Preparing for Winter V

Wednesday2000

I can't even think about winter at the moment, I thought yesterday was one of the hottest days ever. I couldn't even cool down with the electric fan on me all day!

[Deleted User]

There was fresh celery from the fens, covered in black soil and totally delicious too, stored apples and pears, imported oranges, mandarin oranges at Christmas very hard to peel and full of pips but deliciously fresh, veg in season so no shortage of spuds, carrots, swedes, turnips, cabbages, kale, greens, sprouts and mums relied on dried peas/pulses to make up deficits in veg. We had tinned fruit and cream usually on Sunday evening for tea and didn't notice a lack of fresh particularly even salads were there with onion, celery, cooked potatoes in salad cream, grated carrot and pickled beetroot. Dried fruit in cakes was a regular and things in season came and went and were enjoyed to the full (particularly strawberries) for the few weeks they were around. Mums made jams, jellies and chutneys and pickles and bottled fruit and veg and things like tomatoes while things were available too, industrious ladies all and salting beans was regular, I always loathed them!

There may come a time in the future when we have to adopt all those strategies to keep ourselves fed well year round, prices are on the rise, climatic events are taking toll on crops once in a while and I suspect it won't always be 'everything available all year round'. It's good to keep old skills alive just in case a 'better' future needs 'old skills' to make it tenable!

mardatha

I agree MrsL, I can't remember ever wishing for strawberries at xmas or anything like that - but I can remember enjoying each new thing as it came into the shops in season. Strawberries tasted like strawberries, now they taste of nothing. Then you had rasps, then cherries then brambles. I really don't think it's nostalgia, I think everything then was grown in fields not in polytunnels with compost - and it tasted better.

[Deleted User]

Absolutely was MAR. I come from Kent, the garden county and we were surrounded in our village by orchards, apples, pears, cherries, plums, hedgerows full of wild damsons for the picking, strawberries grown in fields round about, hop fields for the brewing industry and lots of arable. All the orchards had grazing sheep in them, no mowing to keep the grass down and then came the Common Market and subsidies and quotas and the orchards were torn down to grow linseed for Europe, the hedgerows were torn out to make 'factory fields' and subsidies paid to farmers for crops 'for Europe', we lost the biodiversity, the plant species indigenous to the area, the insect life, the birds and the wild animals that lived there BUT the EU had its rules adhered to, the farmers grew rich and richer and we saw not one iota of benefit from any of it, just the ruination of the area and all the traditions gone in a blink! what price progress eh?

carolbee

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Absolutely was MAR. I come from Kent, the garden county and we were surrounded in our village by orchards, apples, pears, cherries, plums, hedgerows full of wild damsons for the picking, strawberries grown in fields round about, hop fields for the brewing industry and lots of arable. All the orchards had grazing sheep in them, no mowing to keep the grass down and then came the Common Market and subsidies and quotas and the orchards were torn down to grow linseed for Europe, the hedgerows were torn out to make 'factory fields' and subsidies paid to farmers for crops 'for Europe', we lost the biodiversity, the plant species indigenous to the area, the insect life, the birds and the wild animals that lived there BUT the EU had its rules adhered to, the farmers grew rich and richer and we saw not one iota of benefit from any of it, just the ruination of the area and all the traditions gone in a blink! what price progress eh?

Not many hop gardens around here now Lyn, despite the growth of micro breweries. Don't know about west of county.

[Deleted User]

Sadly it was like it before we left in the early 1990s, every village had it's hop garden and my Mum and her friends used to hop pick every year with us in tow as pre schoolers and I can still remember the wonderful smell of the fire they lit from the picked out hop bines to hang blackened old kettles over to make tea. That and those square headed caterpillars we used to call 'Hop Dogs' and keep in matchboxes as pets until sadly, like all things they passed away. On the odd occasion when I find a dried hop bine in a 'decoration' in a pub I spend all evening sniffing them, Oh the nostalgia.

Lucy5781

I always feel I'm in a funny in between generation (recently seen us called xennials as we're not generation x or millenials... born between 1977 and 1983) because my grandparents were having my parents at the end of the second world war as the last of their children and then my parents were already in their thirties before having me in 1981.

My childhood was all garden veg, pickles, chutney, cakes and allotment shows. Loved it xxx

silverwhistle

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

BUT the EU had its rules adhered to,

I really wouldn't blame "Europe": it doesn't require destruction of habitat, and having previously lived in another EU country for many years there was plenty of support for the environment and traditional local farming practices.

This nostalgic wallowing looking back on some mythical past really doesn't help and nor does blaming other people. There were good aspects we should indeed maintain, but if we are to change or maintain things we need to start closer to home and stop blaming others. The closure and building on allotments, for example. My grandparents had a productive allotment but it is easy to forget that it was important due to their low income.

These days, on a (private) pension I don't need to worry too much about my food budget, and it's easy to forget the variety that is now available. I used to have an organic food box so learnt about the 'hungry gap' and was quite happy that they sourced a bit of variety from further south. When I was young olive oil came in tiny bottles from Boots for cleaning out ears; I'm really not nostalgic for those days!

I was once chatting with an Italian friend about the past in that mountainous part of Italy and the subject turned to food, as it often does there. Before the Americas were discovered they didn't have maize, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes - all of which are now staples of the diet. Chestnuts and farro (which in that area was spelt) would have been the main staples.

One has to be extremely carefully when using the past as a reference to the present!

[Deleted User]

Nostalgic wallowing my friend is NOT what we indulge in! The past had shoes with holes in the soles, chilblains, strikes, power cuts and hunger in it for me and many others who post here and the memories and attitudes that brings are NOT at all nostalgic but really quite sobering. What I and many others here DO remember is a different way of life, not necessarily a better way of life but times gone by (and we do KNOW they are gone) where things worked in society in a different way and life was less governed by rules and regulations, less hedged about by incessant paperwork and more local. IF that's mythical then I don't exist because I remember it very well indeed!

I too have lived in Europe and loved the experience, BUT we are a small rock in the North Atlantic not a huge land mass and what works there, and works superbly well cannot work here because we have so much less land mass available and a totally different climate to deal with.

We have an allotment, have always had allotments and have always needed them to keep us and our family fed they give us a much better diet than we could afford on our wages and now on the pension. We too have a works pension BUT that doesn't mean we can just go and 'buy' , we need to work the plots for our own sakes. We have fought to keep the plots open, successfully so far, the problem here is that people take a plot because the idea is seductive but with no knowledge of what is entailed to run an allotment, do 3 weeks back breaking work and plant seeds then disappear for 3 months and when they re-visit find a mess of weeds, no crop and give up. That's what gets sites closed and built on!

I didn't have to learn about the hungry gap, we are old aquaintances since way back in childhood.....DEFINITELY NOT nostalgia

[Deleted User]

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Nostalgic wallowing my friend is NOT what we indulge in! The past had shoes with holes in the soles, chilblains, strikes, power cuts and hunger in it for me and many others who post here and the memories and attitudes that brings are NOT at all nostalgic but really quite sobering.

yes, oh yes. 1000% agree. The ones who nostalgically wallow are the ones who have no idea, nor empathy. Our most difficult pasts made us what we are now and its a lesson we will never forget. I am not going into anything now but how to survive on pennies? I know about that, we did it, I could help my family do that at age 9. I came from one of the most run down areas of Liverpool, before the slums were pulled down. My parents worked harder than any human beings that I knew. We had our aspirations from them, by example. We had no idea about allotments then, they did`t appear amongst bomb sites and rubble

I know about europe and europeans, of course I do, each of my parents was from a different country in what is now called the eu. My parents valued freedom, that is why my father was in the army side by side with the uk soldiers, his whole life was affected by it and he died too young, his health wrecked because of germany wanting control over all of europe, some countries lay down on their backs rather than fight for freedom. So don`t give me nostalgia, silverwhistle, you really have no idea what it means to be free and that includes how we run our little bits of this golden isle, our sacred allotments