any more and we had to make do with a small dish of local beech and hazel nuts supplemented by some shop-bought hazelnuts (boo – the best-laid plans and all that):

Our meagre catch of local hazel and beech nuts

But, with the addition of the more usual oil, parmesan, basil, etc ingredients, we made a more-than-passable pesto:

Beech and hazel nut pesto certainly looks the part...


And it was pretty tasty on cracked-back-pepper oatcakes. Next stop, some pasta.

We managed to gather a few remaining sloes from the Park but, on my East Lothian visit, I also found a blackthorn bush that yielded nearly two pounds of sloes (and that was only a small part of the crop). Then, at the eleventh hour as far as this particular harvesting opportunity is concerned, I discovered a little crab apple tree out in the middle of the Park’s golf course. All but three of its crab apples had fallen and been removed (actually only the day before!) when the greenkeepers sucked up all the leaves along the edge of the fairway with their leaf and (crab apple) sucking machine. But I picked those remaining three (and watch out next year!), and with some of the few apples our garden’s apple trees managed to produce, we used the sloes to make a sloe and apple cheese using another recipe from Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book:

Amazing sticky red sloe and apple cheese goo!

...transformed into preserved ‘product’ and awaiting consumption on a cheese board!

Happy New Year!

Thank you continuing to read my blog or, if you've only just arrived, then welcome! Whatever your visiting status, today seems as good a day as, or even a better one than any other, to wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year. In comparison to last New Year, this one is remarkably mild, concluding one of the mildest and wettest years in the UK since records began (which for very reliable observations was the year 1910, I think).

The past Autumn was extremely mild. Here in Stirling, we've only had two or three mornings with frost and December temperatures reached double figures Celsius on a few occasions. There have been numerous media and social media comments about ongoing flowering from this year or the early emergence of next Spring's flowers. We have just spent Christmas with family in West Wales where we saw cow parsley in the hedgerows either still flowering or flowering early. Red campion was also extensively still in flower, as this post's only photo shows.

And it isn't just the flowers - the birds and bees are doing what they ought not to be too. I saw a Twitter comment this morning about queen bumblebees in southern Britain being active today (unfortunate, as they won't survive any sudden temperature drop such as is forecast for the next couple of days). When I was walking the dog in the park this morning, the woods were alive with wood pigeons giving their courting calls and I saw collared doves displaying in flight yesterday.

We're all doomed, I tell you, doomed!

Wild food from the park – October

We were really into the swing of things by October in our ‘Wild Food from the Park’ mission, finding interesting ways of using what wild food was still around (well, interesting to us at any rate). We managed to gather a few late brambles, just as the rose hips and sloes began to appear and, with a cup of the remaining honeysuckle blossom, boiled that lot up, strained it, added sugar, boiled it again until the setting point was reached, and made a few jars of a very dark red ‘Autumn’s end’ jelly. Truth be told, I slightly overdid it, and boiled it a bit long, so let’s call it a very firm jelly. It’s easily meltable though, so it won’t be wasted, as a glaze, a hot cordial, a syrup for ice cream, etc.

Autumn’s end jelly ingredients – brambles, rose hips, sloes and honeysuckle

And I almost forgot that we also produced a batch of rowan jelly, a real staple of Autumn wild harvesting, and a great compliment to venison (and to loads of things really – we’ve also eaten it with roasted vegetables and with beef curry before). We tend to use it quite sparingly and only just finished the last jar of rowan jelly from 2007 (which was the last time we had made it). The huge bunches of bright red rowan berries are one of the first and most visible signs of approaching Autumn and this year, in our local park, King’s Park, which is rich with rowan trees, most of the rowan trees had HUGE crops of berries. 

King’s Park rowan berries

A large bowlful of rowan berries, cleaned of stalks, leaves and with the occasional beautiful shield bug liberated out of the kitchen window,

....and ready for cooking up:

The final product – 2011 King’s Park rowan jelly – but all those berries to make only five wee jars once the boiled pulp is strained then boiled with sugar!

October also provided us with some local wild mushrooms, although not from the King’s Park (where we could have harvested, but didn’t, some more jelly ear fungus). A nearby wood where we have been collecting chanterelles for 20 years is slowly being felled – it is a commercial conifer plantation – and the felled edge is now only about 25 metres away from our lovely productive chanterelle site. We managed to pick half a kilo of chanterelles for what I fear may be the last time, as I think this wood will be gone one a few months time (if it hasn’t already gone ). In that same wood, we also found some fine hedgehog mushrooms – these all found their way into various pasta dishes in October.

Wild food from the park – September

Well, we reached September in our little local wild food project with 8 months of interesting discoveries, experiments and food and drink already behind us and documented on this blog. And, with September being more or less the peak of the natural produce ‘harvest’, we had a reasonable expectation of more good wild food opportunities.

Our opportunity to make the most of these was a bit truncated, however, as we spent two weeks away in our campervan in the first two weeks of the month. While we were away, unfortunately, the crop of blackberries on the bramble bushes peaked (and were picked – by others) and had largely vanished by the time we came home in mid-September. We managed to find a small number of ripe blackberries that hadn’t begun to rot. Plus, a hopeful sight, there were also quite a few green, unripe blackberries that, with a relatively dry, mid spell of weather might ripen (and they did indeed, by the end of October). More later on how we used the blackberries.


Honeysuckle (Latin name: Lonicera periclymum) is a widespread and common plant species of woodlands, growing as an entwining climber up into the trees. Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’ describes honeysuckle as having: “one of the sweetest and best-loved scents of all British wild flowers.” He reports that children (and, I can confirm, some adults!) still pick the flowers to suck nectar from the base (although I doubt if Stirling children do this these days, at least not as far as I have spotted). Tess Darwin’s book: ‘The Scots Herbal. The plant lore of Scotland’ says that, as well as having been used for a number of medicinal purposes, honeysuckle flowers can also be made into tea and wine. Honeysuckle is widespread in the wooded areas of our park and we collected blossoms for yet another purpose:

We were really keen, knowing that the flowers are edible, to use them in some way that would make the most of that wonderful fragrance. The other ‘fragrant’ product that we make regularly is elderflower cordial, so we decided we’d have a go at making honeysuckle cordial. A quick search on t’Internet confirmed that people have done this successfully before so we just substituted honeysuckle blossoms for the elderflowers in our usual elderflower cordial recipe and made the cordial by our usual method. Honeysuckle blossoms in the park occur as either pink or yellow and we harvested blossoms of both colours:

The resulting cordial is the most fetching light pink colour and may be the most wonderful drink we have ever produced. It is delicate tasting and fragrant and we will make much more next year! It gets a gold star from me and has been my personal high point in this year-long wild food experience so far:




The pink delight that is honeysuckle cordial



From the Park, we managed to gather together enough brambles, some of the wild plums I wrote about in August, a very few wild greengages that had been growing unnoticed next to the plums, and a few elderberries, all cooked together and strained, the juice then being made into a very dark and well-setting hedgerow jelly:




Some remnant blackberries, with wild plums and greengages.
With elderberries, these became a hedgerow jelly.



Hedgerow jelly in preparation

 We harvested a few more hazelnuts that had escaped the attentions of the local grey squirrels, but many of the nuts proved to be hollow:

We also began to find, right at the end of September, that some of the beech trees were producing beech mast (the hard green cases that hold the beech tree’s seeds in the form of beech nuts). Most beech mast cases were empty or contained hollow beechnut cases but a few had little beech nuts, covered in a fine brick-red fuzz (which is quite bitter, in my experience, and should probably be scraped off, if you can be bothered). We began to collect these in dribs and drabs as a little wild food plan had begun to germinate which would deliver much later in the Autumn.


We had other wild food opportunities in September as a result of our holiday travels. On the way north, we stopped at Coylumbridge on the edge of the Rothiemurchus Forest near Aviemore and took a walk up the bottom two miles of the Lairig Ghru footpath (it cuts through the Lairig Ghru pass, connecting Aviemore with Braemar or, if you take a wrong turning, Blair Atholl!), to stretch our legs, and tire out the dog. The Aviemore end of the path lies within the great Scots Pine forest of Rothiemurchus and there we picked a couple of pounds of chanterelles, at a site we had visited and picked them at maybe five years ago. We ate those as part of several breakfasts during the following week of our holiday:

Rothiemurchus chanterelles plus a birch bolete

Then, the final day of our fortnight’s campervan holiday was spent in the glorious Culbin Forest and Sands on the north-east coast of Scotland, the Moray coast, near Findhorn. Long-established Scots Pine forests provide a habitat for many species of fungi – mushrooms and toadstools, including a number of edible (and much sought after) species. In Culbin, we picked some chanterelles, some (very) large orange birch boletes and, a brave first for us, a dark brown hedgehog mushroom we’d never seen before and which is restricted to northern Scots Pine forests. We ate these in a big mushroom risotto once we were back at home.

Signs of the times: Autumn #15

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

"Hogs, in eating acorns, chew them very small, & reject all the husks.  The plenty of acorns this year avails the hogs of poor men & brings them forward without corn."

Rev. Gilbert White "The Natural History of Selborne", entry from  November 3 1781 (230 years ago the day after tomorrow! Which is pretty cool!)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 15

Back to my series of blog posts about the wonderful art of Charles Tunnicliffe and the story his paintings told about the state of Britain's wildlife and countryside some 50 years ago when the Ladybird "What to look for in... Spring/Summer/Autumn and Winter" books were first published.

Another romantic painting of a lovely Autumnal rural idyll. A herd of pigs and a flock of wood pigeons are rooting about under an old oak tree, feeding on its fallen acorns. In the background, a traditional-looking wooden barn is backed by poplar trees and some nearby silver birches are turning yellow and gold. In the foreground there is a fairy-ring of little toadstools. The aging oak tree has bracket fungi growing from a cleft in the trunk, showing that, as the book’s text says, “there is rotten wood inside”. Indeed!

Pigs were traditionally a useful domestic animal for turning the bounty of acorns into a useful source of meat, something that cattle cannot do as, apparently, the “sharp little spikes at the crown [of the acorn] accumulate in a cow’s stomach, sometimes with fatal results”. As pigeons can also digest acorns, using their strong-muscled gizzard, they could also be regarded as another traditional mechanism for transforming acorns into something more palatable for people to eat!  I discussed the trajectory of the wood pigeon population of the UK in the first post from the Ladybird Autumn book, here, so I won’t add more now on that story.

We also saw a large female pig, with her piglets, in a picture from the Ladybird Summer book, here, but I didn’t look at pigs in any detail then. Pigs had a traditional role in woodland management in Britain or, looked at differently, pigs were an excellent means of producing edible protein from inedible acorns (well, acorns that are inedible to humans at any rate), a traditional form of foraging/ feeding known as ‘pannage’. In his book ‘People and Woods in Scotland. A History’, eminent Scottish environmental historian Professor Chris Smout notes that a visitor to Scottish woodlands in the past would be impressed by how populated they were by, amongst others, swineherds in the Middle Ages running their pigs among the acorns.

The form of extremely extensive pig meat production shown in the picture couldn’t be further from the means of production by which the bulk of pig meats have been produced in Scotland over the last 50 years, in indoor rearing units. It looks more like the mode of life of wild pigs.  The wild pigs native to Europe, and once native here, were forest-dwellers, as are many of the other wild pig species in the world. It seems that, as a result of escapes from farms and collections and, possibly, as a result of illegal deliberate releases, wild pigs, the wild boars of the media’s vivid reporting (here’s a great example)  are once again living wild in Scotland and elsewhere in Britain. In fact, BBC Radio4 (all hail – we’re not worthy) broadcast a documentary a couple of weeks ago about the very subject, which claimed that there are now records of wild boar living free in nearly every county in the country (although whether that was England or Britain, it wasn’t clear). There’s a lot more interesting information about Britain’s wild boars on this site here.

The fairy ring of toadstools and the bracket fungi could be any of many possible species (it's impossible to tell which from the painting) and I’ve written previously about how little we know about the long-term trends in most of our native fungi species. So, I’m yet again sorry that I can’t comment properly on how well these species are doing compared to 50 years ago!

Nice to be back on the Ladybird seasonal trail again!

Food from the Park: June

Flaming June? Not for most of the month, it wasn't, in Stirling at least. But we still managed to eat from the Park again in June. And, in wild food terms, it might seem a logical conclusion that the availability of edible species would continue to increase in June as it does in the run of months from March to May. But our experience is that while some new options for a wild food diet do indeed appear, other options become less palatable. Nettles, ground elder, common hogweed and cleavers in the Park, which provided the bulk of vegetable mass for meals in the previous months, have all grown up and become tough, coarse and/or incredibly fibrous. Hawthorn leaves, so soft and nutty-tasting when they first appeared, and lovely in salads in that state, have also toughened up and dropped off our menu. By June, the leaves of wild garlic were also beginning to die back.

But, fortunately for the wild food gastronaut, there are new kids on the block in June. From mid-June in Stirling, the creamy-white, fragrant umbrellas of flowers, or umbals, of the elder can be found in profusion on elder bushes all around the edge of the Park (see below). As I've written previously, the elder is an important source of ingredients for wild food - in winter, we picked the jelly ear or Jew's ear fungus from dead elder trees. In autumn, I have no doubt that we'll find ways to incorporate elder berries into a meal. And in summer, well, best of all is elder blossom. Every summer, we make a big batch of elderflower cordial. We drink it usually with sparkling water but sometimes just with tap water, and often with ice cubes, frozen raspberries and the blue flowers of borage from the garden thrown in. It's a bit special.

We started making this year's cordial about in early June and we finished the last bottle of last year's stock three weeks later, so 12 litres must be about right, since we don't stint on its use during the year! We use the recipe in the book "Sensational Preserves" by Hilaire Walden, which includes the addition of citric acid to prevent fermentation. Actually, we made about 14 litres last year but two bottles fermented, probably as we didn't have quite enough citric acid left for the recipe by the end of the season - so 12 litres survived.

Elderflowers - raw material for one of summer's true wild food delights!

 Here's a picture of our final elderflower cordial "product" for 2011, labelled up as a bit of fun.

Our 2011 elderflower cordial collection

The other special wild food that appeared in June was wild raspberries, which are usually abundant in our Park and which few people bother to collect. We usually harvest about 6 kg of these over the several-week long season and these are mostly frozen for use through the year, in porridge and in puddings (and, once, to make a framboise liqueur).

Wild raspberries in King's Park.

 Our raspberry season usually begins with us simply eating the first ripe berries off the bush for a couple of weeks in early-mid June when we are out walking the dog, until there are enough ripe berries to make it worthwhile doing some organised picking. The 6 kg total usually arrives in about half-to-one kg batches, which is what we can pick in about 30 minutes with both of us picking. That's generally because 30 minutes is about the limit of my patience with the nettles and bramble thorns that interweave the Park's raspberry patches. Unless we are planning to cook them down for something, in which case, they can be frozen in a lump, we normally freeze them laid out in a single layer on baking trays in the freezer and then bag up the already-frozen berries.

The 2011 raspberry season began worryingly slowly and it looked like last winter's extremely extended and severe cold spell had killed off the majority of the raspberry canes (wild raspberries produce the current year's fruit on the previous year's new growth). That had indeed happened and there were large areas normally dense with raspberry canes which were almost devoid this year, but the remaining survivors seemed to have benefitted hugely from the very warm dry spell of weather in April, resulting in a great pollination and a huge crop on the remaining bushes. We picked steadily through late June and all of July such that, with the final picking session in our raspberry season, we managed to bring our total to just over 6 kg again this year (by the very end of July, when I wrote this catch-up note).

Incidentally, we also managed to include some Salicornia or glasswort in our diet in June, a salt marsh pioneer plant that has been eaten in Britain for thousands of years. Highly nutritious but if eaten too regularly, it might wear away your teeth due to its high silicon content (it is called glasswort after all!). I seem to recall reading that people from some prehistoric coastal populations in Britain were found, by archaeologists examining their remains from graves, to have wear patterns on their teeth consistent with a high consumption of glasswort.  We didn't pick this ourselves - O bought it from the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar shop. It must have been harvested wild (no one grows it commercially here - or anywhere?), and probably locally to Loch Fyne.

[Addendum, 4th August: Excitingly (admittedly I don't get out much), I was on a bus in Portobello yesterday and saw Salicornia for sale in the window of a traditional fishmonger's - the one with the window constantly washed by a curtain of running water; if you are local, you may know it. Maybe it is becoming more popular. I'd love to know where they source it from].

 We ate it (the green stuff above) as an accompaniment to a breakfast of smoked salmon scrambled eggs, made with Loch Fyne smoked salmon and eggs from our Stirling friend Judy's chickens. Slightly salty and you have to pull the edible vegetable portion off with your teeth and leave the central slightly woody stalk. A slightly odd breakfast item but pretty tasty nevertheless.

Wild food from the Park: May

Just catching up with posts about our wild food project, in which we are trying to generate food and drink every month from wild ingredients collected in our local park, King's Park in Stirling. Having had something of a culinary success in April with my first ever souffle, a wild Spring greens souffle, I thought I'd try it again, but using the wider range of plants available in May.

And it got a bit out of hand...

In a 30 minute foraging session in the park, I picked twelve wild plants: young nettles and white dead nettles, young, tender ground elder leaves and stems, comfrey, yarrow and dandelion leaves, chickweed, young plants of cleavers ('sticky willy'), the softer, youngest leaves of hawthorn, wild sorrel, the slenderest, most tender of common hogweed stems and wild garlic leaves. Back at home, we realised that our garden's herb bed was quite well advanced, so we added in little pinches or a few leaves of 18 different herbs: wild rocket, sorrell and red sorrell, four different varieties of thyme, sage, woodruffe, garden mace, tarragon (very sparingly - it has a very powerful taste!), chives, lavender, chervil, curry plant, savory winter, carroway and curly-leaf parsley.

So, a 30 plant souffle - a bit over the top, but it serves to demonstrate quite well the wide range of edible species that are out there. The preparation was otherwise as described for the April dish and, again, it turned out both well and delicious:

The final dish, garnished with fresh parsley from the garden

And we enjoyed some ancillary wild food action in May with ingredients collected elsewhere - namely the leaves of a succulent coastal plant, one of the Atriplex or goosefoot family, which is widespread around our coasts and a close relative of the edible garden weeds and wild food staples, Fat Hen and Good King Hal, effectively inland versions of the same family. Very nutritious and quite tasty. We harvested ours at the top of the sandy shore down at Tyninghame in East Lothian:

We added the leaves to a bean and vegetable soup, made with some home-made chicken stock. No photo I'm afraid but, needless to say, it was delicious... Looking forward to telling you shortly about June, when some of our favourite local wild food ingredients become available.

Nature wins again... Plankton 1: Nuclear Power 0

Occasionally, just occasionally, this nature boy blog has the chance to be reasonably topical.  I have a blog post in preparation about a wonderful coastal walk we did last week in East Lothian, from which I have extracted one small element to post early. One thing we noticed was that the high tide line of every sandy beach along which we walked was thick with stranded dead or dying jellyfish. They were mostly moon jellies, the very common jellyfish Aurelia aurita. It typically looks like this when stranded:

Stranded Aurelia aurita (moon jellyfish), Gullane beach, 26 June2011

Huge shoals or swarms of these jellyfish are very common in our coastal waters in some summers and mass strandings of this species or other jellyfish species are not uncommon.

Here are a couple of photos of stranded jellyfish en masse at Gullane beach in East Lothian last Sunday (26th June):

Like other jellyfish, this species does have a fringe of stinging tentacles but, in this species, they are not capable of delivering a sting to humans. When the wind is blowing onshore for long enough, these moon jellies, which are very poor swimmers in a current and are thus effectively a part of the zooplankton (albeit very large zooplankton), are forced into the shore and dropped by the falling tide. So what, I hear you ask?

Well, you might have picked up the news today (BBC, Reuters, all the main newspaper websites) that Torness Nuclear Power Station, about 15 miles along the coast from where we were walking, had to shut down both of its Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors on Tuesday afternoon as a swarm of moon jellyfish was clogging the filters of the cooling system's seawater intakes.

According to the BBC's website coverage, the filters: "are designed to prevent seaweed and marine animals entering the cooling system. If these screens become clogged, the reactors are shut down to comply with safety procedures." The Beeb also reported that the "East Lothian plant's operator, EDF Energy, said the shutdown was a precautionary measure and there was never any danger to the public."

It was not a radiological incident... Phew - no need for "Marine Plankton generated this generation-spanning nuclear contamination says nuclear generator" headlines...

But this mass plankton invasion has probably closed one of Scotland's few remaining operational nuclear power stations for a week! Like I said, Plankton 1: Nuclear Power 0...

Incidentally, the BBC coverage also reported, somewhat stupidly, "It is not known why there are so many jellyfish in the area". Duh, it's summer (recent weather notwithstanding) and jellyfish swarms often happen on the East Lothian coast in summer. My Dad recorded numerous incidents over more than 20 years of working on that coastline. And I have no doubt that EDF know that it is a likely occurrence in summer and hence have their contingency shutdown plans. Best not let the obvious facts get in the way of a good mystery for the news though...

Incidentally, my wee brother also picked up on the mass strandings during one of his coast rides on his fabulous Pugsley sand/snow bike, and posted about them here on his Coastkid blog.

The whole incident put me in mind of a wonderful character, Plankton Boy, created for a one-off cartoon strip in an issue of Chris Donald's Viz comic back in 1990 (lovely Google identified it as Viz Comic No: 40 Dated February / March 1990, but sadly no picture was available online). Plankton Boy was "raised by innumerable tiny sea creatures" and had special superhero powers based around plankton. Maybe one was corralling jellyfish towards cooling water intakes... as my brother said earlier "Nature wins again!"