Wild Food (8) – Sloe Gin by Ian Carter

I do admire people who manage to produce their own wine from flowers, fruits or leaves, gleaned from the countryside. It seems to require lots of faffing about with all sorts of different ingredients, and endless decanting of fluids from one vessel to another – followed by a long, nerve-wracking wait to see if it…

Thank you

Thank you for your comments. This blog started in April 2011 and this week we passed the 50,000 comments milestone.  

It is a Big Issue

I often stop for Big Issue sellers, but I rarely take away the magazine – after they have given me change and the magazine I usually give them both back. But that’s why I missed these excellent words from Ali Schofield in mid-September (in a larger (very good) article mostly about badgers). ‘It’s not the…

Junk from the Guardian

Consider which you would consider as five of the best UK birdwatching sites. It would be tricky to name your top five but I wonder whether the five sites picked out by Rachel Dixon in the Guardian would get in your top 100? 200?  I guess every five are ‘five of the best’ in a…

Dr Coffey’s reading list (5)

Dr Therese Coffey is the junior minister at Defra. When Gavin Gamble’s e-petition in favour of banning driven grouse shooting passes 10,000 signatures (and it stands at over 9300) then Dr Coffey will need to sign off a government response. In order that she does not make Defra look even more foolish than they do…