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| The Tumbrel - Pour Encourager Les Autres |
I’ve been gardening and feel quite proud. Yesterday I made six apple grafts taking cuttings that I had made from trees at the Mill and sticking them into stubs of branches on the apple trees here. I watched a little video on YouTube that showed you how to do it. Mind you, like so much else, seeing an expert cut, slice and bind with all the right tools and knowing exactly what he is doing, is one thing; doing it yourself without the correct equipment is another. But still I have six grafts: five on apple trees and one on a pear for I had taken a quince cutting and read somewhere that pears are grown on quince root stocks - so why not vice versa?
Anyway the whole exercise was an experiment, a bit of fun. I am not overly worried if they grow or not. For good measure I brought home a quince sucker and that should grow and if it doesn’t produce quinces at some future date I had always graft pears on to it.
Of course I had no suitable grafting goo with which you protect the graft after you have made it. So I used the first thing that came to hand which was Polycell flexible and waterproof filler, specially for bathrooms. Apart from being white rather than black it has exactly the same rubbery, gooey look of the stuff in the YouTube film. It can’t be poisonous, can it? if you use it in bathrooms? Anyway we shall see come the spring.
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| An Apple Graft - Perhaps Not a Good One |
I blame Rosie for my enthusiasm, plus a restless desire to experiment inherited from long hours alone and unsupervised as a child. I once tried making cider but found, as you do, that it is remarkably hard to extract juice from an apple unless you first cut it into small pieces, which is hard unless you have some sort of mechanical device like a great stone wheel in a trough and a horse to pull it.
I must have been about twelve. Cutting the apples with a knife was boring. But then I had the wonderful idea of simply squashing the apples that had already fermented and gone brown of which there were a great many in the apple store. What I produced looked like rough cider in every way. It even tasted like a species of cider. But it was of course undrinkable, being acid to a degree.
Down in the Cantal they produce with their mountain of apples something that looks very similar to my effort - a muddy, grey, brown brew which tastes infinitely better than it looks and is served in plastic juice bottles at one euro a litre. They give you a wrap of roasted chestnuts with it as well at no extra cost - chestnuts being another commodity of which nature has delivered an abundance. The cider isn’t particularly alcoholic and at the little cider festival we attended the hardened drinkers at the bar were all drinking beer. But you don’t want anything to make you legless when you are sitting out in the sun enjoying the scenery, do you.
The real trouble with going to France of course is that I put on weight at the rate of a quarter of a pound a day. I have more appetite than at home and of course the food is better. On this recent holiday I had the best trout I had ever tasted at a little hotel not far from Maurs. Outside, in the sunshine, stood a tumbrel, looking as though it had just conveyed Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Inside the trout were cooking, or maybe even being caught for the hotel Patronne said she kept the fish in a pond. Certainly, they tasted fresher than daisies. Whether they had been grilled, baked, or deep fried, I wasn’t sure, but anyway they came covered with garlic and cooked to perfection.
I asked the Patronne how she made the loose bones crumble and melt, but she wasn’t telling. ‘It’s an old Auvergnat recipe.’ she said, smiling mysteriously.
Anyway, whatever she did I don’t think it involved apples. If my grafts take we shall have here at least some of the dozen or more varieties of apple at the Mill. And maybe even a Quince too. We shall need to wait for spring for a result.
