Preserving Bible: Thane Prince

This is a foodish bookish Landing post today, as I have been a-foraging and have just started this year’s batch of elderflower cordial. I have previously featured a couple of foraging books on Landing Tales, Food for Free by Richard Mabey (1972, 1992) and Wild and Free by Cyril and Kit Ó Céirín (1978, 2013). Thane Prince’s Jams & Chutneys: Preserving the Harvest (2008), which I have also mentioned before, is not a foraging book as such; many recipes here you could make from your garden produce. Over the years, I have tried several of the recipes, in particular making preserves from foraged ingredients such as elderflowers (and berries), rowan, blackberries, rosehips and windfall apples. I have even occasionally actually bought fruit to try out a particular recipe, though I think food for free is much more rewarding. Sadly, there is no foraging for lemons, so if I want to make curd, I have to buy lemons!

There is quite a lot of domestic history within the pages of this cookbook as I have tucked in stray recipes that have never made it into my main recipe folder (and that’s a whole other issue). Some loose leaves are scanned from library books or recipes downloaded from favourite websites; others culled from magazines in the same way that my mum would have done. Naturally the pages of the book have acquired more than a few sticky marks during our preserving experiments, with a couple of pages here and there becoming a bit too fondly attached to each other. Some recipes sport annotations where we have tweaked ingredients/methods or scaled down large quantities. I can also find notes on where to buy citric acid or liquid pectin lest we forget such vital information.

Any recipes tried out by the testing committee have the year jotted down alongside; by now some pages have had a long line of dates added. Time certainly does fly; raspberry jam has been part of our repertoire on and off since 2018 and in later years we have made it with our homegrown fruit. I can see that we first made elderflower cordial in 2014 and have continued to do so most years since. I have already jotted down ‘2025’ in the list.

Elderflowers & citrus fruit steeping in syrup.

Now, I think I will go and give my cordial another stir, before getting the elderflower bottles and labels ready.

The Flowerpot Forager

Mar30

As it is Easter weekend, I thought that I would put up a quick garden-related post inspired by a book that I ordered from my local library in January. I originally spotted it in a bookshop while over in the UK before Christmas but I ended up buying a copy as a gift rather than one for myself. The Flowerpot Forager by Stuart Ovenden (Hardie Grant Book, 2023) happily combines two of my favourite outdoor interests, foraging and container plant gardening. The book has a UK focus but the plants discussed are all native/naturalised in Ireland too. This may yet become a genuine Landing Book Shelf title as I will probably buy my own copy in due course to add to my gardening/foraging/nature collection.

I have been browsing through the book for a while, looking for ideas for new projects to undertake. The book is beautifully presented and illustrated, a tempting book for armchair gardening on a cold winter’s evening. But now, with the sap finally rising, I have decided to be systematic and compile a shortlist of ideas for a spot of flowerpot foraging this year. I am very taken by the idea of raising plants that wouldn’t be immediately obvious choices for containers. And, I’m with the author in that much as I enjoy a spot of foraging, sometimes it can be tricky to be sure that your identification is correct or you may not have a good patch of whatever you seek close to hand.

The book is therefore mainly focussed on raising your own crops of plants more usually found in the wild, though Ovenden does offer some general advice on foraging as well. He gives instructions for growing thirty plants from seed or cuttings, as well as examples of culinary uses for your crops. I have been busy with scraps of paper (no hi-tech here) marking a few plants that I want to try. I was able to rule out borage and watercress as I grew those for the first time in the last year or two as container plants.

In the end I came up with a list of eight gardening-foraging subjects for my future attention. I was pleased to see Ransoms mentioned as I bought a packet of seeds before Christmas. Rather disappointingly however, Ovenden says that if growing from seeds, you may have to wait a year or two to obtain a substantial crop. He recommends digging up some bulbs from the wild (with the appropriate permissions) or buying bulbs from a supplier. Well, as I like a gardening challenge, I suppose that I will stick with my seeds and see what happens. Patience will be the ingredient most required I feel.

Apart from Ransoms, I have a list of possibles comprising, Elder, Bramble, Chickweed, Dog Rose, Alexanders, Pink Clover and Meadowsweet to be going on with this year. I am not too sure about the idea of raising Stinging Nettle in a pot, although I have previously foraged for leaf tips and made soup (perhaps not surprisingly this was a pandemic pursuit along with banana bread making). And, I will need some persuading to cultivate dandelions in my patio pots as they are already prone to pop up elsewhere without much encouragement. One plant project that I have mentally put on a To Do List for now is that of growing Marsh Samphire from seed. I am intrigued by the possibility so that is something that I would like to try in the future.

A nice bonus in the book is a recipe or two for using each plant to get you started on using your foraged crops. I am very tempted by the recipe for Alexanders Seed & Orange Beignets, which look absolutely delicious. First, grow your plants (or forage your seeds), as Mrs Beeton might have said…

Nature on The Landing: Bird Feeders

Feb25

As the weather is still tending to be generally less than springlike, I thought that I would revisit my attempts at making fat cakes for our garden bird population. I first had a go at making some back in 2018, inspired by a section in a book that I have on The Landing called The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young. Originally this rather sticky activity featured in a post on the craft blog that I used to write with The Bookworm called, Curiously, Creatively. I thought that I would disinter that post from February 2018 and reprint it here (slightly edited) in case you would like to have a go yourselves. All I need to do now is to find some foolproof way of ensuring that the magpies, crows and seagulls (not to mention acrobatic squirrels) don’t charge in and savage the treats before the robins and bluetits get a look-in. Any thoughts?

The immediate prompt for making a feeder (and choosing to make a fat-based feeder) was reading a book that I was given for Hogmanay, The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young (Faber 2017, Farming Books & Videos Ltd, 2003). In amongst all of the cow, sheep and pig stories was an episode about wild bird feeding. The Youngs make winter bird feeders by melting fat, stirring in bread crumbs and moulding the mixture in small plastic cups. I was very taken with their method of fixing the feeders onto canes and putting them in the ground instead of stringing them to hang on a tree. This, I felt I had to attempt for myself.

I used a basic cooking fat (Frytex in this case) from the supermarket and reckoned that trying 100g would give me about the correct amount to fill my two cups. For my mixture I had a root around the kitchen and came up with porridge oats, desiccated coconut, a dried fruit and cashew mix, mixed seeds (pumpkin and sunflower seeds) and some brown soda bread. I didn’t have any cheese, but I figured that if you have a fat base then you don’t really need the fat in the cheese. I used a blend of these ingredients to make up 200g, crumbling up one slice of bread and crushing up the cashews a little before mixing with my melted lard. My mixture just nicely filled the two containers. For the one cup, I made a hole and put string through for hanging. I fixed a wooden spoon in the other to make it easier to fix the cake onto a cane when set. I popped both in the fridge for an hour to set firm.

The final stage was to fix the fat cakes in place in a good spot in the garden. I hung my strung feeder onto the lilac tree, near the old wooden feeder as that spot is familiar to regular bird visitors. In one of last season’s tomato pots, I stuck a long cane and fixed the other cake on to it (after removing wooden spoon!). I did push a bit too hard and the cane came through the end slightly, so I fixed some wooden pegs underneath so the cake wouldn’t slide down the cane. One of our ever-curious resident robin pair came to have a close look at what was going on, while the mate kept a watch from a distance. Then, I retreated to the house to watch for my first proper customers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the blue tits were the first to sample new tuck shop, though the robins were not too far behind. Both these birds managed to get the hang of the feeders very quickly and perched or clung on to feed. These birds have managed to feed from both types of feeder quite easily.

Rosamund Young describes the antics of various species of birds when confronted with a delicious new food source on a stick. Similar to my experience mentioned above, she comments that the blue tits ‘learn how to feed from them within minutes, hanging upside-down with ease.’ Where we differ is in the case of robins, as she notes that it took the robin some time to achieve success. She writes, ‘The best the robin could ever manage was to screw himself into a tight ball on the ground directly under the cup and leap vertically’ until eventually one bird learned to shimmy up the bean pole to feast. Apparently, chaffinches became quite angry with the feeders, but so far, I haven not spotted any in our garden so I am unable to make a comparison. What we do have are greedy starlings however, arriving en masse to hog the food and scare away smaller feeders.

I will just add that this year the birds have peanuts instead of cashew nuts, but I doubt that they will complain too much. I made cakes in mini plant pots and plan to string them up in a holly tree, which is a favoured bluetit haunt in this garden. What I failed to make allowance for was the determination of an acrobatic squirrel making inroads into the bird feed. I tried to film the little critter but couldn’t get a good enough shot. Anyway, it was very entertaining to watch.

That’s all this time, from nature-watch on The Landing Bookshelves!

The Garden Diary Re-visited

May29

As we are almost at the end of May, I have decided that it is time for another Garden Diary post, having not ventured from The Landing region to the sunny uplands for ages. The Garden Diary (now into volume III) lives in the kitchen rather than on the Landing but as you know, technicalities of book location tend not to weigh too heavily hereabouts. The three volumes live on The Landing in spirit as it were, being something of an heirloom already and probably as dusty.

Since June 2021 (according to the note on the first page) I have been using a splendid new leather-bound notebook, a Christmas gift from a previous year. The cover is a lovely dark green, stitched around the edge; the front cover is decorated with an embossed image of a Green Man. Unlined pages of a thick creamy-white paper are stitched in five signatures. It arrived in its own cotton bag, so for a quite a while I was terrified that nothing would be good enough to write in it.

In June and July 2021, I am sure that I did have various horticultural activities, but nothing made it into the diary and I picked up the threads of the diary once more on 29 August. As I have mentioned before, I try to write up notes on what I have sown, transplanted, re-potted etc. I do generally ‘fess up to the failures in the interests of full disclosure to my future self. I enjoy keeping up the diary, although as you can see, I do fall beside the way sometimes and may let weeks or even months go by without making a note of my horticultural activities. I enjoy taking photos for the diary, attempting to document my garden progress. Houseplants occasionally get a look-in too.

I have also been trying to record the wild flowers that I have identified in the garden. Some are easier than others (think dandelion or daisy), while others have required the consulting of wildflower guides. Not to mention the use of a magnifying glass on tiny specimens. I am up to about twenty-six varieties of wildflowers recorded in my trusty diary. I think that the discoveries that delighted me the most were finding cowslip and ox-eye daisy in the grass. Along with red clover and creeping buttercup, the ox-eye daisies create a real meadow-like scene in the garden. I was particularly pleased that I was able to identify a plant called self-heal last summer with the aid of wildflower guides. I am far from being a specialist, so it is a true delight to be able to claim that I have successfully identified a flower (and for it to be happily living in my garden).

I have a handy guide, A Beginner’s Guide to Ireland’s Wild Flowers (Sherkin Island Marine Station) that I bought a few years ago at Magpie Books in Enniskerry (sadly no longer extant). I also use Zoё Devlin’s Wildflowers of Ireland website for identification. She has now published a wildflower guide which I have not yet got around to buying. My newest identification from the website has been a Lesser Hawkbit (see photo). All finds will duly go into the Garden Diary for posterity.

Now as it’s a sunny day, I am heading off outside with my diary!

Recipes: from an Old Farmhouse by Alison Uttley

Jul31

An evocative image

I wanted to follow up on the last Landing post on foraging-related books with another foody feature. This book is part memoir of a Derbyshire country childhood and part recipe book by children’s writer Alison Uttley (1884-1976), who was best known for her Little Grey Rabbit series and also the Sam Pig books. The recipe book was first published by Faber and Faber in 1966 and I recently treated myself to the copy shown here, which is in very nice condition. Something to cheer me up during the spring Lockdown! It is a beautiful little hard back book decorated with black and white sketches by Pauline Baynes. The drawings complement the text beautifully. Recipes has been reprinted more recently, but I opted for a copy of the original edition and wasn’t disappointed.

Alison Uttley gives us recipes that her mother used in the farmhouse kitchen, including recipes given by friends and neighbours. These were named for the donor, for example ‘Mrs Lowe’s Parkin’. The book is divided into sections with anecdotes, reminiscences and recipes. If you wanted to try out any of the items, you would need to scale down and adapt the recipes as Uttley gives the quantities and methods as they would have been used by her mother at the end of the nineteenth century in the farmhouse oven. So, you would need to figure out the oven settings and alter the timings accordingly. The recipes aren’t laid out as recipes as we would find them in a cookery book nowadays, but they are easy enough to follow. I’m planning to try one or two of the cakes or puddings in smaller quantities.

I have found overlaps with my foraging post as in a few of the recipes given, Alison Uttley talks about foraged ingredients gathered by the family. I was particularly taken with her account of the annual cowslip gathering expedition with her mother. They took a clothes basket out with them to fill with blossoms. She describes it beautifully here,

Picking cowslips

One morning in April my mother would announce that we would pick cowslips for cowslip wine. We would set off after breakfast, the servant girl, my brother, my mother and I, with a clothes-basket, and several smaller baskets. It was exciting to run down the first big field, deep down to the gate that led to the cowslip field. By the gate we left the clothes-basket, and we each took another basket and began to gather the flowers.

It sounds idyllic but it was also hard work for all of them, Uttley describing herself as ‘dazed with stooping to the ground’ after a few hours of picking. It sounds as though the children were allowed to go off and play though, while her mother and the maid carried on for the whole day. But of course, the work didn’t stop there. What Uttley refers to as ‘peeping’ was the next task: removing the flowers from the stalks and calyces. That task must have been mind-numbingly tedious as well as an instigator of repetitive strain syndrome. I find it bad enough picking stalks off fruit for a modest sized batch of jam, so I’m not sure how I would have coped with that mammoth preparation session.

Black and white title page illustration for the chapter on beverages, showing entwined branches with culinary equipment hanging off them.

Chapter title page

I’d actually love to be able to try making a small batch of cowslip wine, but cowslips are quite rare now in Britain and also in Ireland according to Zoe Devlin’s website, wildflowersofireland.net. However, she does go on to point out that the plant has made a comeback in Ireland in recent years, so perhaps it will continue to spread. In his foraging guide Food for Free, Richard Mabey suggests that the huge quantities of petals used in making ‘one of the very best country wines’ has probably contributed to the flower’s scarcity in Britain. He comments on the ‘devastation that some of these recipes must have wreaked on flower populations’. Thankfully now, you can buy cowslip seeds as well as other wildflower seeds to grow in your own garden and even up the balance a little. I somehow doubt that I will be able to grow enough flowers to make wine, though cowslip growing is to be one of my projects for next year (I have the seeds ready!) As far as beverages are concerned, I think I will have to stick to making elderflower cordial, the only problem there being that the best blooms always grow too high to reach!

I hope to return to the book for another Landing post, when I have had a go at some of the recipes. Meanwhile, I will decide where to go for August’s Landing Tales post when I have scoured the book shelves again!

Are there any Alison Uttley fans out there? Does anyone remember her Traveller in Time, televised by the BBC in 1978? I loved the series then, but wonder how it would stand up now.

(Pauline Baynes illustrations scanned from my copy of Recipes)

Two ‘Wild Food’ books: Food for Free and Wild and Free

Jun12

Before we go any further I would just like to say that it’s a moot point whether these books a) really count as Landing Tales reads as they don’t live in that shelf region and b) would really be a better fit into our retired craft and garden blog Curiously Creatively. I say moot point, because whatever the arguments either way, these foraging books are what I have decided to feature in today’s blog post. And anyway, as you all already know, I can be somewhat flexible as to what constitutes a bona fide Landing Book Shelves title. As to the subject matter, I refer you to the Landing Excursions category and to the occasional garden or cookery feature that creeps in here. So that’s that out of the way then…

Front over of the 1992 edition of Food for Free showing a variety of plants.

Food for Free, 1992

Food for Free by Richard Mabey (Harper Collins 1972, 1992) was given to me about a year ago and is a former library book, so it had already performed much service by the time it passed into my hands. I think there has been a more recent reprint, which I may try to buy. Wild and Free by Cyril and Kit Ó Céirín, (O’Brien Press 1978; Wolf Hill Publishing 2013) actually belongs to The Bookworm, though I confess that I have rather commandeered it lately. This is what happens when you buy people books that you really want for yourself! Both books were originally published around the same period, looking at British and Irish wild food respectively. There is of course much overlap between the two books as far as flora and the uses to which they were/are put. Each book has its own approach, Food for Free being more of a field or gatherers guide to edible plants. It gives notes on habitat, season and details on how many of the plants have been used in the past, sometimes with basic cooking instructions. For some plants, the text merely notes that the plant is edible (eg the White and Red varieties of Dead-Nettle) without any further detail. In contrast, Wild and Free presents a collection of methods for a range of dishes, cordials, wines, jellies etc based on a seasonal foraging calendar and tried and tested family recipes. The Ó Céiríns write in detail of about twenty-four sources of food, giving plenty of instructions for making such tasty items as elderberry syrup, nettle soup, crab apple wine and a whole host of blackberry treats. There also seems to be a lot of beer and wine recipes!

As the Bookworm and I have a penchant for foraging, they are both handy books to dip into now and again as we like to extend our foraged food range now and again. Up until this year, I’d say that we have arrived at a fairly regular pattern of free range goods, focussing mainly on berries. Usually we end up with a good supply of blackberries, haws, rosehips, rowan berries and elderberries in the freezer for jelly making. We have used various recipes for preserves, but most frequently the Thane Prince book mentioned over on Curiously Creatively. The exception to all of the berry harvest is elderflowers, which we have picked for a lovely refreshing cordial in the last few summers (one batch already made so far this year, we hope to do another). Wild and Free gives a recipe for Elderflower pancakes that I would like to try for a change – I imagine they’d be great for a weekend breakfast.

Cover of Wild and Free showing blackberry jam & fresh berries.

Wild and Free, 2013

But in this particularly strange spring and summer, with the help of our two foraging guides, we have branched out slightly and explored some new foraged food. For quite a while we have been thinking of turning towards having a go at collecting some young ‘greens’ from the wild plants on offer to see if we could make a meal out of wild vegetables. As Richard Mabey points out, ‘It is easy to forget, as one stands before the modern supermarket shelf, that every single one of the world’s vegetable foods was once a wild plant’. This is obvious if you think about it, though as The Bookworm pointed out, you can quite see why nobody ever thought that cultivating and selling nettles was a great idea. Though maybe, a cultivated nettle would have no sting?

As you might have guessed, nettles were one of our target greens, having been meaning to make nettle soup for years. Funnily enough, we were rather wary about the idea of picking something so stingy to eat! Tip: stout gloves are required. It is also worth poiting out that venturing near a nettle patch with ripped jeans means that you get your knees stung at the very least. In the end, our foraging and cooking went very well thanks to the handy recipe in the Ó Céirín book. In the chapter on nettles, the authors retell a story about St Columcille and his Lenten instructions that his soup of nettles, water and salt should have nothing else ‘except what comes out of the pot stick’. The enterprising cook apparently hollowed out the pot stick and poured milk and oats into the broth. A much more substantial meal. Inspired by a note in Mabey’s book, we have also tried Goosegrass or Sticky Weed, which he tells us was recommended in spring soups and puddings by the diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706). We did ours in a pasta dish, which seems to be a much more twenty-first century twist on things.

Moving on to something that we still haven’t tried yet, I was tentatively considering looking for mushrooms and fungus. Mabey’s book has a section on fungus, which I found fascinating reading. I would love to try foraging for edible fungus, but I am aware that I need to do much more research first. At some point I hope to attend a workshop as a starting point, though I’m not sure if I will ever feel confident enough to try it for myself. In the meantime, I am happy to try to merely spot a few examples. The authors of Wild and Free describe a lovely foraging session, when they once gathered bags full of field mushrooms on a walk, which sounded fantastic. Sadly, we don’t live within easy reach of green fields, despite our lifting of distance restrictions now. That’s one for the future. Meanwhile, I will settle for our usual delicious berry harvesting.

I would love to hear from anyone who forages or who has any good book recommendations to pass on to us.

Sheep, Sheep Everywhere….

Apr14

This blog post is going to feature several sheep. Yes, that’s right I do mean the woolly, grass eating sort (as if there were any other). Having said that, my recent reading material has challenged any preconceptions that I might have had about sheep (even the grass-eating bit is suspect). Don’t ever let anyone tell you that sheep are boring because they are not (honestly) and they are not very docile either. They are however, very photogenic as the illustrations in my book testify (sheep are obviously shameless poseurs).

The Unknown Sheep….

Thanks to a Twitter competition, I recently became the proud possessor of a book entitled Counting Sheep: a Celebration of the Pastoral Heritage of Britain by Philip Walling (Profile Books, 2014, 2015). I have to admit that when I entered the competition I did it on a whim and came up with an answer before I really considered the merits of any possible prize. The story of Britain’s sheep breeds and their place in the social and economic fabric of the country has proved to be an enthralling read. Some breed names were already familiar to me, but much of the sheep history was not. I can now claim at least a nodding acquaintance with Cheviot, Swaledale, Portland and Jacob breeds. Moreover, of course, this book is not just about sheep, but about people, the land, trade, clothing history and more besides.

Before we go any further, I will put you out of your misery regarding the non-grass eating sheep. This type of sheep, inhabiting North Ronaldsay in the Orkneys descends from animals around in Viking times. The sheep in question, habituated long ago to eating seaweed as their main source of food, do also graze more conventionally when breeding. The diet of seaweed came about a couple of centuries ago due to changes in land use. Crofters confined the sheep to the island’s foreshore for most of the year to free up land for growing crops. These sheep can even swim for goodness sake!

The sheep adapted and throve on a diet of Palmaria Palmata (Dulse) which they graze on the outgoing tide. Rather disconcertingly, the sheep have also evolved a taste for eating the legs and feet of sea birds (dead ones I hasten to add). These are some tough sheep indeed and they are not the only ones. Some sheep varieties can survive and prosper in incredibly poor conditions, still producing quality wool and or meat. Fortunately, the Scottish breeds have developed a taste for eating heather. You also realise that shepherding, while affording a degree of autonomy in the workplace must have been (and probably still is) a very demanding and skilled job.

I am still only about half way through the book, yet I have become acquainted with an alternative history of Britain through the medium of sheep. They have been part of the landscape since the early breeds brought by the Romans and Celts. The trade in sheep wool was once a hugely profitable enterprise and one that changed the landscape forever as land use changed to raising and developing flocks. In the eighteenth century, men such as Robert Bakewell brought new techniques into sheep farming, producing new breeds and establishing modern sheep farming. Sheep history is problematic, encompassing as it does the Highland clearances, which populated huge tracts of land with sheep rather than people. Progress in farming meant displacement for those in the way.

I can foresee that I will be going around sheep spotting with the aid of my newly acquired knowledge next time I am back in Blighty. I can honestly say that I appreciate sheep and their influence on British landscape and social history in a way that I didn’t before. I probably would not have picked this book up in a bookshop, and I am glad to have had a chance to read it.

What chance discoveries have you made lately?

From Landing to Garden: Sunflowers and The Pip Book:

Jul31

Home grown sunflower

As a heavy rain shower has just stopped play (or rather work) in the garden I now sit diligently in front of my computer waiting for inspiration to strike. At the same time, I am endeavouring to keep one eye on the kitchen window to see what the weather is up to now. If however the sunshine does break through again, I will have to dash back to the lawn mower leaving you to carry on regardless. In the meantime a smidgen of writerly inspiration has struck The Landing regions so I will devote this post to a garden theme.

This flurry of garden activity has reminded me of the garden diary that I have been keeping intermittently for around twenty years. The diary now in fact has spawned a sequel co-written by The Bookworm. However, I doubt whether our efforts at a garden diary will ever be published and attain legendary status among future generations of gardeners. Nevertheless it will serve a purpose as a piece of family history as will the pictorial evidence (shown here) that we did once manage to grow a substantial sized sunflower. I am sure that Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West would not be overly impressed but it was a first for us.

My (or rather our diary) contains notes of what has been planted when and where and is copiously illustrated with pictures from seed packets. Also it tends to note the rather frequent occurrence of cases of seed non-germination and slug depredations in the flower and vegetable borders. When I first started the diary I lived in a small flat so the entries were all about houseplants. Looking back through the pages I realise just how many plants I used to have. I wonder how there was room for anything else in such a domestic jungle. At the beginning of 1993 the grand plant total was thirty-two plus a variety of herbs.

Cover of The Pip Book with an avocado plant.

Mine didn’t look like that…

You might be surprised to hear that my library of gardening books is not (and never has been) very extensive. The sum total is four volumes, including one very small paperback book called The Pip Book by Keith Mossman which tells you about growing plants from almost any variety of fruit you can think of trying. I first came across this book when I was working in a bookshop in Birmingham several years ago and ordered a copy. According to a diary entry for 27th May 1994 I had recently bought this and another (un-named) gardening book. It is a great book full of helpful advice and I have tried growing several varieties of seeds and stones as a result. I have to confess though, that despite Keith Mossman’s book I have never yet had great success with avocados.

The illustration below is of a more recent edition from 2011 and I assume the book has been revised but even if it has not it would be well worth buying if you enjoy a growing challenge.