A Cider Pressing Party

Last Sunday, we participated in a truly lovely fall tradition -- a cider pressing party hosted by family friends  in Willow. It was a glorious day - brilliant blue skies, sunny, and that unique autumn mix of warm and brisk. 

The party was fun, yummy, and wonderfully photogenic. It was also perfectly suited to our little Will since it featured both apples AND tractors, two of his current passions. You'll see that he's holding either one or two apples in every picture. And we left with a gallon of fresh cider which is DELICIOUS!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes. I've also included a few great recipes that feature apple cider after the photos if you feel inspired.

A basket of apples, bound for the press

Will weighs his options

Vintage Ford tractor used to haul a wagon-load of apples up to the press

A picturesque wagon-load of apples calmly await their fate

Two girls filling a bucket with apples to press

The apples get a bath before pressing

Will's new friend, Jasper, puts all four teeth to work

Gears whirring above the mash bucket

Feeding apples to the hungry American Cider Mill

Our wonderful hostess, Oona in front of classic American apples poster

A line of bottles & jugs snake up to the press, waiting to be filled

Cranking down the press

Will walking around a tree, holding a "bib" apple and a "lille" apple

Cider, fresh off the press!

Apple mash from the pressing headed for the compost pile

Apple Cider Recipes

• Cider-Glazed Delicata Squash with Rosemary and Sage
• Gingered Winter Squash

And here are a few other tasty-sounding recipes from other blogs and sites that have caught my eye.

• Apple Cider Doughnuts from Deb at Smitten Kitchen
• Cider Braised Pork Shoulder With Caramelized Onions from Epicurious
• Pork Medallions With Cider Sauce from Cathy at Noble Pig
• Cider-Glazed Salmon from Elise at Simply Recipes

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What do you do when the Schau is over? Travels in Mitteleuropa part 3.

     What happens when the last Stein has been drunk, the last leaflet on bio-dynamic slug control handed out and the last Tagetes wilts in autumn's first frost?        
     Gardenshows are a big part of the German garden scene, lasting all summer and (key thing this) leaving behind the legacy of a regenerated urban space. Many of the best parks are former Gartenschau sites. We tried it in Britain during the Thatcherreich but no attempt was ever made to keep them as public spaces, and in the sad case of Liverpool, the show site is now quite well-known for its grafitti daubed ruined Chinese garden.

Playground - durability all right! Had to stop myself running up it.

            How you turn a one-summer event into something permanent is a challenge, one which has apparently been met pretty well here. Of course I tend to visit the successful ones, but I have seen places with  artworks that look like beached whales, avenues which go nowhere, and perennial borders run amok. A couple of days ago I dropped in on a 2004 Bavaria State show at Burghausen. On the whole a successful transformation, 8 out of 10, I think Herr  (or Frau) Burgermeister. One series of perennial borders pretty well abandoned – why not just replace with ground cover? and some strange objects which could only be artworks, but a fantastic children’s playground – the kind of really inventive place which can be one of the best features of these events, overall a good urban green space, and a whole series of little gardens between beech hedges – nice intimate spaces (assuming the good folk of Burghausen don’t go in for too much spliff-rolling or needle-based activities, which is always a problem if you create too much quiet space in urban parks). These were all designed by design practices, a bit like Chelsea Flower Show gardens, but permanent. Some looked really good, the others … well, I am sure the designers would be horrified if they could see their names attached. There is always a real problem with these individual gardens in places where they become permanent and get maintained by the same staff – they all sink to a common level. On the whole though they make for garden vignettes you would never get normally in a public park.

Panicum virgatum grass with Aster dumosus at Weihenstephan

            Quick visit to Weihenstephan, home to the world’s leading collection of perennials, meet the new prof. of planting design, Swantje Duthweiler, whose interest in early 20^th century planting styles heralds the prospect of some interesting new takes on plant use (watch this space?).

            Now in Switzerland where I have spent a fascinating day at Hochschule Wädenswil, a teaching and research centre in canton Zürich. They have done a lot of work on perennial mixtures – randomized combinations of plants for particular visual effects or management techniques, sometimes just perennials, but sometimes including bulbs and annuals too. Some very high tech means of teaching plant ID too – you use an iPhone app. to zap a code on a pillar and your phone downloads a plant list, plant information and other stuff about the planting; meanwhile some nicely designed little leaflets give you plants lists too.

Most stunning of all though are the vertical gardens they are working on for indoor environments, including some wonderful ‘plant pictures’, exploiting the fact that a lot of tropicals perform well when growing vertically.

            A lot of fruit growing happens at Wädenswil too – it has a mild climate, being on Lake Zürich; some fascinating unusual fruit here too. Actinidia arguta makes tiny sweet little Kiwi fruit – much nicer than the normal kind, and I never realised you can eat Schisandra chinensis berries – although to be honest the flavour made me think of what it would be like if you bit into a chunk of incense – a challenge for the truly innovative cook perhaps.

            Odd how in the German- speaking world, it is public horticulture  which is where innovation happens, and private gardens are relatively unsophisticated - mirror image of back home. Our nearly all having private gardens (in the UK) has meant, sadly, a lack of political pressure for quality public space. But given the very different agendas of private and public gardening, there is so much scope for cross-fertilisation of ideas.

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Travels in Mitteleuropa 2

TRAVELS IN MITTELEUROPA 2

Jo and I try out the exercise machines on Bratislava's new Danube river promade - a real boost for the way you can enjoy the city and the river.

The perennial revolution marches on! The Czechs and Slovaks are now doing research into public use of perennials, very much inspired by the German randomised mixing technique. Extremely interesting afternoon at the Landscape Dept. of the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. Jo worked at Bratislava Comenius Univ. from 1993-5, so we now all about alcoholic Stalinist heads of department, reinforced concrete buildings , dead hand of Marxism-Leninism exams etc, etc. So delighted to find lovely new building,  ditto perennial border, ditto prof, and young staff well clued up on all the German research, on Oudolf, and ‘the Sheffield school’. On the subject of profs. a sure sign of age is when the professors start to be younger than you are.

Reading Prof. Hallova’s research I realise that she’d brought up an issue none of the rest of us have ever considered – that plants engage in chemical warfare through ‘allelopathy’ amongst themselves and that this impacts on planting combinations, so for eg. nepeta and euphorbia suppress the growth of asters and geraniums. I immediately think of all the Euphorbia cyparissias I let rampage in my borders. Fascinating! I think I should set up some trials back home this winter and really see if it is an impact we should really worry about in a practical sense. 

Perennial beds in every town I drove through! Plus trusty Renault Kangoo

Given that it's a long time since I’ve driven round Austrian roundabouts it is just amazing to see how much perennials (in the 40-60cms height range) are used in traffic islands and roadside environments. Really just about every place I have driven through in Oberösterreich seems to. Wunderbar!

A misty, soggy, chilly stomp around some dry meadow habitat near Mikulov in Czechia, Scabiosa ochroleuca and Aster linosyris flowering away in profusion. Sabine Plenk (a colleague from Vienna’s BOKU) and I agreed it was a ‘second spring’ effect as autumn rains re-moisten very thin stony soils. Nice to see the local flora (Pannonian-Pontic) used in the grounds of the castle in town in an ornamental way. Not so sure about the monstrous Christmas tree in the town square and all the artificial snow – but it turned out to be a film set. Made me freeze just looking at it.

Dialectic of locally native dry meadow plants with box parteer at Mikulov Castle, CZ.

More soggy foggy in Austria, can’t see the mountains! Furchtbar! Schade! Garden visiting in Austria is looking up. There is a new guidebook, published by Callwey Verlag and based on the very thorough Gärten for Germany. Lots of really rather nice sounding Privatgarten open too – how soon can I get back to check them all out? Only managed Linz Bot. Gdn. (good, some nice mature rarely-seen shrubs) and Christian Kreß’s nursery – Saravasto – at Ort-in-Innkreis. FAB, FAB, FAB. If this nursery were outside Guildford, you’d be blown away by it. Its not just plants, its really funky architectural salvage, kinky walls, alpines grown in all sorts of weird rubble. Its Berlin grunge meets Alpine Garden Society. Its cool. Ain’t nothing like it back home.

Forget the Sleazyjet flight to ‘Vienna’ (in reality Bratislava). Get the car out – the GB sticker, the green card, the ferry/chunnel  ticket, the headlight deflectors, and thrash down the autobahns (yes, you really can drive as fast as you like) and load the car up with plants. There’ll be loads here you’ve never seen before. And while you about it you can load up with Austrian wine, all of it totally gluggable and varieties like Grüner Veltliner you never find amongst the Chard and SauviBlank in Sainsbury’s, and the time spent on the autobahn will feel like its worth it. I did one better, stocked up with Slovak wine at the Nitra Tesco – just as good and miles cheaper. Stuff the Dordogne, up the Danube!

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Kingston, NY Farmer's Market

Hello again. Sorry for the long silence on my part. We spent July and August settling into our new home. And then, at the end of August, my dear dad, Joel, passed away totally unexpectedly at the age of just 66. Here's a photo of the two of us at Rahm's and my wedding - one of the happiest days of my life. I'm so glad he was there to share it with me.

As you can imagine, life has gotten even busier and a whole lot more sad. I'm still trying to wrap my mind and heart around the idea that he is gone - it's pretty hard to fathom. I have not had much time to cook in the past few weeks, nor much of an appetite, so even if there had been time to blog, there would have been nothing to write about!

But as the shock of my dad's death begins to fade a little, I find that I am regaining some of my appetite for life (and food.) We're having Indian summer right now - the sky is a clear blue, the leaves are turning yellow, orange and red, and the weather is surprisingly warm. Yesterday morning, Rahm and I decided it would be a good day to stroll around the lovely Saturday farmers market in Kingston, NY's historic stockade district with our little Will. And I remembered to bring the camera.

Below is a slideshow of some of the photos I took of the fall bounty. Enjoy. And I hope to write more soon.

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Mmmmmm...pesto

Thank you, basil, for not protesting my neglect now that I've been back to work for a few weeks. And thank you for sacrificing a few leaves for the sake of yummy pesto. I couldn't have done it without you.

Sometime soon I'd like to grind up some garlic and basil to freeze over the winter. (Then you just add the pine nuts, cheese, and olive oil when you're ready.) But the whole process always seems to take so long that I didn't do that today. It shouldn't take long, but it always does.

Why did it take me over an hour today to make some simple pesto? I started accounting for my time, and it started to make a lot more sense:

Stopping by to pull random weeds- 20 minutes.
Admiring butterflies- 10 minutes
Surveying vegetable garden and cursing groundhog- 5 minutes
Struggling to remember how to assemble the food processor- 10 minutes
Clearing breakfast dishes out of sink to make room for washing basil- 5 minutes
Cleaning up the pots and pans toddler has strewn across the floor - 10 minutes

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Monarch caterpillars

I was surprised and delighted to see what looked like Monarch caterpillars munching away on the butterfly weed this afternoon. At first I was confused since I thought they only dined on milkweed. Then I looked it up and found out butterfly weed is Asclepias tuberosa. Once again paying attention to that pesky Latin can come in handy, since its Latin name clearly shows it's in the milkweed family. Doh!

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I don't usually do this kind of thing

I don't usually do this kind of thing – summer bedding that is, but with some empty beds in front of my office building I thought I'd give it a go. Specifically I wanted to do something with a Mexican theme; having made a couple of visits to the country over the last few years I wanted to play with some colours I'd got to particularly associate with the place, in particular a very strong carmine pink which you see a lot, in fact my Mexican friend, Dr. Cruz Garcia Albarado, describes it as the national colour. We wouldn't dream of combining it with yellow, but the Mexicans love to.

So, with a backdrop of corn (a sweet corn variety) and amaranthus, two of the crops which fed Aztec and other Mesoamerican civilizations, I splurged out with some outrageously colourful flowers, all bred by the Aztecs (dahlia, tagetes, tithonia, zinnia), or of Mexican origin, nicotiana and bidens. Mostly started off in plugs sown March or April in the polytunnel and planted out May.

A few lessons for if I ever do it again. One is that it is almost impossible to get hold of a tagetes marigold which isn't ridiculously compact, although my friend Blair Priday saves seed every year of a very loose-growing one which would have been better. Same problem with the tithonia, but that might have been my problem choosing the variety. What happens is that compact plants get swamped by the sprawling bidens and nicotiana, quite apart from the irritating parks department look of compact annuals.

Everyone LOVES the zinnias, they don't seem to be a particularly fashionable flower right now, but the colours are so intense, and brings together that real Mexican pink and yellow.

sweet corn

Amaranthus 'Marvel Bronze

Amaranthus 'Autumn Palette'

Bidens ferulaefolia 'Golden Goddess'

Tithonia rotundifolia 'Fiesta del Sol'

Agastache mexicana 'Sangria'

Tagetes 'Legion of Honour'

Zinnia 'Scabious flower mix'

Nicotiana affinis

and although you can hardly seem them in this pic: Dahlias Dahlia 'Gallery Art Deco', 'Princesse Gracia', Bishop of Auckland, 'La Recoleta', ‘Ellen Huston’.

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