Woodsman

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Some of the most interesting work I did with apples was when I was working for Oxfam as a permaculture consultant in Albania. The mountain district I was working in was poor and inaccessible, and the choice of fresh fruits was very limited outside of the main growing season. The apples in particular were very poor. The local varieties were at best similar to low-quality English crab apples, so any improvement in the varieties grown would be beneficial to the local people. Working with Brogdale, suitable scion (grafting) material was obtained and sent out to Albania for grafting on to the local Albanian crab root stocks. ‘Ribston Pippin’ was chosen for its high level of vitamin C, while others were chosen to survive the long, cold winters and the short summer growing season in the mountains. These materials are now cultivated in the permaculture research centre in northern Albania, and hopefully improving the lives and diet of many people living a sustainable lifestyle in the mountains.

Restoring old fruit trees and orchards, as well as planting new ones, have helped me to cultivate many plants in the surrounding landscape, although I can’t exactly claim that I am farming them.

As I turn and head south, with the sensual curves of the South Downs silhouetted in the distance, I join the small, winding waterway – the River Lod. Rising north-east of Lynchmere, and picking up many streams along its journey, it skirts the village of Lodsworth before joining the River Rother at Lod’s Bridge, which in turn joins the Arun and continues on out to sea at Littlehampton. As the Lod winds south through the parish it makes its way through mixed coppice woodland – hazel, ash, field maple and willow – below which can be found abundant bluebells, yellow archangel, early purple-flowering orchid and wood anemone in late spring. Preceding this flush of colour, the wood is carpeted with the dense mass of foliage of wild garlic. A walk this way in spring and you will be aware of the wild garlic before you see it. Its poignant aroma fills the air well in advance of its physical presence. I harvest the wild garlic for stir-fries and salads, a cheese sandwich for lunch is greatly enhanced by a few leaves, and it makes an excellent pesto. I have supplied pubs and restaurants with the leaves over the years, and in my early days at Prickly Nut Wood I would often trade beer for wild garlic at the local hostelries.

The Lod is a healthy, clean river and salmon trout spawn as far up as the mill pond at Lurgashall. Brown trout are common, as are bream, roach, chub and pike. As a small river it is not often fished, with the nearby River Rother being more popular with anglers. One part of the river that seems never short of water is near the bridge at Lickfold. The road regularly floods here, and after heavy rains it can be hard to make out what is bridge and what is river. There have been a number of civil engineering works over the past couple of years to try to improve the regular flooding, but so far I have seen little evidence that they have made much difference. I am astonished at how often we seem to throw money at trying to find a solution to a problem that is part of nature. Water has clearly always flooded at Lickfold, which is a low point for water collection and is well fed from surrounding fields. It is not a major route, is only impassable for a few days a year and there are alternative routes, so it would seem to make sense to leave the river to flood when it wishes at Lickfold Bridge and focus our civil engineering energies on more useful projects.

Where the Lod reaches halfway bridge, I have found many good giant puffballs in the adjacent fields. Creating a fungi map based on wild mushrooms that I find is a useful part of farming the surrounding landscape, and there are many areas that I visit purely to collect mushrooms for the table. One of my favourite is ‘horn of plenty’, or the ‘black trumpet’. I have a favourite picking spot heading west from Prickly Nut Wood. When found in abundance I have picked baskets full, and as I often find them near to Halloween, they are an ideal mushroom to market to local restaurants for ‘black trumpet soup’. Another favourite I find throughout the chestnut coppice is ‘chicken of the woods’. This is a great find, as one orange bracket of ‘chicken of the woods’ can feed a good number of people. I’ve walked through the woods to the Duke of Cumberland pub at Henley, and found and traded ‘chicken of the woods’ for beer on a few occasions. ‘Chicken of the woods’ gets its name mainly from its consistency; follow a recipe for chicken pie, substitute ‘chicken of the woods’ for real chicken, and few people will notice the difference. When cooked, ‘chicken of the woods’ looks exactly like chicken, and its texture and taste are surprisingly similar.

As a lover of mushrooms, I have taken to cultivating my own. I have been growing mushrooms on logs for about 12 years now and have had good success with Japanese shiitake mushrooms and oyster mushrooms. I buy in the mushroom spawn growing on sawdust and then drill holes out in a log, fill them with the sawdust spawn and seal them with hot wax. In my first year of inoculating (as this process is called), I used beeswax from my hives and the bees visited the logs and took back every bit of the wax. Since then I have used a vegetable-based cheese wax, similar to what you will find surrounding Edam cheese.

The log is left to stand within the woodland for a year to 18 months, depending on the species of tree. A birch log, for instance, will produce mushrooms more quickly than a sweet chestnut log, because the mycelium can colonise birch more easily as it’s less durable than chestnut. Once the mycelium has spread through the log, the log will fruit (produce mushrooms naturally) when the appropriate weather conditions arrive. In autumn, with heavy rains following the warmth of summer, the conditions are perfect to stimulate mushrooms to appear in great numbers throughout the countryside. The same applies with mushrooms cultivated on logs. One great advantage of inoculating logs is that I know each log contains mushrooms and therefore I can simulate the autumn rains by throwing the logs into my pond. I leave them there for 48 hours and then extract them. About five days later the mushrooms will start appearing. The log should be rested for about six weeks before shocking it again. This process can be repeated so each log can produce mushrooms three to four times a year. I think of the process of shocking the log into fruiting as being that the mycelium inside the log feels like it is drowning as it lies in the pond partially submerged. When nature is under stress it reproduces, so naturally the mycelium sends out its reproductive parts, these being the edible mushrooms.

16 April

I took my ‘push me/pull me’ hedge-laying tool, which resembles an exaggerated boat hook, down to the pond. I pulled out another five sweet chestnut logs and stacked them in the shade nearby. The logs I pulled out four days ago already have tiny mushrooms beginning to form. I am going to keep up this pattern of shocking a few more every two days and see what volumes I produce. I enjoy walking amongst my log piles. To a visitor they would look like any other pile of firewood, but I know there are mushrooms stored in the log, waiting for me to free them. Today, with so many piled up at different stages, I felt like I was wandering through an outdoor laboratory, inspecting different stages of an experiment. Took 2 kg to the Hollist Arms – Sam is going to stuff them with walnuts and Stilton, and serve them as a starter.

I often think that, as a species, the human race is under high levels of stress. Our reaction to this stress, similar to the mushrooms, is to reproduce, and in doing so we maintain the seemingly unstoppable upward curve of our increasing population. I once heard on the radio that had China not adopted its one-child policy, over the past 25 years their population would have increased by the size of the population of Europe (and that’s not counting all the children who were born). With our rapidly growing population, and the associated challenges of meeting our energy and food needs, it is possible with hindsight to see the wisdom in what at first glance seems such a Draconian measure. It probably seems a step too far for Western cultures to consider such a measure. But sooner rather than later we are going to have to make some major decisions about population control – unless nature, through natural disasters or contagious diseases, decides to make them for us. I find this one of the most difficult environmental questions of all – and as a father of three children, I understand the animalistic need and drive to procreate. In the United Kingdom as a whole, and especially in the south-east of England, we are very heavily populated. It is hard to see how we can maintain population growth at its present rate, whilst at the same time converting more potentially food-producing land into accommodation and harvesting more resources for energy and infrastructure, without further degrading our landscape and pushing more species towards extinction. However, despite this rather negative outlook, it is important to remember that a new generation always brings fresh hope. Perhaps it is the children of the next generation who will make these tough decisions about population growth, limit our energy usage rather than expand it, develop local food and energy initiatives to revitalise communities, and simplify our lives to bring us more in touch with nature and our natural environment.

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Foraging has become a natural part of any walk I take and I am always alert to a free meal that nature is offering. Crossing some of the many rural roads near Prickly Nut Wood, one becomes aware of one of the few benefits of the motor car to the forager. Motor cars are quite adept at producing a meal and I’ve collected a good number of pheasants and rabbits, one partridge, one mallard duck and a number of roe deer, all of which have provided fine meals. The quality of roadkill varies depending upon the nature of the vehicle’s impact and where it has struck the animal. Whilst I have picked up pheasants so crushed and flattened that it would not have been worth trying to sort the meat from the bone, I have found others where the impact has been slight and the meat is untarnished. The next thing to establish is how long the animal has been dead. First check for warmth and how flexible the body is – has rigor mortis set in? Then look for flies’ eggs, which can arrive within an hour in the heat of summer. Have any hatched in to maggots? Does the meat smell? If I decide it is good to eat, I still have to get the meat back home. This is easy with a rabbit or a pheasant, but not so easy with a roe deer. If it is a deer I find, the first thing I look for is to see whether the stomach has begun to swell. Deer are ruminants and the grass in their stomachs will ferment, making the stomach inflate with gas. If the stomach is not swollen I will ‘paunch’ the deer – cut open its belly, and remove the stomach and intestines. If the deer is still warm, at this stage I will remove the liver and take it back home for my next meal. I will then drag the deer into the shade, marking the spot clearly in my mind so I can return to it later with a vehicle and collect the carcass. Once I have the carcass back home, I hang it in a fly-free environment for a few days before skinning and butchering it. A roadkill deer will provide venison for a number of meals, and such a find often signals a good time to invite over friends for a fine casserole or roast. The actual killing of deer is controlled under the Deer Act, so don’t let the delicious taste of venison tempt you into hunting deer, unless you decide to get properly trained through a deer-stalking course with the associated firearms certificates.

Heading north on the return journey to Prickly Nut Wood, the footpath takes me under an old walnut tree that kindly deposits large volumes of nuts upon the footpath. The actual walnut we are all familiar with is enclosed within an outer case that is thick and green. The green colouring will soon stain your fingers when harvesting these nuts. It has been traditionally used as a dye, as have the leaves. After picking a bagful of nuts and husks and then trying to wash your hands of the greeny/brown colouring, you will certainly appreciate its qualities for dyeing. I have five mature walnut trees I visit for foraging nuts as I walk around the parish, and there are a couple I have planted at Prickly Nut Wood. I planted grafted varieties of ‘Broadview’ and ‘Buccaneer’, which have struggled to compete with the ever-present challenge of the grey squirrel. I visited Martin Crawford’s nut trials at the agro-forestry research trust in South Devon and saw some fine examples of grafted walnuts producing well, which are all very suitable for our climate here. Martin recommended the variety ‘Fernette’ in particular, but there are a number of good cultivars to choose from. Away from the woods, where squirrels have less aerial access to trees, the planting of more walnuts would be a useful addition to our future food supply. In any garden or wasteland space, the planting of fruit- or nut-producing trees will help us towards having more established perennial food production, something that I believe will become a necessity in the future.

As I continue north beyond Prickly Nut Wood, I take a favourite route that takes me up the zigzag to Blackdown. On the way through Blackdown Park, I pass an orchard of plums and apples that I planted ten years earlier. The trees are now well established and cropping well, and sheep graze beneath them – a classic silvi-pastoral landscape. The zigzag is a steep climb up to the Temple of the Winds, where a stone bench marks one of the finest views in the south of England. Looking out from the Temple of the Winds, it is hard to imagine the motor car has been invented or that we are anywhere near the highly populated south of England. The border between Sussex and Surrey passes over Blackdown, and the area was one of the first pieces of land the National Trust acquired. In recent times – with the felling of timber and the grazing of cattle – much of the hillside has been returned to heathland.

I often visit here with my children for bilberry picking, as the reduction in tree cover has encouraged the spread of this prolific berry across the open heath. The wild relative of the blueberry, it is delicious in flavour and ensures the children’s hands and faces are more purple than when we have been blackberrying. Plenty are consumed while picking but others are taken home for one of my seasonal favourites – bilberry pancakes. I remember as a child that strawberries had a particular season. Now, with imported food, it is possible to eat them all year round, and the energy cost of transporting them is reflected in the price, unlike the associated pollution. The excitement and anticipation of waiting for the first strawberries to ripen have been taken away and in doing so this exquisite fruit – at its best when plucked straight from the plant – has become trapped in a plastic package and transported around the globe. It is the eating of fruit in their particular season that makes our connection with growing food so special and foraging such a delight. Blueberries are readily available all year round, but bilberries, they have their season and even then you will not find them in the shops. This perfect little berry creates a day of adventure. A picnic is prepared, water bottles filled and a mission undertaken to venture out across the heathland. A whole day unveils itself around this seasonal fruit. Games of hide and seek are interspersed with more picking. My son Zed becomes a bilberry scout, venturing ahead and alerting us busy pickers behind him to the treasures he discovers. Tess, my daughter, is picking well, her face blotched purple from her stained fingers. ‘Look at this one,’ she shrieks, finding a good-sized bilberry. As the day draws on she is on my shoulders as we start our descent and the journey home.