Week 18

Mealworm café

I hope you had a beautiful Beltane/May Day! Is this the best week of the year? I think it is quite possibly the most beautiful. The bluebells, the cow parsley, the hawthorn blossom…and I JUST heard our first swifts, returned from Africa! On Saturday Jack-in-the-Green will parade through Bristol and end up at my local park and in a few days time it is my birthday… so I may be biased, but you’ve got to admit it’s not a bad one.

Also, something a little special is happening on my birthday (in addition to the caviar and champagne and massages etc…). It is publication day for this little beauty. My first ever birthday publication day!

A Year of Feasting & Festivities is the latest in a series of books that we are putting together, and compiles stories and recipes from across all of my almanacs into one beautiful little volume. It features Easter breads, wild garlic green goddess dressing, heg peg dump, lemon and elderflower Sally Lunns, Michaelmas salad, Hallowe’en mash 'o’ nine sorts, pepper cake for carollers and much more, a mixture of traditional dishes and seasonal ones to help you make the most of wild and cultivated harvests, plus a guide to what’s in season every month of the year. It follows hot on the heels of A Year in Story & Song, which came out this time last year, and we hope to build this into a beautiful little collectible series. You can see the publishers have done a gorgeous job of it, all ruby red cloth cover and copper foil. Glorious.

You can find it at Blackwells (cheapest, at time of writing!), Waterstones and Amazon, and if you ask your local bookshop to order it in for you you will be doing them and me a big favour.

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Now on to business. This is our weekly community post in which together we chart the year and season week by week - I tell you something I can noticed/done/eaten and then you tell me yours, and at the end of the month I stitch them all together into one big sort-of-poem of the month, such as April’s, here.

Here’s mine

Mealworm café

No, the picture doesn’t match the title this week - this is my quince tree, blossoming away - because I thought in this week of beauty I really didn’t want to serve you up a picture of a dish of dried mealworms. But that is exactly what I am doing for the birds and they are going crazy for them.

Brief educational bit: this time of year our wild birds’ needs switch. They have been needing lots of fat to keep them warm through winter, and so peanuts and fat balls were perfect, but now they are making eggs and feeding chicks and what they most need for that is protein. They of course can never get enough and a dish of mealworms turns our garden into a riot. It really is mobbed. I am trying to make sure they always have mealworms, birdseed and water and it is quite a job. They are churning through it all at a rate as I shuttle back and forth many times a day. And then I lose more time in watching them - so many! I do have a job, you lot. I am compensated by thinking about all of the many little chicks I must be keeping fed in the hedges and trees around our house, and then it feels like an easy thing to do for such an important outcome. I have taken to sleeping with the window open so that I get woken up by the dawn chorus, and smile, and then, hopefully, fall back to sleep. Magical times.

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A tiny bit of housekeeping: this Sunday will be the first Sunday of the month and so it is ‘Usual Spot’ time over on the chat part of the app, in which we all take a picture of the same spot once a month and share it. It’s not too late to join in if you haven’t already, so get your pics lined up.

That’s it from me, now over to you. What have you seen/heard/spotted/eaten this week that felt particularly ‘this week of the year’?