Beth Eats Local

You never expect it to happen, and when it does, it hits you hard.  I’m talking of course about the end of the allotment strawberries.  For a few weeks, I had been in the habit of going up there, harvesting a couple of pounds of fruit and then stuffing pancakes with them for breakfast and I mean stuffing.  But, no longer.  I had planned to build a solar dryer and dry some for winter breakfasts.  No such luck.  I’m always slightly too busy to start building the dryer and what I considered my main drying crop is now over.  As I am reluctant to face a strawberry-free winter, my next plan is to borrow a friend’s dehydrator (electricity, evil electricity), go to a U-pick and pick an amount that will see me safely through to spring.

So, no strawberries, and to add insult to injury my clandestine redcurrant and raspberry stash has been rumbled too.  I was, oh-so-secretly, harvesting fruit from my friend’s abandoned allotment.  Abandoned in the sense that they moved to Bristol, leaving the allotment in the care of someone who didn’t (care that is).  The grass was chest height and hid my furtive doings well from view, but now it seems the allotment has been commandeered and handed to someone else, or at least the one next to it has.  I shall keep a weather-eye on it and see what’s going on.  I really hope that the allotment hasn’t been given to someone else yet because there are vines in their shed and greenhouse which are just about to spew forth pounds and pounds of grapes.  These too I was planning to dry in my not yet existent solar dryer and possibly make some wine from them.  I was planning to bathe in grape juice and make shoes from the skin.  I was planning to…

No strawberries, no grapes.  Looking at my meagre harvest of 20 blackcurrents, five redcurrants and six raspberries, I felt very sorry for myself.  Chris – housemate and fellow allotmenteer - suggested in no uncertain terms that I stopped sulking, but what does he know, Mr Cocoa and Sugar (I’m such a bitter person).  Sulk.  Sulk.  Sulk.  There is a silver lining to this very dark cloud, however, as I have just found some cherry trees on waste-ground near where I work.  I picked some yesterday, wearing office lady attire, going through my innocent foraging story in my head should some thick-necked security guard come along and ask me what I was doing.

There’s more on foraging to come, as I have started a foraging group (we go out on the last Sunday of the month for people who are interested) and we had our inaugural trip on Sunday.  I won’t say too much about it as I’ll be posting a video (this was supposed to be a videoblog, but video is way more time consuming than text to produce and I refuse to let blogging get in the way of eating). 

Don’t worry about me too much.  Though there’s a dearth of soft fruits in my life, there’s always, always rhubarb.