Tweetin' the Marmalade

As I've been writing The Blob for more than a year, there are more than 400 posts to read.  Some of them deathless prose, others a bit slap-dash and shamefully rich in typos.  I must say I am bemused at those which attract over-the-average attention. The current top hitter (25% more interest that any other post) is a perfectly quotidian, not to say boring, reflection on making marmalade.  Someone must have tweeted it, but I can't discover who.  At least that appears to be quite genuine interest; the second "most interesting" post was written a year ago about Milk of Magnesia.  That's a lot more interesting than the marmalade piece but the page-views went through the roof because some imbecile set a robot to advertise in the comments.  It was a while before I worked out how to knock this intrusive nonsense out of the ball-park. Here's another lament about the practice from the often wonderful Tywkiwdbi.

I'll pretend that there is a widespread demand for more marmaladocentric copy.  I made my fourth and final batch of marmalade over this last weekend.  The other batches worked out rather well: all different but all edible.  Marmalade as any fule kno usually has what we, as kids, used to call "fishes" - the little pieces of cooked orange peel.  In the old days you'd make these by slicing the reamed-out orange peel into slivers with a very sharp knife.  I have done this but it takes a long time, so nowadays I put them through the coarsest grind of my old Spong mincer and get klontjes of peel rather than thin slices.  My Mum used to have a Spong mincer and we kids used to fight for the privilege of cutting the remains of the Sunday meat-slab into Spong-sized chunks and mincing it all up for the Tuesday shepherd's pie.

One of the joys of living isolated in the country is that you can fire foodie things out of the door and expect them to be biodegraded. Yard = midden here!  I'm a little precious about our septic system because the settlement tank is about 40m from the house and goes through two right angled turns.  I really don't want to have to rod out a blockage, so I'm really careful about what goes down the kitchen sink lest we get a fatberg.  After marmalade batch three I scrubbed up all the utensils and then got frightie about the orange fibres.  So I seized the washing-up bowl (of course we don't have a dish-washing machine) and fired it out of the door into the yard.  The next morning, I missed the little wing-nut of the Spong which you can see on the left of the picture.  After a good hunt through the kitchen, I realised that it must have been unnoticed at the bottom of the jettisoned washing-up from the night before.  It was also Monday morning and I wasn't going to be on-site in daylight until Saturday at the earliest.  Luckily I had a spare nut, but I don't like to lose things.  Accordingly, the following Sunday I went out scanning the grass within a 5m half-circle centred on the front door for a piece of metal 2cm in diameter.  Lucky I still have my eyes because random pokes would have a 1:100,000 chance of successfully hitting such target in such a field.  It only took about ten minutes but I was immensely pleased with myself - probably happier than if I'd never lost the danged thing. 

The last batch of marmalade was rather a disappointment, both lumpy and rather difficult to set.  I had to resort to spooning the glop into the hot jam-jars because pouring from the jam-pan put as much down the sides of the jars as inside.  I'll have to use it in a helluva lot of marmalade puddings over the next couple of years.  Note added in press: I've just noticed 2kg of sugar on the shelf in the kitchen where there were four, earmarked for marmalade. Duh! So now I have an explanation of why the marmalade was wonk and a lesson in what matters in the process of jam-making.

Marmalade Games 2023

My marmalade log book goes back to Jan 2003!  The basic recipe is from Mary McDermot via Delia Smith’s Winter Collection [the book, not the link whc defo didn't exist 20 years ago]. The key to the method is to separate two different chemical processes both involving heat a) boiling the oranges to release their pectin b) boiling the pip/pith-discarded pulp with 2x - 3x sugar to a roiling boil to drive off some water and make the sugar and the pectin stick together.  If your process conflates these two quite different reactions, you risk burning the sugar and/or having a very dark set to the marmalade.

The last ten years of my marmalade journey are record in The Blob. In 2020 we were super late because my mother died in peak marmalade season, but it was worth the wait because we shared the work with some other marmaficianados. In 2021 otoh, at peak lock-down II, I had to soldier on; all alone; with nobody to do even a cold-plate test. That generated a mighty marmalade surplus, so there was none made in 2022. But reserves were looking depleted in the bunker this winter and I was persuaded to get my apron on again. Shout out to Brendan Walsh, fruit whole-sale in Slieverue [X91 FR84] North Waterford who sold me a flat of Seville's for €26 cash. There were 102 Sevilles in the box and it transpires that the 2 possible pans for our process a) [above] take 26 Os and 4 pints of water.

Starting at 07:00hrs, on two separate days in mid January I loaded up the Pectin Release Pans PRPs, and set them to boil-then-simmer for 3 hours. That's easy work. The hardship comes later when the piping hot fruit is split in half [ooo ooo aaa aaa AAAA*] and the pulp scooped from the peel. The glop is forced through a muslin or, better, a conical sieve; sugar is added at the rate of 1kg to 1 pint of glop; the minced peel is thrown thereto and process b) rolling boil is started [see L]. Because of the 3 hours of no intervention needed earlier this last cook takes only 15-20 minutes. It needs some attention, lest it boils over in a lethal sputtering lava-flow and/or it burns on the bottom of the jam-pan. 

Jam cook-books say that you can predict whether the mix will set by dobbing some out on a cold plate and seeing if it stops running or crinkles at the edges if poked with a finger. But actually, we [re?]discovered this year, that you can tell by the sound of the boiling jam. When the mix comes initially to the boil, it is very fizzy and this is when overflow accidents are most likely to occur. Is that because, the gas dissolves in the water is being forced out of solution? Later, the sound turns to a deeper BLUP . . . BLUP and that's when the mix will pass the cold plate test and, in due course, set in the jar.

Set in the jar, is it. The picture [R] shows the fruits of our labour over the 3rd batch batch of [26 x minced peels; 2.8 kg glop; 4.0 kg sugar]. 18 miscellaneous-sized jars of 2023 Goldiloxian [not too bright; not too sweet; just right] marmalade. The jar in the fore-ground is designated for soon consumption because I didn't oven-sterilize enough jam-jars and we had to recruit a jar cold from the recycle box to take the last dribble from the jam-pan.

Did I say, Third Batch? I did! We now have a convenient 52 jars of vintage 2023 marmalade. Enough for +2 years at the rate we consume the stuff . . . assuming, erroneously, that we won't be giving any away. And we still have a baker's dozen of oranges still in the skin. They'll keep until we get the energy for another session in the marmalade foundry.

* Two monkeys in the bath. One goes "ooo ooo aaa aaa AAAA!". The other say "If it's too hot, mate, you can run some cold water in".

Seville Savvy

I have written records of our marmalade making adventures going back to 2002. I must have made it before then because when, we lived in England 1983-1990 a lorra jam was made from a lorra different sorts of fruit. What couldn't be boiled up with sugar and sealed [jam] was warmed up with sugar and yeast and bottled [plonk some mildly radio-active]. But around 2002, I got alongside a canny method for fool-proofing marmalade. This involves separating 

• process "pectin release" [simmer oranges for 3 hours in enough water to cover] from 
• process "combine pectin, acid and sugar to make jam that sets" [bring orange gloop (less seeds and pith) PLUS 2x as much sugar PLUS coarse chopped skins to a roiling boiling and keep it there for 10-15 minutes].

Looking back on my early marmalade notes shows that we've made considerable changes to the protocol mostly in the line of simplify simplify.[that would be Thoreau]. Now we've got the right kit and the lived experience and the notes to reliably knock off a year's supply of marmalade from nothing more than oranges, sugar, water and time [maybe seven hours elapsed time from a standing start, of which half is actually working]. The other solid is that we have a reliable "3 generation" team: BobTheSeville, Dau.II and the latter's odd-mother who have known and liked each other for 30 years.

We haven't made marmalade since Jan 2023. Our Seville supplier from 2 years ago has retired and I had to scrabble for another. Top-tip: make sure your dentist and your fruiterer are much younger than you are. Shout out for Bolger's Fariview of Waterford: serving the SouthEast retail and wholesale for 75 years!  Although it was late in the marmalade season, Bolger's sourced me a 12kg flat of Sevilles, to be collected on the morrow, for €25. The next Saturday, Lá Fhéile Bríde, I was alone in the house and started on processing 24/93rds of the oranges as a first batch . . . to see if I still had the touch. 7 hours later, result! [L] showing that I could still do it. Note also ◎ the latest bit of kit - a 2kg quartz boulder to keep the wafer-thin lid down on the stainless steel saucepan in which I now do the 1st 3-hour boil. Seville oranges float, hot Sevilles positively bob and the pan is Full. A weighted lid really minimizes water-loss and a steamy kitchen. Cast iron 7.5lt Cousance? so yesterday! And so damnably heavy.

Cost: it is remarkable how well oranges have held their value over the last 20 years: between 2005 and 2015 a crate of Sevilles cost €20±€2. Now it's about €25±€2. Sugar otoh has gone vertical: up 50% from 2021 to 2023. For this batch 

• Materials. Sugar €6.80, oranges €6.45, water €0.00. 
• Labour: 1 hour prep. 2 hours process. 3 x €MinWage = €38.10 
• Total €51.35 or €2.85 per jar
• cf: Fruitfield Old Time Irish Coarse Cut Marmalade 454G €3.29 
• If you ignore labour it’s €0.80 a jar
• cf: cheapest Stockwell & Co Orange Marmalade 454G €0.49

Team Seville assembled on Lá Fhéile Blaise the Monday following Lá Fhéile Bríde which has been a public holiday since 2023. I sprang out of bed at 06:30 so that Process Pectin for Batch II 2025 could start at 07:00 and the hard work could start after breakfast at 10:00. As soon as the the Pectin Process Pan PPP was empty, I started off batch III for after lunch.

By the time we'd enjarred Batch III we were all kinda knackered: but were revived by tea, toast and . . . marmalade. Over the weekend we created 18 + 18 + 23 [some kinda a small - we ran out of jam-jars] pots which should see us through the year. We still have [rotate your stock!] 5 pots of vintage 2023 to eat first. 

I froze the last 20 oranges after first scrubbing them down with a 4:1 solution of white vinegar against the surface fungi.

24 horas en Sevilla.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been  

  Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,  

Tasting of Flora and the country-green,  

  Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!  

O for a beaker full of the warm South!

Johnnie Keats

Keats was dreaming of the booze and was far too poetic to find oblivion is a feed of pints. Nothing would do but claret or some other beverage with beaded bubbles winking at the brim and purple-stainèd mouth. Silly boy, look what all that plonk [and a good dose of Mycobacterium tuberculosis] did for him, tragically dead at 25. Me, I'm more of an orange sort of bloke, especially if they are from Andalusia and too bitter to eat raw. I last made marmalade at the beginning of 2014, which my calculators tells me is three long years ago. Then, my pal Aoife bought a crate of Seville oranges from Sam Dennigan in the Dublin Fruit Market and brought them down for a marmalade meitheal. That post generated an unaccountable spike of interest in The Blob - as if my nerdnik readers had never heard of marmalade before.

In November, Aoife said that she was down to her last pot and was I planning making more marmalade this Winter . . . and, after a good bit of dropped batons and missed messages, it was so. We agree that Saturday 28th Jan 2017 would be Den Tag der Marmelade, and it was so. Aoife+1 arrived at noon and 10 minutes later the three largest pots in the house were full of oranges and water for a 3 hour simmer. Making a batch of marmalade consumes a lot of time but most of it is not working time. After 3 hours at 100°C, the poor oranges have lost a lot of weight, but have transmuted their pectin into something gloopy that will gel the solution if supplied with enough sugar and if the pH is sufficiently acid. My recipe calls for squeezing the pectic-rich soup through a muslin cheese cloth and I started doing that on Saturday: massaging a bolus of hot orange pulp with my hands.

Then I remembered that, since the last marmalade time, we had acquired a a stainless steel conical sieve, so I put the cheese-cloth aside and lurried the pulp into the sieve. A great improvement, and at the end of the day my hands were normal coloured instead of red and raw as an 18thC washer-woman's.  Having separated the gelly liquid from the internal fibre and pips, we added 3kg of sugar to 3 pints [the alchemy of jam doesn't require consistent SI units] of gloop and the skins ground in my old-fashioned Spong mincer. [for which see prev]. Two batches of gloop+sugar+peel came quickly to the stage where the confection would set at room temperature and by 5pm we had bottled 32 jars of marmalade; in the process using up about 60% of the crate of oranges.

The next morning, my support team having returned to Dublin with most of the previous day's production, I rose at 0600hrs to start another batch. It took a little longer because I was on my own but by the forenoon I had finished the 2017 season with another 2 dozen jars - some double-sized. That was more or less 24 hours after we started the day before. It's sort of mad. If my time is worth the minimum wage of €8.20, then 25 pots of jam costs €40 in labour and about €10 for materials. €2 / lb is about the middle range of shop-bought marmalade: Tesco Value = €0.49; Olde Time Irish 2 for €4.00; Bonne Maman €3.39.  This doesn't factor in the cost of transport from Dublin, so maybe marmalade making is, to paraphrase Dr Johnson's assessment of Antrim's Giant's Causeway, "Worth doing but not worth going to do".

I was so taken with the utility of the conical sieve, that I went round to lend it to a jam-making pal of mine. No good to me was her response. Her recipe calls for cooking the oranges and throwing  the whole mess skin-and-all into a food-processor. Clearly no washer-woman hands in that home either.

Vergüenza naranja evitada

Orange shame avoided

Thank heaven for a leap-year: without it we wouldn't have made marmalade in February, let alone in January when Christians get the task done. When my marmalade-mate 2014 - 2017 Aoife announced last year that she was completely Out of breakfast preserves, I replied tartly that my marmalade days were behind me. Why would I get washerwoman's hands and spatter-burns all up my arms to supply all my friends-and-relations and various hangers-on at work with marmalade when I could drop into Tescaldidl as necessary and buy a serviceable jar for €1.80 the pop? I demanded with bitter irony. But Aoife is nothing if not dogged and when she repeated her call to marmaladey arms <ouch>, I was prepared to say yes. Then my mother died which consumed all the January weekends and February was almost done before Aoife found a window of time to plunge into the centre of Dublin and buy the oranges from Sam Dennigan. Because it was late in the Seville Season, there were several blue furry oranges in the box, which 'Sam' helpfully swapped out from another crate, not failing to chid her <tsk tsk> for not coming in January.

On Monday night [24/02/20] when I came back from yet another trip to England, I called by Aoife's gaff to collect the oranges. The following evening I did another triage through the crate finding a couple more blue furries but several others which had been up close and personal to the write-offs but were, like the curate's egg, good in parts. When I did that Tuesday triage, I cut the oranges in half to make sure they didn't house a world of spores in a dried out husk waiting to change colour. These edge-of-sell-by items I piled into a large saucepan and cooked up sufficiently to deter further fungal invasion. I was therefore one pan ahead of the game when I sprang out of bed at 0600hrs on Leap Day.

Inventory for making marmalade [R]:

• Seville oranges: must be orange; 
• large saucepan: may be orange, here yellow
• cold plate for testing: should be orange
• cooked peel; is still orange
• tea-cup; can be orange, here red

The great thing about about Deli O'Smith's recipe for marmalade is that it separates in time two processes essential to the gelling of fruit preserves. First you release the gelling agent pectin from the skin, pith and pips then you add sugar [the acid is already there in citrus fruit] which binds with the pectin [and increases the viscosity with dissolved solids]. Other recipes for marmalade try to achieve these two processes in the same time frame. That, dodgy, method is much more like to result in disaster: the sugar is caramelising then blackening on the bottom of the pan before sufficient pectin is in solution for the gelling reaction.

This year, because of the triage, I twigged that cutting the fruit in half allowed a more efficient packing of the pan, so that the ratio of water to orange was more fruity. Between 0600 and 0645, therefore, I had filled our two biggest, tight-lidded, saucepans with halved, cleanish, blemish-trimmed fruit, filled the gaps with ~2.5 lt water and set them to simmer for 3 hours.

The next stage of the process, when the pulp, the sugar and the fishes of chopped peel come together in a final rolling boil, is best carried out in a wide jam-pan with sloping sides to maximise the surface area and hence the evaporation of liquid. A modest simmer won't do the trick. With all that sugar and protein, the liquid will at some stage in the process boil up [and over if the pan is too full], so it is better to split the pulp into a couple of batches and do them in sequence. Not least because if the first lot isn't setting you can add a touch more sugar (and/or a squirt of lemon juice; whose acid helps the pectin to set) the next time. In the Deli O'Smith protocol, this stage of the process takes not more than 30 minutes. You can do it by the clock or check by putting a dribble on a cold plate to see if it will set there. You have to have faith, sisters, because over-cooking will set the marmalade more chunky and less spreadable: less is more. otoh if you want a darker brew you can/shd cook it off a bit longer. Always, the last jars poured from a batch will set harder than the earlier top skims.

Just about the time the two 0600hrs saucepans were finishing their 3 hour simmers, the rest of the household started to wake up and demand breakfast. Dau.II, who had arrived the night before and is ever up for a colourful cook challenge, put herself on the task of scooping out the pulp, and processing the skins coarsely through a Spong hand-cranked mincer to generate the "fishes" of peel in the final product. The pectin-rich pulp was simultaneously [many hands make light work] pushed through a fine pored conical sieve.  Each panful of fruit generated about 4 pints = 20 fl.oz = 570 ml and my rule of thumb is to add 1kg of sugar per pint. That is on the low side of settability but if you add more sugar it just gets sickly sweet and the bitter grown-up bite of the Seville's gets lost in the wash.

A couple of hours and several cups of tea later, we had boiled down four or five batches of (2 pint pulp + 2kg sugar) and aliquotted them into oven-sterilised jam-jars. That would normally be a job well done and a cause for cake or at least a round of scones as a marmalade vehicle but we were still expecting Aoife's party to follow her oranges down from Dublin and get cookin'. Apart from anything else, we were running short of serviceable jam-jars. Undaunted, we filled up the two largest saucepans again with clean halved Sevilles and set them to boil. Not a moment too soon, the jam-jar cavalry arrived from the Big City and by the time we'd all finished a Leap Day lunch that couldn't be beat, we were ready to process the next batches of bubblin' Sevilles.

The joy of doing things again and again before you forget what happened last time is that you get to know the process. Like medieval swordsmiths who, after decades of deliberate practice, knew the temperature of the steel from its colour, so we could tell when the marmalade was ready to pour from the texture of the boil. No real need for a cold plate, let alone a jam-thermometer. The other positive outcome of repetition is that you can ring the changes - we are not machines after all. Confident that we'd mastered the basic process we made i) a small batch without fish ii) a batch with extra fish iii) a small batch with cardamom and then . . . we . . . were . . . done. It was full dark before we screwed tight the last lid and I for one had been on my feet for 14 hours. The days total was just over 70 pots of the warm South. I hope my ActivPal accelerometer was impressed or at least recording. In the end all that's left is a generous handful of pithy, seedy, compost [see R]

2014 Marmalade is IN

Yesterday we put in the full of a Winter's day in the kitchen converting Seville oranges into marmalade.  The recipe, adapted from Deli O'Smith, is idiot-proof because you boil up the fruit separately to mobilise the pectin in the pips and membranes and then add the sugar and boil it until a drop or two of the glop sets on a cold plate. Other recipes run these two separate processes together into the same time frame and so it's a little quicker in elapsed time but also more prone to failure. I try to minimise the amount of sugar in any jam that I make so that it's fruity but that means that the second sugar-meets-pectin reaction is likely to result in jam that's a little runny.  That's what happened with the first of two batches yesterday, so I last night I thought I might have to re-boil that batch with another half-kilo of sugar and maybe some lemon juice.  Or bottle out and throw in a lump of frozen crab-apple pulp. Apples are so rich in pectin that they should have sure-set tattooed on their skins.  On the second batch, we learned from experience and lashed in an extra half kilo of sugar which did the trick nicely.  So Aoife has returned to Dublin with 16 pots of 2014 vintage marmalade; and we have half a crate of bright orange oranges yet to convert/preserve.

Making jam is rich in kitchen science.  You can, for example, persuade jam to 'set' in different ways:

• if you add a tea-spoon of orange juice to a kilo of sugar et voila! it's set; 
• you can buy pectin as a powder or, as I say, as apple-cores; 
• pectin sets better at low (acidic) pH, which shouldn't be an issue with oranges but lemon juice is more tart and so has more bang per pip.  

This morning however,  our first run marmalade is looking solid enough.  Not solid so you can turn the pot upside down, but it won't run off the toast and down your shirt-front either. All it needs now is the label. But now I must off to work and try to work out when I'll next have 5 hours elapsed time to make more marmalade.

Boiling Bill Bryson

I am a fan of Bill Bryson.  his Lost Continent was the funniest book I ever read on the recommendation of rec.arts.books - which was part of Usenet; which was social media before the World Wide Web turned the internet into something altogether bigger and uglier. In November last year, I saw that an audiobook of him reading his own The Body; a guide for occupants was available on Borrowbox . . . but not until 30 Dec 2o2o. So I reserved it. The very next day, last of 2o2o, I was on a road trip to Cork and picked up a big box of Seville oranges. While the kettle was boiling, I took advantage of Dau.II's unlimited WiFi to download Bill's Body to my smartphone. Such an inconsequential act would have taken many minutes over our rural "broad"band, even assuming our bandwidth neighbour wasn't on a Netflix jag.

The next morning was the First of 2021 and I reckoned that the oranges were not going to marmalade themselves. Accordingly, like Leap Day 2020, I cherry-picked as many oranges are would fit into my tallest and most capacious saucepan and set it to boil-then-simmer for 3 hours. I could / should have halved the fruit before packing and cooking them but forgot to do that . . . because I R old, forgetful and can't read my own notes. This is the easiest part of the Marmalade Protocols because it is perfectly possible to let the fruit simmer and multitask about the house: emptying the grate; counting the sheep; making tea; making water; gathering Winter fuuuelll. Note to self: I went at it again on 2nd Jan because we had sugar and jam-jars sufficient unto the task. This time with hemispherical fruit - this allows only about 10% extra packing. 

But this is just the lull before a storm of pain as the fruit are eviscerated with a sharp knife and a scooping tablespoon. It's quicker and more fuel efficient to do this hot, but begod ye need asbestos fingers. That yielded 4-and-a-tad pints [~2.3 lt] of pulp which will take 4kg of sugar by past experience. The skins were rough-minced with m' trusty Spong mincer and cast thereto.  Actually those quantities are about twice as much as can be conveniently handled with my ⌀ 40cm jam-pan; so I split the task into two batches. The second batch was cooked a little longer than ideal and so will support a standing spoon as well as being darker in colour. By tea-time I had 17 pots of marmalade: sealed, labelled and ready for the Armageddon bunker.  By tea-time the following day I had another 17 pots full of the warm south. Outlay in cash makes it about 75c /pot for quality [organic] 3 ingredient [water sugar orange] calories. And I still have 6-7kg fruit à la peau.

It certainly helped the yaroo pain to have Bill Bryson burbling along in the background about dermis and the microbiome. But I'd much prefer to be meithealling the marmalade like last year; although that is unconscionable under Coronarama Rules. The day's work really hadn't made much dent in the box of fruit, so I anticipate cooking through the current lock-down until I run out of jam-jars. Then I will freeze any remaining oranges until the jar-fairy delivers more. On the way down to Cork, Dau.II and I were speculating about whether the process of freezing might actually generate the better product - because the cells of the oranges get bursted by the formation of ice within. A bit like bletting?

Shucking chestnuts

🌰You know and I know that there are two sorts of chestnuts in these islands. Horse chestnuts = conkers Aesculus hippocastanum vs sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa. Don't be eating horse chestnut: it is loaded with aesculin a coumarin related toxin, not to mention getting all frothed up inside by the soapy saponins which are also present at high titre. They are both called chestnuts because a) nuts b) 'similar' palmate multilobed leaves. But the two species are about as far as they could be phylogenetically. A horse chestnut freshly blurfed from its shell is a gorgeous thing. 

🌰I've always been disappointed by fresh-fallen sweet chestnuts, though. The covering is much more offensively spiny - you have to be a bit previous in your attack to get ahead of squirrels - and the insides are, for me, always wizened husks or too small to bother with. Which is a bummer because I love marrons glacés or chestnuts roasting on an open fire or in any other form.

🌰In 2007 we planted a few hundred 10 y.o. oak and other trees courtesy of our pal Rene. In among that micro-forest were about a dozen Castanea sativa. Some of which were thinned by Sean the Forester in 2022. In Sept 2025, I was stravaiging through our wood when I found a tuthree sweet chestnuts on the ground. Inside was the usual disappointment. A month later under a different tree the leave litter was dense with fallen chestnuts in various states of undress. I shucked a bunch right there and then went back for a bucket to do my shucking in the warm and dry [R with old boot for scale]. I went back a couple of times and stopped when I had ~10lb = 4.5kg. Leaving some for wild loafers. I was amazed and delirah, especially after I cut a couple of small ones in half and chugged down the contents.

🌰According the Dau.II & the Internets, chestnuts will keep for a year if frozen or a month in the fridge. But this is not great advice. Chestnuts sweat through their shells and a bagful gets soggy in the fridge. And turn quickly furry if left out of the fridge. I triaged my horde and put 2x 500g of the biggest shiniest nuts in the freezer against Christmas stuffing. I also passed a 1° quality bag to La Torbellina my cookie neighbour. She scored the shells with a cross and boiled them with aniseed and lemon in the eSpanish way. Scoring and roasting is only sensible to process small amounts (for immediate consumption) because as the nuts cool, the inner membrane re-glues itself to the nut. 

🌰The last two bags, of 2° grade and smaller nuts, having lurked in the fridge for a week, were triaged, cut in half and boiled for 5 minutes. Six nuts had decided to make an attempt at sprouting-for-posterity, so I potted them out in sieved compost [before boiling!]. About 10% of the remainder were squidgy or discoloured within. Compost! Processing the hot nuts gives you the same sort of wet burns as Seville oranges when making marmalade. I found that the best shucking tool was two opposing thumbs: in ideal cases that popped the half nut out of shell and membrane. In other cases it was more of a struggle. I hope my thumb nails don't get infected from compacted matter; they were quite sore when I'd finished. The work-to-reward ratio is not as positive as for marmalade, but 8oz = 225g has been frozen against Christmas [see L], as well as the larger unshucked qnty already there.

🌰The smaller chestnuts looked suspiciously like filberts / hazel Corylus avellana, but these two species are in different families (as below). Castanea is sibling to beech Fagus sylvatica and oak Quercus robur in Family Fagaceae although their fruit look quite different. Which is a lesson in taxonomy: don't over-emphasize Obvs features, like palmate leaves, to determine evolutionary relationships.

English	Genus	Family
Alder	Alnus	Betulaceae
Birch	Betula	Betulaceae
Hornbeam	Carpinus	Betulaceae
Hazel	Corylus	Betulaceae
Chestnut	Castanea	Fagaceae
Beech	Fagus	Fagaceae
Oak	Quercus	Fagaceae
Hickory	Carya	Juglandaceae
Pecan	Carya	Juglandaceae
Walnut	Juglans	Juglandaceae

BAYleaves buy mi bayleaves

Sing it! like Nina and Frederick with their MANgoes. There is no harm in wanting to make an honest living creating things which are fun to make and useful to/for other people. Everyone who's had the benefit says I make an mmmmmm good flapjack and a just-right pot of marmalade. I am getting better and better with my sourdough bread too. But it is only because I stand on the shoulders of my grandmother (flapjacks) and Delia Smith (marmalade). Several people, over the years, have said "These are so good, you should sell them." But I always demur with a blush and flutter of my eyelashes. Making a slab of flappjes and watching them go down a graduate student's gannet-hungry throat give a lot of pleasure. Making many slabs and weighing them, packing them, driving to the farrrmer's market and selling them requires a whole other set of skills, few of them delightful. And the health and safety regulations are now nightmare intrusive.

Now here's a picture from shortly before the big thaw of January 2010 which washed out our lane and left us prisoners in our own home for a week.  It shows a couple of small bay trees in the garden behind the house weighed down with snow. A quick shake by Dau.II and they soon rose upright again.

I was up in the garden taking a few progress pics and I snapped the now wall of baytrees, which we have to walk through to reach the polytunnel:

I include some laundry for scale.  We planted the pair of trees in ?2008? as a garden feature and source of bayleaves which are a culliunary essential on our kitchen.  They are now 6m tall and 4-5m across at the base, so I try to harvest the bayleaves from inside the tunnel between the two trees so that we can walk directly to the polytunnel without getting soaked from the rain-wet leaves. I paused to wonder just how many bay-leaves there might be: because I believe guesstimation is a core skill in science and I need examples for teaching this up-coming year at The Institute. Accordingly I counted 100 leaves and reckoned they filled a sunlight-space  / surface-space of 0.1 sq.m. You can work out the surface area (excluding base) of a cone from first principles or you can go to the cone-heads site: to find the formula. The Lateral surface area of a cone  L = πrs = πr√(r² + h²) where s is the slant height which is the hypoteneuse of the h[eight] and r[adius] triangle hence the Pythagorean square root of the sum of the other two sides.
Putting in r = 2.5 m h = 6 m yields the other parameters:  slant = 6.5 m ;; Vol = 39.3 m³ ;; L.area = 51.1 m² ;; Base.area = 19.6 m² ;; Total.area = 70.7 m².  If there's 100 leaves in 1/10th sq.m there are 1,000 leaves in 1 sq.m. and 50,000 across the surface of each tree. I'll add another 50% because, although it is dark in the interior of the wall/bush there are lots of leaves running back almostvto the trunks. So we don't have a million bay-leaves or only a thousand but somewhere in the region of 150,000. If we use a flaithulach 10 bayleaves a week we have enough to keep going for 300 years.

That's clearly a) an under-estimate because it is the nature of trees to make more leaves, possibly in a sustainable manner b) selfish, stingey and inefficient for the culinary happiness of the sunny south-east of Ireland. So you're all welcome to come for a handful. In Tesco, bayleaves sell at 49c for 3 grams or [Schwartz] €1.19 for 6g. 6g is about 20 leaves. So, cutting out the middleman, the packaging, the labour, the plastic, the airmiles then our baytree harvest is 'worth' 150,000 / 20 = €7,500.  Maybe when I'm reduced to my OAP next year, I'll use my free bus pass to bring 50 or 100 packets of  bayleaves up to the Big Smoke once a week and sell them on a street-corner so I have money for my meds and my Paris pants.
Q. What's this about Paris?
A. Why, it's in-Continent
Har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har.

Walking the line of nicety

Last Saturday, like every 3rd Saturday of May for the last 30+ years, The Wayfarers Association ran organized, the Blackstairs Challenge: a 33 km up hill and down dale yomp from Killanure to Glynn via Mt Leinster [780m] and Blackstair [735m]. In earlier times, the route took in Knockroe [540m] with walkers lepping off the S face of the hill and tumbling 300m in less than 1km horizontal. That hard-chaw route is now deprecated and everyone [N=180 this year] comes down our lane. Last year and most of the previous 20+ years, we have serviced this worthy endeavour: first with a) water, then b) seats, then c) flapjacks. There is no doubt these trifling courtesies are used & appreciated:

. . . especially on years like 2025 when the weather is cloudless because shade trees are absent.  The hike starts at 07:30-08:30 and there is a 13:00 ½-way checkpoint just South of us. If you're not there, by then, you are obliged to bug out. The first runners trotted past our gaff at 09:30 and the sweepers paused to finish the flapjacks at 12:30. The sweepers are super fit Effectives with calves like knotted cords who ensure that nobody is left behind in the hills.

In that window, the participants came through in pairs and clumps, not all of them stopping to bide-a-wee in our yard. In between groups, I nipped out to make sure the tap was shut and there were still flapjacks in the tin. Imagine the mortification when, on such a foray at ~10:30, I noticed a jam-jar full of coins beside the tap. Donations have been made before and they aren't refused, but someone had put a "Trail Fairies" label on the jar, which echoed the "Trail Fairies" I put out on the >>Water>> sign several years ago. The shame that walkers might think we were soliciting money for water like it was transactional!! I was instructed to disappear that jar forthwith. Which solved our face-saving issues but put subsequent walkers to a dilemma . . . solved by putting folding money [as L] under a weight on the flapjack table. The jar? enough for 4 trips across the Waterford toll-bridge!

I, for sure, do not spend the morning chatting with the walkers - they have things to do and places to go. But I was caught at the tap by a feller who said thanks for all the fish cookies: "It's not about the cookies; it's about being seen and received" which I thought was a very gracious way of putting the trail fairy relationship. Being on the tramp (Blackstairs or Santiago or PCT) can be lonely and exhausting, so it's nice to be cared for as you might be at home.

Shortly after the hullabaloo faded away, a delegation from The Wayfarers materialized in the yard to present us with a bottle of whiskey; which is getting to be a habit with them. Even without being a boozer, a bottle of Paddy is always handy to have about the house . . . in case someone faints, like. I intend to make a batch of whiskey marmalade with the frozen sevilles left over from this year's marmalade jamboree.

Thrift

Samuel Smiles, social commentator of the Victorian era wrote books called Thrift and Self-Help which claimed to show that anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps . . . why, look at this rags-to-rich anecdote. I'd be more skeptical now about anyone could than I was when I was 15 and studying the history of Victorian England at school. Nevertheless, I get smug a detectable feeling of satisfaction when I can make something from somebody else's discards. Being able to make soup out of potato peelings is going to deprive the worms in our compost heap; but heck, them's the privs of patriarchy.

I'm not quite halfway through a 12 day lock-in up the mountain having lent my Yaris to a repatriatee in quarantine. With bunkering for Brexit [6kg of fusilli pasta = sell-by 2022; lots of tinned tuna = sell-by 2025], I'm not going to starve. But I'm eking out the remaining bits of Christmas cheese and salami to act as a Jeffersonian condiment to go with winter brassica, carrots, potatoes and . . . fusilli. I'm a dab hand at cooking up something from behind the fridge, to get a few more days of shelf life. Talking of food on the edge-by, I noticed that the litre of milk, which I only use to dribble into tea, was due to turn tomorrow and still half full. I decided that I'd make custard or rather, as you see [L] custard à la beige; (it's the brown sugar innit?) that can pretend it is cream when I add a blut of it to the stewed fruit, of which I have a surplus. You can see [Above] that I am also working through the 2021 season marmalade. The green cards behind which the marmalade is demurely lurking are courtesy of An Post: I can now greet six anyones on the island for free. Like last year.

Last Summer, as part of the BFF Repurpose The Uplands project, we decided that removing the alien invasive gorse / whin / furze / bushes Ulex europeaus from the hill would give a boost to the heather and grass which feed the sheep. It was a grand meitheal all together: but left that section of the hillside littered with upended gorse bushes. 

My experience of clearing gorse from field edges and wall tops is that it makes better habitat for small creatures, and rots down quicker, if you I trim the spiny brash off and leave the 'logs' in a separate pile. Gorse burns hot and quick and so makes an important contribution to the fuel for a wood-burning stove. It has been on my mind to lope up the hill and bring down anything that could, after trimming, pass for firewood next winter. Yesterday Monday 25 Jan was the perfick day: high blue skies, bright sun driving off the remaining patches of snow, everyone else supposed to be working from home. I set off with a light heart, extra socks and my hedge-loppers after postie had delivered my free postcards. Glorious! If I can't access my pensioner's free travel, at least I can get free fresh air. This benefit of living remote sure compensates for not having shops, cinemas and pubs within walking distance like you city folk. I spent an hour lopping, chopping and dragging. After lunch I pushed my wheel barrow up and brought a handy load down - gathering winter fuuuuuel, indeed.

Postscript. In the evening, I decided to try some of the beige custard with a slice of very old Christmas pudding [it lasts forever]. I popped the escalope de pudding de Noël à la crème anglais in a moderate oven but was immediately distracted by 2 consecutive phone calls. By the time I got to my dessert of choice, it looked crusty: like the nightmare institutional cooking unwell people are presented with at St Ghastly's Indigent Infirmary. After my day of outdoor work, it would take more than looks to dent my appetite; and I scarfed it all down quicker than a Jack Russell eating the cook's own sausages. 

PPS. That was yesterday, this morning 'tis raining hard, a sou'wester day, not a day to be out on the hill at all, carpe diem me hearties.

How they brought to schwa to Carlə

I sprang to the stirrup, and Dau.II, and she;

I galloped, Dau.I galloped, we galloped all three;

‘Good speed!'’ cried The Belov'd, as the gate-bolts andrew;

‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;

Behind shut the postern, the ewes sank to rest,

And into the daylight we galloped on quest.

Apols to Robert "Ghent to Aix" Browning

Whither gallop, me bold questers?

To The Fermentary ! next our new Post Office at the top of the one street of Borris:

Who knows how, when and where entrepreneurs take the plunge and sink their all into a new venture? I've been making annual cratefuls of marmalade for 20 years now, everyone loves it, a pot makes the perfect gift. Nobody has a bad word to say about the flapjacks either. I would never $ell the stuff, though - I just don't have the marketing and distribution chops: I'd have to scale up to satisfy demand; the kitchen would reek of Olde Seville; and I'd have contact burns all up my arms. Let's leave it at makes the perfect gift . . . perhaps with a small packet of flapjacks mit.

The Fermentary launched its retail outlet on the first weekend of June 2021. They might have had a slight failure in local marketing, because we heard about the event, after the event, from Dau.II in Cork. She's the foodie in the family, so hears the faintest distant drums of comestibility: cheese or cakes; charcuterie or . . . croissants. The next weekend, she came across the country, following her nose, to see if the product was good. The weekend after that, her sister Dau.I came down from Dublin. On dit que it was because my birthday went down during the week between these visits but good croissants have an irresistible pull to those who've ever had one. Or read the book!  

The Fermentary is an offshoot of The Plúr Bakery in Newtown Co CW where the gaffer is James Jordan. They've been making sourdough and other fermentables for a while now and selling it at the Saturday Foodie Market in Kilkenny. There's a linguist in the batter there because their signage has a schwa for the untrilled first syllable Fə'mɛntary and an {IPA 303} for the second syllable. Me, I really like their aux amandes - good to the last crumb but the reg'lar croissants are great and they do a crusty, aery, tasty sourdough loaf. A batterie de kombucha is available on tap if you like your ferments by the glass. They open at 0800hrs Fr Sa Su and when the croissants are gone, they're gone, so get there early prepared to queue. Chocolatine? Pain au chocolate?

Well now, I've had a great many fine examples of  Viennoiserie this month and intend to spend my carbon credits supporting this local business every possible weekend until I burst or they go bust (which heaven forfend).

Being looked after

At the start of Coronarama, An Post gave each household in the country a brace of postage-paid post-cards as their contribution to combatting social isolation. I dithered for a loonngg time about who would get this limited / precious resource from me. Eventually they went off to the chosen two. As I was handing them to Pete-the-Post, I asked if he had any spares and got another handful. That meant
I could send one to everyone in the audience. Feedback suggested that this simple action was the best thing that happened to the recipients since the lockdown got in the way of their consumption of lattes-in-cardcup. Efven in the best of times, I was far to mean to lash out €3.50 on a cup of joe, even with added Oatly unmilk. But a pal at work asserted that she had one every working day because a) she enjoyed it b) she could afford it because she was in work c) it was a message to say she deserved a treat. Both the postcards and the cappuccinos said "somebody cares" and that's important all the time not just in pandemonium.

I was chatting along these lines with Dau.II on the Daily Show from Cork and she drew my attention to Grace Dent, once-upon-a food columnist with the Grauniad, who now has licence to write about whatever comes into her head because there aren't any restaurants to review. At the beginning of May Dent was writing about being a food puritan in her own kitchen. "It was time to dispose of the aubergine. The one I acquired 39 days ago. Once firm, noble-seeming and purple, it now sat there looking forlorn – mottled in places, with a slightly jammy undercarriage. I picked it up several times on Tuesday and edged it closer to the bin, but I couldn’t bring myself to make the final push: chucking food would be an admission of defeat."

She then goes on to riff on how she was dreaming of the day when she could bust out of this Sarajevo mentality and eat something bright orange, crisp, piping hot and loaded with salt, MSG and bad cholesterol. Looking after herself, virtuously polishing her plate, wasting nothing . . . because there was a war on: it was all getting too wearing.

In January, I wrote about how Old Vic cared when my widowed mother was assigned a billet in a nursing home for the final 4 months of her life. When she was much younger, in uniform for much of WWII, it wasn't an easy life, but at least there was someone in the background to cook the food and there was enough of it, Her own mother had a much harder life, with butter, eggs and bacon all rationed at just enough to get by on. With two adults in the house, my grandmother was allowed 2 eggs a week, and you may be sure that The Man of the House got them both. That went on for 6 years, so you can see what ordinary people are capable of enduring. It is nevertheless entirely appropriate to deliver a slab of flapjacks, a dozen eggs, a pot of marmalade or a postcard to show you care.

Potlatch

Last week, I confessed to failing to finish a couple of books. Since giving up YouTube in January, I have a lot more time for reading books. But sometimes just sitting is better than sitting and reading something unfulfilling. As the days get longer, I will read less and get out more - although with earbbooks multitasking me asks ¿Por qué no los dos? When the family came home this Easter, Dau.II was uncharacteristically nose deep in a book The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects (2025),by Bee Wilson a foodie confessional ramble which nods at Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert. Dau.II was reading it because foodie. I finished reading it because stuff.

So much stuff!  in Bee's kitchen, her friends' kitchens, our kitchen. We've come a long way since Cooking in a Bedsitter when our entire batterie de cuisine fit easily in a single orange crate. Now there is so much rarely used kit that, when company comes, pots need a good un-dust & up-scrub before use. Which is kinda shameful when far too many people subsist on a batterie de cuisine not much more than the possessions of a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari. 

But the accumulation of stuff is not entirely my fault: people will give us things & only occasionally for pure generosity of heart. When The Management at The Institute decided to mark my retirement with gifts, they made sure to engrave my name and The Institute's to indicate the continuity of my indenture. Six months later they doubled-down with another gift and I doubled-doown on my rant. You don't need to read that again here. In other cultures - Japan and the Pacific NorthWest - gifting has to be reciprocal. If the return gift is more valuable, the exchanges can result in damaging loss as a runaway spiral ensues.

Valuable? Stuff, gifts and sentiment offer a neat alternative dimension of value. One of my two favorite everyday mugs is 20+ years in my cupboard or, as rarely washed, on the table. It [L] was given me by a caminante when we got together to compare notes on the process of pilgrimage. My other favorite mug was a £1.99 gift to me by me from Tenby near Pembroke Ferryport signalling that my family originally came from Wales. I don't think we are housing stuff because it was gifted to us and passing it on (to Oxfam) seems wrong or disrespectful. But we have enough clutter material household goods that it is sometimes hard to find a rarely used but then useful bit of kit - the Spong mincer for marmalade for example,

But enough of me! You can't borrow me from the library, but you can put a reserve on Bee Wilson's ruminations and insights into the baggage that adheres to kitchen kit. Who knew that her sister is Emily "Iliad" Wilson [whom bloboprev] and their father is A.N.Wilson, the British public intellectual and their mother Katherine "Shagsper sonnets" Duncan-Jones? Small wonder that both girls ended up as [Arts Block] researchers and writers.

Back-it-up then bin-it

Was I on about decluttering recently? I was: in particular the, originally Swedish, concept of death cleaning aka döstädening. I take from this that getting rid of sentimental-attachment shite is

1. a courtesy to those who will have to execute your Will and tidy up Your Affairs 
2. a cleansing therapy to realise that your memories are selective and having a physical coat-rack for them only works if it is on the mantle-piece in plain site. If your keep-sakes and memorabilia are in the cupboard under the stairs, then you might as well forgettit.

If it takes a ceramic rissole [L] for you to remember that amazing meal you had with your long dead father - the time he told a joke that was most improper for children - then perhaps of don't need the rissole. Just imagine your children going through the house after the funeral "Guess what I've found? A ceramic rissole! I can't imagine why someone would make such an object; but only Pop would be dopey enough to buy one - ah bless".  It was a bit like being present at me own wake when Dau.II came up from Cork for the long weekend and offered to help process some of the stuff in the shed. Shed-stuff consists of material possessions that are reasonably immune to cold-and-damp but not in regular use. The döstädening gauleiters would define it differently.

Shed-stuff (n.) stuff that should be shed.

Brutal, but often true dat! Bank-holiday Sunday was a Perfect Day for mowing the lawn - slight breeze; good sun; bone dry - but also for turning a shedful out onto the [recently mowed] grass and seeing what we had <da da daaah> behind the crate brim-full of jam-jars-for-next-years-marmalade. Down a couple of archaeological layers, Dau.II found three flat-screen computer monitors which haven't been warm for at least three years. The sight of computer kit for the dump sent me up the attic of the shed for a 30lt box of  "misc. comp.peripherals". If you think that stuff in the distant shed has rather low status, imagine how stuff in the dark attic of the distant shed feels. Behind the misc.comp.peripherals box was a disintegrating plastic bag marked "olde lappe-tops", so I brought that down as well.

We each acquired a Dell lap-top when the first SFI-funded Molecular Evolution Lab was set up in 2001. The boss had a few million €uros to spend and that seemed a justifiable way of keeping the troops fully productive even when away from their desks. Well that laptop, and two of its descendant, is now for recycling and gold-abstraction. I'm not so naive as to discard the whole instrument when it still has information about the correct way to parse the human genome - imagine <WhatsApp alert> if The Feds or The Reds got hold of that?? So I filleted out the hard-drives: shown above with their storage capacity in Gb. The storage capacity and the speed went up in leaps and bounds but the price was more of less the same - that is the Law of Computing Costs.

The box of misc. comp.peripherals was mostly a tangle of wires each one with a connector at one end and a different connector or a gadget at the other. Everything nowadays is USB but in the past there was a wild variety of incompatible plugs & plug-holes. All for the dump! Even the hook-on-your-monitor ALDIDL web-cam that lasted about 3 weeks. But underneath the wires were layers of magnetic data-storage devices. A collection of 5¼ inch floppies; lots more of 3½ inch 'stiffies' - that's what my German pals called them in the 90s anyway. At some stage I had bought floppy storage-boxes with plastic section dividers to keep the data in finger-tip librarian order. There were even a dozen 100MB zip-drives - remember them from 20 years ago? They were the backup's answer to Microsoft bloatware because they could store about 50x more bytes on an object that was only twice the size of a 3½ inch floppy. But for the big stuff - the DNA database from 1993; all the files of my 300 users when I was SYS$OP for The Irish National Centre for BioInformatics INCBI at the end of the last century - I have a small collection of 90m DAT tapes that were supposed to have a capacity 40x more than a Zip-drive.

I spent a few minutes sorting out the GDPR-compliant discs for dump - ancient operating systems; start-up discs; obsolete printer-drivers - and a much longer time thinking about how I could dispose of all the personal or potentially personal stuff  (I don't have anything that can read a zip-drive to find out; but I am confident that all the Polish dump scavengers do). It is salutary to reflect on man's vanity that I should have been so careful to make copies of this valuable material and it is now beyond my wit or available technology to read it. We can make a stab at reading Linear-B shopping lists from the 3000 year old but electronic media from 30 years ago is essentially beyond recovery.

Sic transit gloria INCBI.

Scaling up, organic edition

Karen Blixen had a farm in Aafrika; we have a farrm in the Irish Midlands. Insofar as we are farming, we are organic. We are not Certified Organic because we haven't found the energy to, or seen the benefits of, filling in the 12 page Form App21/15 from the Irish Organic Association or the 1 page Form ORG1/DAFM form from the DeptAg. All the successful Organic-at-scale farmers are chewing their beards at being unable to find and lease Certified-Organic fields. Maybe certification-process tail is wagging the organic dog ? Paperwork infrastructure and bureaucracy is holding up housing and hospitals across the land: maybe Perfect is the enemy of the GoodEnough.

Our organic is fine for us:

• Sow seeds in pots in the Spring
• Transplant to nature after the 1st week in May [last frost]
• Water on the regular 
• Reduce the number of competing weeds
• Pick off slugs and fire them over the hedge
• Remove withered, spotted or furry leaves
• Insert sticks to support beans and tomatoes
• Eat what has been left by the competition 

We don't make a living out of this! But surplus courgettes and tomatoes make almost as good a social glue gift as home-made scones or marmalade.

A couple of years ago, we signed up for Teagasc's Signpost webinars which are broadcast every Friday at 09:30hrs and later get archived for folks who were haying or calving when the live broadcast went out. I've made sour comment about the surplus mouths battened onto these webinars. And also ranted at the screen when presenters read their own slides [and run over time arrrrgh!] and so make the whole live exercise a bit redundant. But in general it's a data-rich way of spending an hour and I've learned a lot.

These Signposts have induced me off-site to attend three [3] Open Days in the last two weeks. Teagasc Centraal at Johnstown Castle near Wexford. A Somers Evening on a big commercial environmentally friendly farm at Oylgate. Scaling up Organic Tillage near Wicklow Town. I confess that I bugged out of two of these events when drifting drizzle turned to decisive rain. It's not just me getting wet, it's anxiety that my delicate, under-powered, low-slung Yaris will bog down in a bucketty mud-field.

But not before I'd been amazed at the tech with which proper commercial organic farmers address the problem of weeds. The next three images are lifted from a recent Signpost Prez.

This a GPS connected, solar-powered Roomba aka FarmDroid FD-20. You deliver it to a field of, say, carrots or onions. It remembers where it sowed seed 15 days ago [straight rows, precisely spaced]. When the sun comes up the beast starts trundling down the first 5m of rows. Anything green growing between rows gets a jolt from a laser, gives up the fight and dies. When the sun goes in, it stops, not least because clouds are associated with rain and you need to keep moving machinery off wet fields b/c soil compaction. But this baby is far lighter on the earth than a 5 or 10 tonne general purpose farm tractor. Yes it's expensive, but so is the kit for spraying herbicides from behind your GP John Deere and consumables are much lighter on the farmer's pocket and the planet.

Same problem, different solution. Thulit MF 1200 [above] Harrowing between rows has been the weed-solution since peasants were wielding a hoe, deftly detaching weeds from crop fields. Doing it mechanically requires a) skill b) tricking about with a spanner adjusting the tine-settings and tractor speed to optimize the weed/crop kill ratio. But in a large known field the soil quality [and weed-holding] will vary. Is it worth rejigging the tines for than awkward corner or is it better to accept some missed weeds or collateral crop loss. Precision tine harrows have each tine hydraulically adjustable from the tractor cab. I don't think that we're there yet, but GPS-encoded data could adjust tine angle and depth automatically to suit the micro-locality.

This kit also required precise row spacing. Instead of static tines, on the Lemken EC-Steer & EC-Weeder little propellers scoop out the weeds, maybe only turning if the associated camera sees a docken Rumex obtusifolius. We saw a similar camera driven solution to docks of the Somers [not organic] farm. They have a 30m-wide boom on the back of a tractor for spraying weeds; there are nozzles every 0.5m; each individually controlled. Herbicide is only released where/when it sees a dock! Big saving on the use/ release/ cost of 'chemicals'. They seemed to imply that a drone can act as the eyes for each nozzle.  Software aGoGo! 

One final demo to share. Flahavan's in Kilmacthomas, CoWD mill and sell organic oats. Current demand far outstrips supply. Weeds are a big problem with organic cereals. One part of the solution [blind weeding] is to clear, harrow, roll the field then sow the oats Avena sativa 55mm deep: at least 2x the usual depth. Wait two weeks then harrow to a depth of 30mm, hiking all the weed seedlings to oblivion. That gives the oat coleoptyles a clear run to get their heads up. The weeds under that regime exist, but they are struggling for light under a dense canopy of oaty leaves. Next door, the trad, shallow-sown, part of the field was spackled with yellow and blue flowers [aka weeds] at the same height as the oat seed-heads. 

On Sunday we drove up to Dublin on another mission. On the M9 just N of Carlow Town there was a field of barley with a great broad streak of scarlet running through it. Whoop whoop poppy Papaver rhoeas alert. I said "must be organic". 3 days later we're traipsing through another barley field at the Oylgate Open Day. Not a poppy to be seen! I mentioned this to an ex-colleague from The Institute as we stood in the drizzle at the next Open Day. Colleague is also a farmer in South Wexford and he pointed out that, whatever about docks, poppies are really not a thing in Wexford. Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny: plenty of roadside poppies. Wexford: null. Who knew?.