3mm Basil

“Mum,” asked Goldilocks, “Can we have green spaghetti for tea?  We haven’t had it for ages.”

I have resisted buying a new blender because the processor part of the machine still works fine and is adequate for soups and houmous.  But our basil crop will grow and sooner or later I’ll get the urge to make pesto.  Trying to do all things sustainably I should’ve probably gone out and bought a huge pestle and mortar, but my eco-halo ever wonky, I went to Argos and bought a mini electric blender.

I was determined not to compound this act of worshipful consumerism at the alter of Argos by buying supermarket basil.  Our slope may not look much like a garden yet but it yields a rich supply of organically grown weeds.  My solution lies in the plant below, garlic mustard or jack-by-the hedge.  It’s edible leaves can be used in salads, wilted like spinach or ground into pesto.

If you’re collecting wild plants for food, make sure you collect them from areas that you know are not treated with pesticides.  Pick off insects and wash the plants thoroughly.

To make Hedgerow Pesto, whizz together (or pound in your huge pestle and mortar if you are a better person than me!)  100mls nut oil, two to three plump garlic cloves, a heaped teaspoon of sea salt, three large handfuls of washed jack-by-the-hedge and a handful of hazel nuts. 

 If you live in a place called Hazlehurst you may well have collected and stored plenty of nuts from last autumn, if not (ahem!) like me you can buy them from your local health food store. 

The other wild goody on the canal right now is watercress.  The best place to look is in the overflows, where there is generally a constant but gentle flow of water.  Here’s a nice little patch Willow and I found on our Sunday walk.  I was torn between letting it grow more and the fear that if I didn’t take it someone else would.  I left it, but then three hours later went back for it!

 As I am feeling very generous with my pictures this week I though I’d treat you to this pic of hedgerow promise to come.  This crab apple over looks the fields at the back of the house.  This particular field seems to be permanently flooded now, but this was not always the case, and may be the result of particularly wet recent winters and summers.

I realised that any successful counting was going to require a narrowing of the field. On the grounds that the birds were overwhelming I decided to concentrate my efforts on bees as these are something of a pet subject at the moment.  I failed to inform Goldilocks of my new strategy and every so often my efforts were interrupted by shrieks of, ‘Wagtail! Wagtail!’  

I think I may have counted the same carder bee (little burnt orangey ones) five times.  I thought I’d had more luck when six honey bees simultaneously landed on the patch of forget-me-nots outside the kitchen window, only to concede later with my ‘Collins British Wildlife’ in hand,  that my certain six honey bees may possibly have been only six drone flies.  I lost count of the buff-tail bumble bees, which I guess is a good thing, but the survey form doesn’t have a field for ‘estimate of all things buzzy’.   There were ‘quite a few’ (handy scientific term!) hover flies, which I identified mostly from the fact they were hovering, the minute you try to get near them they do this amazing warp speed getaway manoeuvre.   I  think that,  Winnie-ther-Pooh style, I will have to disguise myself as a raincloud in order to get close.  The Man from Salford thinks I will have no problem passing myself off as a rain cloud.

A more successful Easter activity was a visit to Trentham Gardens.  Goldilocks and her pals threw themselves around the adventure playground and then set forth on the ‘Bar Fuss’ or barefoot walk.  Boots and socks off, we bravely ventured through shin-deep mud, cold water, gravel, cobbles, bark-chip, sand and hay.  I couldn’t help feeling that I could have done something pretty similar walking home up the towpath for free.  Goldilocks claims that she is now desensitised to any surface and does not need shoes.  Great, I tell her, we will  lessen our global footprints by not buying any more new shoes and she looks more than a little crestfallen. 

We also visited Trentham’s eco-garden and came away with the idea of a ‘fedge’ for a child-friendly weekend garden project. 

Here is our fedge.  To the untrained eye it might look like something Eeyore knocked together, but hopefully to the multiple eyes of insects this is the Hilton.  We have stuffed our fedge with leaf-litter, reeds, pine cones, sticks and what I hope are some very dead Japanese knotweed stems.  These hollow stems are five-star accomodation for carder bees apparently.  I guess these structures can be as fancy or as simple as you like and I’m sure people more creative than us could come up with a more impressive fedge.   The project kept Goldilocks happily employed for a couple of hours, running to and forth with her finds and then trying to make them all stick together somehow. (Tip-use plenty of soft materials in between the sticks – leaves, conifer branches and reeds all seem to have good binding properties.)  We finished off by planting a couple of foxgloves  and sowing wild flower seeds at the base of our fedge in order to ‘advertise our vacancies’ to the insect world.  A passer-by admired our handy work and then inquired as to when we were intending to set fire to it!