Squelch

    Time to crack open a bottle of cider and curl up on the sofa watching the TV. A great heap of damp and grubby clothing is in the washing machine. Green tree moss, British mud and a hefty addition of wet dog smell, all being removed with the help of a plastic ball full of Persil.
    December in rural Britain is usually cold, in every form from bright and cold through to freezing cold, damp and depressing. This December, like the rest of 2012, had diverged from that rule book, being warm for the season and very wet indeed. My parents land is flooded, as is most of the surrounding farmland. In driving to their place I found myself having to brave the uncertain depths of more than one stretch of flooded back road in the Rollerskate, unfortunate memories being conjured of the time I misjudged a flood and nearly got the car stuck. The latest installment of my Welsh course was abandoned half way through, the heightened adrenaline rather claimed my attention.
    So I've been squelching around the orchard in Gore-Tex and wellies, pruning the apple trees. 2012 was a bad year for apples as for most trees the blossom came in a cold wet spring, but what they lost in fruit they made up in growth. I have a small forest of young branches to tame, something I have to do without encouraging yet further growth next year.
    It's fortunate the Rollerskate has a very good heater. I didn't have long enough to really dry out in front of my parents fire and the drive home ( Wyt ti'n mynd y gallu siarad Cymraeg? Ydw, dw i yn mynd y gallu siarad Cymraeg!) shifted some of the damp. I should really have packed a change of clothes, shouldn't I.
    Around us the country is entering the usual pre-Christmas frenzy. We did all our relevant shopping weeks ago and got in a couple of weeks groceries at the start of last week, so fortunately we're avoiding it. Not so far away from us is a retail outlet village, a place that draws a never-ending stream of label-afflicted idiots and makes the main roads in its vicinity impassable for two months over Christmas. Now you know why I was using flooded roads earlier.
    We're going to spend Christmas day at my parents place. No sister this year, just them and us two. As last year, I'm going to leave the scruffy bloke on one side for the duration. I have a red and black dress lined up that should be festive enough for Christmas Day without being too impractical for turkey-cooking duties.

    As always, it's just too damn easy.

    In about three weeks I'll be off to the GIC again, to talk about The Future. I can't honestly say I'll be the scruffy bloke this time next year, but neither can I outright give up. I'm in an odd position though for someone following my path. It seems more usual for partners of transgender people to threaten to leave if they transition. My wife made the observation that as I am not happy and thus neither is she it was more likely our marriage would end eventually if I didn't.
    Nobody said it was all going to be too damn easy, did they.

No pleasing some people

     It's May! And we're all full of the joys of spring! The left-wing people take to the streets, the Anglicans stand on top of church towers and sing at the dawn, and I anxiously scan the orchard for evidence of blossom.
    Blossom. It's the cider-maker's unhealthy obsession in Spring. How much of it is there, is there enough water, enough light for it, and are the dreaded frosts kept at bay.
    Fortunately this year has seen the wettest April in decades, so frost hasn't been a problem and  though we're ironically short of water due to almost no winter rainfall, the blossom hasn't had it too dry. It's been a little later than last year too, probably because of the cold winter.
    Seems odd, a wet drought. The usual grousing in the suburbs about hosepipe bans. But it's very real, even now after all that rain if you dig down a few inches the ground is dried out. The water is being sucked up by the plants, it's draining straight off the surface before it can soak in, and it's simply being evaporated by warm weather. Even a wet April can be warm enough for that it seems!
    So the chances are it's going to be a dry summer. Which provides a fresh set of worries for a cider-makers, will the apples shrivel up and fall off the trees, or perhaps will they have a low juice yield?
    I should spend less time worrying, shouldn't I.
    One notable anniversary passed last week, it's a year since the Rusty Old Wreck passed its MOT after a lengthy period off the road. This year's MOT now passed, it's fit for another year's driving. Shame the weather's so damp, the roads are all muddy.
    There's no pleasing some people is there...

Melomel

    Melomel. A cider or mead flavoured with fruit or berries. I made an experimental batch a few years ago using blackberries in my cider, and I've cracked open a bottle this evening to see how it's doing.

    Mmm, blog posts made under the influence of strong cider-derived alcohol...

    The label says 2005, so it would have been bottled in mid 2006. It's had just under six years in the bottle, and it comes out slightly effervescent due to a process called malolactic fermentation in which naturally occurring bacteria slowly convert the malic acid in the cider into lactic acid, releasing CO₂ and mellowing the flavour. The blackberries lend a gentle hint of the hedgerow as well as a rosé tint you wouldn't normally expect from a cider.

    I always get annoyed when wine critics wax lyrical, now I'm doing it. Damn. Well, at least I'm not going to blather on about the bouquet. There, it smells like cider, satisfied?

    I'm overdue for a cider post here, but this time of year is hardly busy on the cider front. Not much is happening. I did rack the 2011 pressing on Sunday, but that was a simple case of siphoning the cider away  from the settled spent yeast into clean plastic drums, allowing any further yeast to settle out of it and stopping the yeast imparting any bad flavours on the finished product. I tasted a small glass of the rough young cider and found it to be rather good. If nothing spoils it between now and bottling time perhaps the '11 will be a vintage year. I can live in hope, can't I.

    There are times when a bottle of well-aged real cider lends a positive spin to the world. This I think is one of them. I know it's illusory, but right now I appreciate it. Wassail!

 

Crunch crunch, saw saw, code code

    All the clichés of the British media have been wheeled out, it's been a snowy weekend hereabouts! Pretty cold as it happens, we had a -14 celcius frost a few nights ago.
    I spent most of the weekend at my parents place. Watched our resident fox nosing around in the field, threw him an apple. And spent a load of time in the orchard, pruning apple trees. As always a restful occupation, this time with the added fun of drawing large patterns in the snow dragging branches across the field. The harvest seems a long way away, but in eight weeks it'll be nearly blossom time. I should have finished the pruning earlier.
    So that's the crunch crunch and the saw saw part. The coding came later, I returned to my trans news analysis. Yet again looking at the sources, this time breaking them out by month. The image below shows a colourful graph that should be an abstract bedspread design rather than a representation of media data. Click on it to see it at its full size. It's even more obvious which outlets have an obsession with us, and how constant it all is. I should point out here that one UK paper is missing: the Times hides its content behind a paywall so doesn't appear in Google News.
    Next I'll be looking at language rather than source. You can never tell until the results are in, but I hope there'll be a few stories to tell there, too.
    Just a thought, given current UK news I might add "pregnant man" to my search terms. They can't resist a new angle, can they!

Slow pressing

    A happy day spent wielding apples yesterday, as our two friends from the antipodes came up from London to join the fun of pressing cider.
    In fact we spent rather less time pressing cider than we might have, after a morning picking apples we cooked a rather huge veggie shepherd's pie and apple crumble which along with a bottle of the 2010 pressing left us all a little relaxed for the afternoon. Still, we managed enough juice for both cider and pasteurising, and I had the chance to blend a high-tannin wild apple with dessert apples to make what I hope will be an interesting cider.
    So I think we showed Nix & DB one of the better slices of the British rural autumn. We even had near-perfect weather, dry and temperate, neither too hot nor too cold.
    A couple of pressings down, maybe a couple more to go, I think.

Diary of a fruit picker

    It's that time of year again. Trees laden with apples, hedges laden with blackberries. My clothing is streaked with moss and my arms are peppered with bramble scratches. My freezer though is stuffed with bags of fruit and I have a plastic drum full of what will become the first batch of next year's new cider gently fermenting.
    The late summer here saw my first apple pressing in 30 degree heat, a first. A colleague remarked that we saw three seasons last week, I expressed the hope that last Saturday would then see cherry blossom, sadly a forlorn hope.
    Autumn always leaves me slightly sad, feeling that I've somehow missed the summer. Silly really, autumn is the most impressive season in itself, the countryside both laden with produce and beautiful in decay. I took a walk across the fields with my parents neighbour on Sunday, watching deer through the woodland and a poor buzzard being mobbed by some crows.
    The picture shows some very late blackberries. Losing flavour a little by now, but still worth freezing. Those will find their way into a pie sometime in January.

Indian summer

    Here in Southern England, it's apple harvest time. And it's a good one too, the cold winter followed by a late spring gave the trees a decent dormancy so the yield this year is huge.
    So as we get a final burst of warm weather - the Indian summer of this post's title - I'll be spending a while in the next few days picking apples and pressing juice.
    There s a comfort in the stability of the rural calendar. Whatever happens elsewhere, you know what to expect at home. On Sunday I was passing the spot where I was standing back in March when Dawn told me her friend Grace had died. That tree is in full leaf now, just starting to turn. Life goes on.

Jungle warfare

    I spent the other evening in the company of a Billy Goat. No, I haven't gone all goaty on you, between you and me people who keep goats are a bit weird. A Billy Goat is a self-propelled petrol-powered brushcutter, and as is my custom at this time of year I was using our rather venerable model to mow my parents' orchard.
    The growing season for meadow grass starts in early May. Ground nesting birds move in, the flowers come out, and for a while in June it all looks like a scene from a Timotei shampoo advert, except one featuring apple trees.
    By July the vegetation has reached out-of-control proportions. We don't have a handy baby elephant, but I'm sure some of it would be as high as its eye if we did. The birds have all flown and the wild flowers seeded, so it's time to reach for the Billy Goat and tame the jungle. It's hot work, but the machine makes a good job of it and lets the light in around the trees. More importantly the air can get in and keep the damp away, otherwise there are all sorts of mildews and other entertaining afflictions that can strike down your apple crop in its prime. In a few weeks a little bit of new growth will see the orchard carpeted in green velvet, just in time for the odd bit of casual scrumping as the early varieties ripen.
    Mine is a tenuous connection to the land these days, that of a hobby farmer who works shifting words at a desk in an air-conditioned office in the big city.
   

Got a lot to bottle

    It's that time of year again, last year's cider needs to be bottled. It has spent the winter fermenting, I racked it a month or so ago and now it's ready for the next step.
    There is one snag though. Because of my fancy new press, last year's juice yield was higher than expected. My worry is that I may not have enough bottles to cope, and will have to resort to inventive solutions. Cider in jam-jars anyone? Or more likely one gallon demijohns.
    So my Sunday will be spent preparing my stock of bottles. Counting them, and the tedious task of label removal. The BBC tells me it will be a warm day, I'll sit in the shade of a very large apple tree with a tin bath full of water and a bottle brush. I can think of worse ways to spend a day.
    Thinking about it, there is a war of words in the cider community too. The drink is called cider, but some insist on referring to it as cyder. It can come down to presscloths at dawn in the saloon bar of the Kingston Black over that one!
    Silly really, because however you refer to it it's exactly the same stuff.

Blossom

    Blokes aren't supposed to talk about flowers. I think they're all scared people might think they're gay or something. Which is a shame because particularly at this time of year there is a lot to talk about if you appreciate flowers, every tree is covered in them.
    The picture shows one of our orchard trees, a williams pear. Fruit growers are one of the few groups of blokes you'll find talking about blossom, though they'll be careful not to sound as though they are enjoying its beauty too much. Unless they *are* gay, presumably. Instead they obsess about whether it'll be frosted, how much of it there is, and whether enough of the right insects are finding it.
    I tried to catch one of the mason bees on the blossom in my picture, but it was camera shy.
    I've been a little up-and-down of late. My wife was away at her mother's place until the weekend, and that's always a bit difficult for me. Wandering through the orchard at blossom time is not a cure-all for depression, but it certainly makes you feel a little better.

Edit: Apple blossom picture added for comparison (See comments).

Petrol, or cider?

    Here in southern England there is an expectant feeling in the air. Spring is about to happen in a big way and it's as though the whole world knows it but everybody's waiting for someone else to start the process. The days are bright and the sunshine feels warm, but the air is still a bit chilly and buds are firmly closed.
    I normally have a couple of tasks at this time of year, bringing my motorcycles and the Rusty Old Wreck out of hibernation and racking the previous year's cider. One leaves me smelling of petrol, the other of yeast. I'm pleased to report that the bikes both still work and the cider, while a bit rough with youth, shows promise and hasn't turned into vinegar.
    The Rusty Old Wreck, however, is still off the road. My mission has become to get it through an MOT (British mandatory roadworthiness test) before the end of the month. To that end I need to get it a new set of tyres, refit its interior and adjust its brakes. Surely that is achievable!
    So I've got some work ahead of me. Spring means another milestone for me, it usually marks the end of my winter low. I hope I'll be sleeping better over the next few weeks, and getting less stress.
    The picture was taken on Sunday afternoon. The orchard is still dormant, despite the carpet of spring flowers.

In praise of a saw

    From time to time we all have jobs to do that are part of something we enjoy, but not necessarily the part we'd choose as the defining moment of that activity. If you crossdress for example you probably don't rate the annoying task of hair removal as highly while it is in progress as you do the moment when it all comes together in the mirror.
    If you've followed this blog at all you'll have gathered by now that as well as being an oversized t-girl I'm a cidermaker. Cidermakers live for the end of summer when apple trees are laden with fruit and the orchard is warm and green. We don't live for January and February when the going is muddy amid the apple trees and our feet are chilled to the bone. Yet the orchard is where you'll find us at this time of year, as our charges need pruning - removal of excess summer growth, diseased and dead wood - if they are to provide good yields of apples in the year to come.
    Over the years I have used many different tools for this task. A small chainsaw for the occasional big branch is fine, but most of the work involves fiddly little branches, wands of fibrous and flexible new growth that cling tenaciously to their mother branches and punish you by splittng into fibres if you detatch them carelessly. Sandvik bow saws are too unwieldy, secateurs are too small, lopping shears promise much but are never up to the leverage I can put through them and larger pruning saws never fit in the available space. You wouldn't think such an outwardly simple task would present such a problem, would you. So for me my most invaluable companion in the winter orchard is my little handheld folding Felco pruning saw.
   Small enough to fit in my pocket, short enough to be used in confined space, sharp enough to cut through very large branches yet comfortable enough to use that I get no blisters on my hands from it, it means I can work my way through an orchard of trees in the time it used to take me to do one or two of them. Yesterday I filled the farm truck several times over with cut branches and aside from an unfortunate cut finger from when I became a little too enthusiastic in my sawing I'm none the worse for all that effort. (I came very close to crashing the truck into an apple tree, but that's another story.) That's how useful a single tool has become to me.
    So now you've read it all. A t-girl blog in praise of an agricultural tool. I will have to disappoint you though if you are staying tuned for the accompanying review of a pickup truck, they don't do 'em in pink.

Wassailing

    It's that time of year again. Everyone else is sitting indoors grumbling about the weather or pelting along the motorway to the retail outlet centre but for a cidermaker it's time to head for the orchard, saw and shears in hand for a spot of pruning. And it's time to wassail your trees, if you are of a traditional bent.
    Wassaling is a January tradition from the southwestern counties of the UK that has been revived in recent years. A simple toast to the health of your trees in the coming year, it usually involves going to the orchard and singing wassailing songs at the trees, with assorted other traditions involving offerings of cider, hoisting a wassailing queen into the branches, and of course much drinking of cider.
    I have to admit a touch of embarrassment at the thought of singing at our trees in public. So my wassail will be a much more private affair. If trees are capable of appreciating such things, they should know I take care of them as I barrow in loads of manure to nourish them and cut out their diseased or dead wood, without my having to serenade them with my tuneless wailing. I might raise a glass of cider to them, but I'm afraid it won't be the traditional "clayen cup". Or should that be "cuppe"? I can't decide.
    There is a danger when reviving traditions to gather together every known tradition around an event and produce an entirely false super-tradition laden with traditional elements that while traditional in their own regions might be a little less traditional taken all together. You only have to look at the modern "traditions" surrounding weddings to see very good examples. I therefore can't decide whether wassailing is an over-revived tradition. People certainly seem to have a lot of fun at it though and anything that raises the profile of craft cider has to be a good thing.
    So here's a modern take on reviving other people's traditions, the cut-and-paste wassail. I won't be singing this to our trees this weekend, but it's quite likely people will be doing so elsewhere!

Here's to thee, old apple tree, That blooms well, bears well. Hats full, caps full, Three bushel bags full, An' all under one tree. Hurrah! Hurrah!

A little bit of September in November

    The last piece of fruit-related madness on these pages for a while, in the last couple of days I've harvested the last couple of late-fruiting trees. Quinces, and a late keeping apple called French Crab. There's something just a little mad about standing on a ladder in the middle of a tree in a November fog picking fruit with frost on their skins.
    My mother planted the quince decades ago. She had never had one and was hugely disappointed with what she got. They add flavour to apple pies, but she didn't particularly like it. Meanwhile the tree kept producing huge crops which largely went to waste. I tried a bit in some cider but never again, they impart a very weird flavour once fermented. Fortunately a few years ago she discovered quinces make a rather nice marmalade so they're in demand once more. Hence my climbing the ladder and risking life and limb in the frost.
    My wife's away at her mother's place for a couple of weeks, so I'm as foggy as the November day around our quince tree. Fruit, its culture and processing, is one of my escapes, something I know intimately and am in control of. I have a few such pursuits, the Rusty Old Wreck is another of them, and at times I need to immerse myself in them to avoid going potty. I need my wife to step off the plane and find her bloke waiting for her.

Not well

    Laid low with the dreaded Lurgy (US: Cooties?), I've managed little this weekend. My original task: press a huge pile of apples for cider and juice, has fallen by the wayside, postponed until next weekend when with luck I won't be coughing, aching or upset of stomach.
    My parents' house seems to have feed sacks full of apples on every surface, the long-lasting Wagoner and Sturmer Pippin, the sharp Rosemary Russet and a small number from my cherished bittersweet cider apple Dabinett. The last one has a tendency towards biennialism and it seems this has been an "off" year.
    Yesterday was marked by a visit from my sister. As usual we talked about everything under the sun, she's starting I think to get used to talking as much to a sister as a brother. I'd forgotten that she reads this blog, better watch out what I say about her. :)
    The most unexpected conversation of the weekend came this morning. Having dragged myself out of bed to drive to my parents' house and put the apples under cover, I collapsed on the sofa feeling sorry for myself. The TV was on and I found myself spontaneously discussing with my mother the outfits worn by the female interviewees on BBC1. That's right, my mother initiated a conversation about fashion with her son, now she knows he has something of the daughter about him. Completely out of the blue.
    Back home this afternoon curled up in bed nursing a headache, I'm still rather shocked by that one, it was the last thing I would have expected.

More pressing business

    OK, nothing new in the world of apples this weekend, except this time I had a little help shifting them from orchard to press. The sheer decadence and luxury of driving a Kawasaki Mule with a load of apples rather than pushing a wheelbarrow!
    The apples are a very nice sweet red eater caller Ingrid Marie, and what you see in the picture is about 3/4 of our tree's yield. About half of these are stored away for eating, the other half joined the rest of the weekend's haul in the press.
    Now the Mule's mobile again I get the workshop space back for the Rusty Old Wreck.

Pressing business

    What a sane t-girl should do after driving home from her support group meeting and restaurant outing at 2 am is go straight to bed and sleep soundly into the following afternoon. What I did was get up at eight o'clock and drive to my parents' place to spend the day pressing apples for both next year's cider and this winter's apple juice. Smart-casual girl to farm labourer in eight hours.
    So how do you press apples? With a couple of pieces of machinery, a scratter and a press. The scratter is roughly equivalent to an industrial scale food mincer designed to turn whole apples into crushed pulp, and the press does just what you might imagine, it squeezes the juice out of the pulp. We've been making cider at home for years, so we've got the process pretty well worked out by now. A morning spent picking apples, stripping whichever trees are ready into cardboard boxes, then set up the machinery before lunch before an afternoon scratting and pressing. It's almost a continuous operation and we can make a lot of juice this way in a day.
    Making real full-juice cider is easy. Put the juice in a sterilised vessel with an airlock and wait. Some purists don't add anything to it but I add some sulphites to kill bacteria. I like my cider tasting of apples, not vinegar. Next January I'll rack it, removing the spent yeast from the vessel, then next May I'll bottle it. Sometime around Christmas 2011 it'll be ready to drink. Nothing happens quickly for a cider maker.
    That's the cider, what about the juice? We pasteurise our juice and freeze it in milk cartons, after adding some vitamin C to stop it going brown. I used to bottle it in beer bottles, but then one got some impurities and fermented. Exploding bottles can embed shards of glass in the woodwork, not pretty. Waiting for a big pan of juice to reach the magic 75 celsius is a bit tricky, get it too hot and it tastes like apple sauce, don't get it hot enough and it goes off.
    So there's a typical autumn Sunday for me. I know where my cider and juice comes from, it's my one tenuous connection with my agricultural roots. In another age I might have done this for a living, though while I envy those who do today I know it's not a life for me.
    Have I learned anything this Sunday? One thing, more a comment on the fashions of Middle England than anything else. A cider press needs a cloth  to be at its most successful. You wrap the apple pulp in it and it stops the stuff squirting out of the sides of the press. Best for the job is net curtain material, it's juice-permeable yet made from nylon so washable. Could I find any on Sunday, trawling round the DIY and home interior superstores of Middle England? When did suburbia stop twitching its net curtains?

What's brown, and comes out of Cowes?

    Ah, the sights, sounds and smells of the British countryside, marvelous! My dad has spent a short time in hospital for a minor procedure, something we expected around Christmas but that happened now due to the whims of NHS waiting list planning.
    So I've found myself going back to nature for a couple of days, over at my parents place keeping an eye on our small herd of cattle. Not an onerous task, but I guess mucking out isn't to everyone's taste. I couldn't escape the stuff, yesterday afternoon when I went out in search of blackberries I managed to tread in a cowpat, thanks ladies! Maybe wellies would have been a better choice than trainers to cross the field, I've been gone too long.
    There was a time many years ago when I saw myself one day taking on this herd when it became too much for my dad. How much has changed since a younger me thought anything was possible. It's not just the effort required or the meagre financial return associated with small-scale farming but the less pleasant side of it. Cattle are not objects, mindless automata dedicated to taking in fodder and producing milk, beef and manure. Instead they are complex and gentle creatures, to get the best out of them you have to get to know them and understand their ways. They are all different, just like us.
    I don't know our current animals as well as I knew the generation before them. They know me and accept me grudgingly because they've seen me with my dad, but I don't think any of them would let me near a calf. I was rather glad of this unfamiliarity yesterday as I was mucking out, some of the animals were steers destined for market within the next few weeks.
    I am probably too sentimental about all this but I guess it's the way I'm built. I should be a vegetarian, but don't have the guts.
    Elsewhere this morning I harvested some of the apples that will make this year's cider. It's going to be a good pressing.

When Drunken Wasps Attack!

    The earliest apples are now just about over at my parents place. I spent a while at the weekend harvesting some of them, a cooker called White Transparent. As always at this time of year, the wasps have moved in on the ripest fruit and since this year has been a bumper year for wasps this means that half the fruit were mostly eaten already. Each one would have a hole in the side through which you could see a mass of wasps busily hollowing out the flesh.
    Not just wasps, but drunken wasps. It seems I'm not the only one who makes cider, the stomach of a wasp is the perfect place for a drop of apple juice to ferment.
    As I reached up to pick one apple the wasp-filled one next to it detached itself from the tree, bounced on my shoulder and rolled down my arm. I could see the wasps inside it spinning round as it rolled, as if in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble trying to wrestle something from Dino. For a moment I had drunken wasps being thrown from it at all angles, bouncing off my clothing to land helpless on the grass.
    It seems wasps are not belligerent drunks, I doubt any of them would remember where their sting was, let alone how to use it. I couldn't help laughing, both at the antics of the unfortunate insects and as nervous relief at avoiding so many of them without being stung.
    And all for an apple pie which with luck I'll be making this evening. I hope my wife enjoys it, given what I had land on me to secure it.

Blackberries

    Yesterday was the perfect English summer day, warm but not too hot, with a nice breeze. Walking across the hill to escape some medication-induced zombie-ness and a bit of girl fog I was very pleased to find the first blackberries have ripened since I last passed this way a few days ago. So here's the latest chapter in the search for free food from the hedgerows of Southern England. I returned to the office with fingers stained purple.
    I will miss my walks across the hillside when I change jobs.