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It occurred to me that readers outside the UK, or even under a certain age (say, 40ish) might not recognise the reference to "The Good Life" in my title. Well, it's a BBC situation comedy that I used to watch with my mum back in the 1970s, very much a product of its time. (It was known in the USA as "Good Neighbors", the IMDB informs me, though what they made of such a distinctively English comedy I'm not sure.

Starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal as Tom and Barbara Good, and Penelope Keith and the late, lamented Paul Eddington (later to star in "Yes Minister") as their snooty neighbours Jerry and Margo Leadbetter, it told the story of a couple who opted for "self sufficiency in Surbiton", to the horror of said snooty neighbours. It was beautifully written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. Tom and Barbara had a lovely relationship, sexy but clear-eyed about each other's blind spots, and Jerry and Margo had to go through a steep learning curve, from protesting about the effect piglets next door would have on the price of their property to offering the idealistic Goods important moral and, occasionally, practical support (The sight of Margo, dresed in green wellies and souwester, turning up to deliver piglets and scolding the productive sow 'Fourteen is quite enough!" will linger in my memory.)

Our own, less extreme, version of TGL began when we turned over our front garden to veg and fruit production. Our neighbours were used to our eccentricities, but they rallied round magnificently when we ordered a ton of horse manure and it was dumped, quite literally, in the middle of the road (we live in a cul-de-sac so we needed all the help we could get!)

Here is our front garden - yes, it's a little unusual. In the foreground, just behind the pots, are raspberry canes and, behind them, a cloud of asparagus fern which we are now allowing to have its head after cropping well throughout May and early June. On the extreme left is a productive James Grieve apple tree planted in memory of my mother-in-law who died a few years ago and was renowned for her apple crumble! At the pointed end of the triangular bed, our baby beetroot is coming along nicely. We have several other trees - fig, damson, Conference pear, cherry, almond, olive and peach. A lot to pack into such a small area. I'll post more views if people are interested!

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Raspberry Harvest

Raspberry Harvest
Originally uploaded by mefinx

Our fruit bushes are reaching their zenith. Despite the lack of direct sunshine, I'm picking morning and evening. We grow a raspberry variety called Malling Jewel and that's exactly what they look like - a little necklace strung across the horizontal supports, green with the occasional bright crimson accent.

Picking fruit, particularly fiddly, small crops like blackcurrants, which ripen in ones and twos rather than sprig by convenient sprig, is not a mentally demanding activity but you do need concentration. I can lose all sense of the passage at time when I'm deeply immersed in it, beyond the intention to stop when I've rescued just one more berry...An excellent cure for tension and overstimulation!

We're particularly pleased that the canes we thought we'd had to sacrifice when our new garage was built two years ago have survived the purge and come back stronger and more fruitful than ever. Since we planted a new lot in the front garden and they are also beginning to fruit, our freezer should be well stocked. I shall probably boil a few down into a rich coulis flavoured with raspberry liqueur and either serve it poured over plain ice cream or, if I'm feeling brave, try adding it to a batch at the last minute to make that childhood favourite, raspberry ripple.

I managed to miss a couple of gooseberries last time around and I discovered them today in their green and spiky glory. I think I'll leave them and see if they ripen sufficiently to be enjoyed direct from the bush.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date

The raw materials
Originally uploaded by mefinx

You have to admit, it looks pretty disgusting. This is what it looks like when you boil a load of green apples and quinces for an hour or so. The next picture will make things clearer, however:

The next stage is to put this mess into a bag, hang said bag over a jelly-making frame (available from Lakeland Limited), put a bowl underneath and wait several hours for the bowl to fill with juice - resisting the urge to squeeze, which apparently makes the final product cloudy.

Is it just me, or is the juxtaposition of that shape and the warning "Don't squeze" inclined to make you think rude thoughts?

Anyway, if you're lucky, after six hours or so you will end up with something like this:



The next step is to put the precious liquid into a pan and boil it up with a sprig of rosemary. Then you leave it to infuse a while, come back and add wine vinegar and a lot of warmed sugar. This is the point at which inexperienced jam makers are apt to panic a little (well, I am). You know, where the book says, "Boil until a set is reached." If you don't boil for long enough the result is runny mess, if you overdo things it's caramel, and there's a certain amount of trial and error involved. Eventually this matures into experience, but I don't do this sort of thing frequently enough to feel confident yet.

Anyway, by luck or by good management I eventually ended up with two little jars of a gorgeous coppery jelly, and I'm told it's excellent with lamb. Time will tell whether it was worth the hours of work involved.

I asked my daughter to help with photographing the end product. I was shocked by her trickery - she actually filled a jar with coloured water and stuck it in while I was wittering in my precious way about aesthetics and translucent effects. I suppose she'll be one of those awful food stylists when she grows up.

I didn't make the liqueur either, but it's a lovely bottle. And I did grow everything myself.

Gallivanting!

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I thought it would be fun to write about our recent holiday in Ireland. The Aran Islands are a few miles of the west coast, about halfway up. They were put on the map by the Irish playwright JM Synge and it's well worth reading his short but evocative book about his four visits there around the turn of the century before you go. They have remained a bastion of Irish-speaking culture ever since.

I think the best comment on the Arans I've heard is that they're "Irish to the power of two". Life there was harsh. The landscape is divided into minute fields with hand-built dry-stone walls everywhere. Clearing stones from the fields was the first step towards cultivation. There was almost no soil. It had to be painfully scraped out from between the stones, then sand was added and copious amounts of seaweed to improve fertility. There are almost no trees on the islands. Gateways were constructed by piling large stones into a gap and just kicking them out of the way when you wanted to enter the field.

A wealthy man was one who was describe as having the land for two cows. Fish and potatoes made up the staple diet of the islanders. Interestingly, only one person died of starvation in the Potato Famine; presumably they were isolated from the windbourne blight. We still saw many potato patches; only the largest of the three islands, Inis Mor, has anything resembling a supermarket. That's your only food shop. No shortage of places to buy Aran sweaters, however. In fact, the sweater industry is less authentic than it appears; it was generated by the Congested Districts Board arond the end of the nineteenth century, an attempt to bring local employment to parts of Ireland where the population could not be supported by the land.

We had a glorious day walking around about half of Inis Mor, blessed with perfect weather. Sunny but not too hot. We saw a colony of seals basking offshore, the famous Iron Age fort of Dun Aengus and many of the aforementioned tiny fields, filled with colourful wild flowers. Stopping at a cafe, we feasted on salad and the best ham I've ever had, home-cured, sweet but not too salty, and carved in slices a centimetre thick.

It can be difficult to separate fact from fiction in these places. We noticed replicas of traditional cottages, about a metre high, in a few gardens. One source told us they were built for the fairies, but a more pragmatic one claimed they were a lucrative sideline for a local craftsman.

The Island roads are almost traffic free, since visitors aren't allowed to bring cars. You're met off the boat by horse-drawn jaunting cars, numerous minibuses and bicycle hire operators. This aspect of the local economy reminds me of another favourite place of mine, the Isles of Scilly, where each morning on the main island, St Mary's, you troop down to Hugh Town harbour and select a boat to take you, weather permitting, to one of the off-islands.

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Friday Night Quiche and Salad

Tonight I had a few leftovers to deal with - a piece of cold poached salmon, about half a tub of cream and a rather tired little bulb of Florence Fennel. Fortunately I also had a pack of ready-made pastry in the fridge, so I made a meltingly delicious quiche. I sauteed the fennel in a little butter and then piled in the salmon with a few garlic chives cut from the garden and some smoked salmon trimmings, seasoned it with lemon zest and pink peppercorns (ready made spice rub) and then in went the custard. I never would have bothered to make something so fiddly on a weekday until I learned to cut a few corners in the kitchen.

I used to be such a purist; even when Delia Smith published "How to Cheat at Cooking" I was shocked and thought she'd sold her soul. Prepared pastry was the first chink in my armour. I have always been absolutely hopeless at making pastry. It invariably either breaks up or tastes of nothing but flour and water. I discovered I could never make anything as meltingly soft as Jus-Rol and I'm now a convert. Various other short cuts have crept in and, as long as the standard is reasonable and the cost not too excessive, I have no problem with them. When I made everything from scratch I would burn out on a regular basis and live on TV dinners for a week to recover. At least I put something fresh and partly homemade on the table most nights now.

Having the veggie garden does very much affect my approach to cookery because I'll do anything rather than let a good harvest go to waste. I take pride in finding uses for the most obscure and apparently unattractive crops. So where I do take trouble is with my harvest. If I end up stewing pounds of blackcurrants into coulis or making salad dressing from windfalls, and it takes a while, I'd rather be doing that than letting food go to waste.

When we first started all this, I realised a lot of work would go into the growing but rather overlooked the commitment in time and effort that would go into dealing with the produce. Traditionally, I suppose that would have been the woman's role. It's certainly quite satisfying to put up a batch of jams or chutneys if you happen to be in the right mood. What's a little more challenging is eating beetroots or zucchini for days on end. I do like a little variety and that's a modern luxury, one our ancestors didn't have. They were just grateful not to starve. I guess.

As for the verjuice, I made it into salad dressing. I like a tang to my dressings and it was a little mild for me. Though undrinkable as a fruit product, once you get out of that mindset it's actually quite subtle as a condiment. My husband, who dislikes vinegar, will really take to it, I expect. So I've made the remainder into ice cubes.

I never used to have time to do this stuff when I was writing DW fic. Lack of inspiration does have its advantages, I suppose!

This illustration is of people in the Middle Ages making verjuice out of unripened grapes:



They had it tough in those days. I spent a couple of hours with the assistance of a food processor and a juicing machine trying to produce verjuice last night and ended up with a kitchen spattered with flaked crabapples. Not recommended!

First I gathered the windfalls from beneath the apple tree in the garden - they are about the size of cherries and I got a couple of pounds of them. Feeding them directly into the juicer didn't work as they are extremely hard, so then I tried manually cutting them into quarters. That way I got about half a cupful of vivid green liquid but it was extremely laborious. My next try was chopping them in the food processor first, and then they seemed to produce no juice at all, just gummed up the works of my admittedly quite small and puny juicer (I got it on eBay for about £5.99 so I can't expect miracles). Rather horrified by the mess by now, I decided to try cooking the apple mush. After an hour or so I strained it through muslin and got something that might or might not be useable in salad dressing. I have much more important things to do but the bit's between my teeth now.

I also have an ornamental japonica which has produced tiny quinces. I am wondering what to do with those. I probably should get out more, although gardening is in fact very sociable. My neighours have learnt to avoid eye contact if they don't want a spare lettuce or a few asparagus spears shoved in their direction.