Bank Holiday task 2 - no knead breadmaking!

So there's this chap in New York City who invented a no knead bread that has just a small amount of commercial yeast and a large amount of time... the Guardian magazine this weekend featured how the 'new wave of male bakers' make bread (Christopher Hirst). So I had a go. WOW! The difference - apart from the 18-24 hours for its first rise - is that is baked in a Le Creuset (or similar) cast iron pot with a lid in the oven... well if the truth be told, this apparently has melted many a plastic knob and cast wives into angry moods (allegedly... curious that the right-on Grauniad allows such 1950s thinking to be expressed?)
Smallish loaf - 400g flour, 300ml tepid water, teaspoon of salt and a quarter-teaspooon of dried yeast. Mix in a biggish bowl, for a "few seconds"... I did it for about 2 minutes just to get all the flour incorporated and suitably gooey - yes, it is almost liquid, very sloppy. Cover with clingfilm, leave for up to 24 hours. Pour it out onto a floured surface and fold it into itself with more flour, then slop it into a well-floured linen teatowel for the second rise, about 2 hours or so. It's still very sticky and loose, so I brought the points and sides of the teatowel up together and pegged them so make like a little basket.
Put the oven on to very high. As high as it might go - 260 or gas 8/9? Put the oiled-a-bit Le Crueset cast iron pot in to heat up. Well I don't have one, so I used a terracotta casuela (crock) with a lid, reckoning that it might do the trick instead. After half an hour pour the dough from the tea towel into the pot! Well that was my experience, it simply flowed into it, no way to pick it up easily!
Lid on, into oven, 30 mins, take lid off and another 20 mins. Eh voila.... something that approaches an open-crumb, sourdough-looking but not tasting, ciabatta-like? Looks a bit weird but chewy, tasty, tasty, gorgeous proper-bread-like aroma ... HAVE A GO!
There's a YouTube video of it - Jim Lahey's Sullivan Street Bakery - he seems to make loaves that look more like loaves!

Bank Holiday tasks- vertical growing & intercropping

Once the rain stopped, there was constructed a new raised bed with sycamore pole framework (3rd dimension) in the ground of the 'fruit cage', for proper sweet pea growing. Five different varieties, including Mixed Bijou! Edged with pot marigolds, waiting for dwarf French beans. That gets lovely organic manure & new top soil into the ground, and uses up space where last year's raspberries didn't survive the snow. (Intercropping & multi-yield)
Sweet Pea Cupani and a new frame for the climbing squash in the recycling box, in with the dark-leaved nasturtium Empress of India. Also Jessy snap peas in the other raspberry bed, as they should grow & crop well before the summer fruits reach the top of the little wired structure. Ground Elder looking lush - had some Thai-green-curried with spinach on Friday and I'll put some in a tart for Permaculture lunch on Wednesday! PS Happy International Permaculture Day (phew, just caught it, UK BST!)

Updates

completed engineered oak floor 

the conservatory floor in use

Nearly a year... so, just to show that we have been doing something!

Skyrocket, rucola, national trust rocket...

greening of the roof

The old home town looks the same

Wilson Street Splott 1953 & 2012
I used to think this street was awfully long. I suppose from the perspective of a small girl with short legs, a push of the pram down beyond the boundary of our own lamp-post was a bit dangerous. No cars, notice. In all of the photos from this year, there are no cars in the road. Our 'garage' in the left hand picture housed my dad's motorbike, and the potential for rental of spaces once cars were a more frequent possession by neighbours. It's now a house, quite ugly, and our house next door now has plastic porch doors, plastic windows, a metal fence on the wall (our original ones were taken for the "war effort", we hoped it had become a beloved Spitfire!) and a burglar alarm. In Splott! I wonder who lives there now? The wall looks similar, the edging to the doorway the same...




The house next door, and the one across the road where my great Auntie Maggie lived, still have the encaustic tiles in the pathway, the shiny and sculpted majolica panels in the porch, deep green tiles above. And the chimney stacks are still visible opposite, the houses substantial in a cramped sort of way. It all felt enormous of course!

Below - the Coronation street party

Edgelands

The Pyrénées mark a subtle & mutable boundary between two countries, and nowadays even more so. No barriers to wait for, no huts to shuffle past in a stream of vehicles on the A9, only policemen looking dolefully at what used to be a great job, now is dull and meaningless. On the mountain passes, the sunny side is Spain, the shady side is France, though in this picture there's a bit on both sides. You can just walk between one and the other, or, as in our friends Geoff & Susan's case, step over the rivulet bordering their garden...
The mountains have been the edge between life and death in the recent history of the two countries. Resistants and Refugees have stood on both sides, craning necks to see the border, climbed up what looks so inaccessible but where snowfall shows the secret paths. Suddenly, there is more than talk of ancient rescues and regrets - exhibitions, photographs, books of memoires, old men recounting, women also remembering struggling with their families living on the cold beach in 1939, in the camps de concentration.  Today we went to the Shoah memorial ceremony at the Camp de Rivesaltes. More than 70 years of memory there... over 2000 french jews from the so-called Free Zone were gathered and deported to the deathcamps; also gypsies, more spanish refugees, france's "unwanted undesirables" all interned at some point. Even les Harkis were accomodated - Algerians who had fought for the French and could not go home... a part of its history that France is only now starting to examine and accept. A museum has been long promised - today Bourquin's deputy seemed to indicate it would be funded... at the moment 5 stèles sit along the roadside under the slowly turning wind turbines, and the newly-laid flowers mingle their perfume in the chilly air. Les parliamentaires were each given a memorial pebble with an inscription on it, written and read out by sixthformers from the local town's college.

A Warm Winter in the Conflent

The Eastern Pyrénées, where the border of France & Spain is very close... about halfway between the brown hills and the snowy mountains. In the plain below lies Llivia, a small town that was forgotten in the treaty that transferred land between the 2 countries - it remains a Spanish outpost, with Castillian language, bars & cars, not even the Catalan that the rest of the French in the area uses! The photo was taken in Dorres, a village with outdoor thermal baths that have this view, a sulphurous lavoir (public clothes washing basins), and the jewel of Romanesque chapels, that is only open once a month for mass (3rd sun)  These cloud pictures are from Prades, at about 6pm on the same day. The fiery mass was in the west, and the lenticular plate-like cloud was opposite it in the eastern sky.
My friend Don says it looks like the Starship Enterprise with its cloaking device!

It's been a warm winter, hardly snow enough for skiing, blue sky, 18 degrees... the mimosa is just starting to come out in its yellow cloudy flowers. Pelargoniums from the summer are hanging from our terrace and the bougainvillea has survived!

Conservation: Completion

photo to come...