July 2013

I'm back! After a prolonged absence during which I have been very busy. Now still busy but I've decided to make time for the blog. Twitter is a different animal and serves a different purpose and there is definitely a place in this life for the blog.

Flowers, flowers, flowers!

Life in lovely Herefordshire is as good as ever. The flowers this summer are amazing! I suspect that if one kept a record, one would find a certain pattern in the weather over two or three years that leads to this abundance of bloom. It began with the daffodils and then the apple blossom, which bodes well for the apple crop. Then the fields were butter yellow with aptly named buttercups, from hedge to hedge, giving new meaning to 'The Golden Valley': it truly was! Now it is the elders and everything in the garden. It is just stuffed with flowers!

The Wonder of Elderflowers

These amazingly fragrant and ethereal blossoms are adorning our waysides in great billows. The elder is regarded as a weed tree, popping up everywhere where other more refined species would struggle and its smell is rank. Its pithy wood is, if I am not mistaken, quite without practical use by humans but its blossoms are another thing.

Like great saucers of cream they hang and when examined prove to be composed of many tiny starry flowers.

Cordial

Pick them leaving behind as much stalk as possible and soak them for five days in boiled water with lemons, sugar and citric acid. Strain and bottle the resulting gorgeousness and either freeze or pasteurise, when it will keep indefinitely. If you decide to freeze it, don't do what I did last year and use ordinary or Kilner bottles. They can't take the expanding contents as it freezes and the result is shards of broken glass and a mess in the bottom of the freezer. Pasteurising is so much better and I used the pasteuriser from Vigo, which has many other uses apart from making elderflower cordial.The result for me is six 75cl bottles of delectable elderflower cordial, which should see us through the summer.