The Seasonal Supplement: Issue 4, Mid-Winter

rain | soup | onions

Jan 22, 2023

Many years ago, the land that is now our orchard was once a water meadow. Or so we have been told. In wet winters we can well believe it. And so far, January has mostly been rainy. The stream is running fast, seeps into the banks, and tumbles over the weir at the edge of the smallholding in a noisy cascade. The ground is saturated. Springs that hide underground in dry weather, have bubbled to the surface. Puddles fill undulations in the grass.

But it isn’t as bad as it was when we first moved here. A combination of sand, gravel, woodchip, and topsoil, over-sown with grass and clover seed have made the wettest areas more passable.

Nevertheless, walks through the orchard are currently accompanied by squelching and gurgling underfoot. And the routes we tread daily to tend to the animals are gradually turning to mud. Very slippery mud. But we try not to let it put us off. Fresh air and time outside, even in mud and rain and wind, is always a good thing. It reddens our cheeks and keeps spirits up. It can also induce a runny nose, so pocket handkerchiefs are helpful.

January is a surprisingly productive month on the smallholding. While the land quietly rests and rejuvenates, we get the opportunity to tackle some of the projects that there isn’t time for when the harvests are coming in. This year we’ve been making and installing fencing around the vegetable patch. Handmade gates are next. And there are plans to start some coppicing systems with our hazel, willow, and alder trees.

There’s also a chance to have a thorough tidy up. The paddock hedges have been cut. Weeds have been coaxed out of the herb beds: couch grass, creeping buttercup, nettle, and bramble. All have been made easier to remove and control with regular mulching, but we still have to do an annual blitz with a hand fork. And barrows of soggy plant matter are pulled from the cottage garden, revealing nodding snowdrops, choruses of lilac crocuses, and the first green shoots of daffodils, muscari, and bluebells. Glimmers of spring.

We’ve noticed the time to pack the tools away getting a tiny bit later each evening. The days are still short, but the light is creeping back in.

A seasonal recipe

After a day spent outside, hearty winter meals are needed, and second helpings feel well earned. One of our staples at this time of year is a big pot of onion soup. We make it with the onions and garlic from our winter stores; chicken stock from the freezer; leeks freshly pulled from the vegetable patch; bay from the crumbling pot on the patio; some of the cider we made back in the autumn; and a splash of the vinegar we bottled last month. An immense pile of cheese on toast is, we feel, essential accompaniment.

Onion, Leek and Bay Soup

Serves 6

60g unsalted butter

5 large bay leaves

1kg white onions, thinly sliced

400g leeks, trimmed, washed and thinly sliced

4 fat cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

2.5 tbsp plain flour

200ml dry apple cider

1l chicken stock

1-2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

Melt the butter in a large stock pot over a low heat and then stir in the bay leaves, onions, leeks, and garlic. Season with a generous pinch of sea salt, then leave everything to cook down slowly, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened almost to the point of collapse, and significantly reduced in volume. This will take up to an hour (don’t be tempted rush this bit – the onions need to have lost all their bite and be beautifully soft before you move onto the next step).
Sprinkle over and stir in the flour, then add the cider and stock. Turn up the heat and bring to a gentle simmer. Let the soup putter away for 15 minutes or so, until it has thickened up.
To finish, add the apple cider vinegar a little bit at a time, tasting as you go (too much will ruin the soup, but the right amount will freshen it beautifully). Season with black pepper and sea salt to taste.
To serve, ladle the piping hot soup into deep bowls. We always eat this with cheese on toast on the side, made with mature cheddar and a generous shake of Worcestershire sauce.

An out-of-season side note: in the summer when the onions are green and still have their leaves, we make huge batches of this soup. The fresh onions are extra sweet, and their tops make a good alternative to the leeks in the recipe (which are little wisps in the raised beds at this point and nowhere near ready for picking yet). A piping hot bowl of onion soup feels very out of place when it’s shorts and t-shirts weather, so it all goes straight in the freezer. When the temperatures drop, we can have soup on the dinner table in no time.

Something to watch

Gourmet Farmer

Our good friends introduced us to this Australian programme back when we were living in London and it formed part of the inspiration for our move to the smallholding. The show follows Matthew Evans, a former food critic, in his departure from city life in Sydney to a farm in Tasmania. It’s packed full of seasonal food and homesteading adventures, and has a real air of River Cottage about it. There are five seasons in total. Getting hold of them outside of Oz can be a bit tricky, but some are available on DVD and many of the episodes can be found on YouTube with a little bit of hunting. It’s well worth a view if you can find it.

A seed to sow

Now is a good time to order onion sets for planting in late winter or early spring. We always choose varieties that are suitable for storage. We don’t have a root cellar or dedicated pantry for our produce (although this is a project we hope to get round to soon), so for now the plaited bunches of onions hang from nails in the kitchen wall. This isn’t ideal for long-term food storage, but our cottage is quite chilly, which helps them to keep, and we position them out of direct sunlight, which stops them degrading too quickly. We have found that Red Baron (red onions) and Sturon (white onions) both have good flavour, swell to a sizable globe, and hold out until spring before starting to sprout or rot, even in our far-from-perfect storage conditions, so we’re growing them again this year.

A few snippets from our January task list

Begin winter pruning the apple and pear trees. This task takes a few days, but is getting quicker and easier each year as we gradually train the mature trees into shape. We work systematically across the orchard with ladder, secateurs, and saw, and methodically prune each tree in turn.

Set up a new raised bed in the vegetable patch. One of our lime plaster deliveries last year arrived in a wooden pallet collar that is the perfect height and size for a small raised bed. An extra, zero-cost, planting space is something we can’t resist. So, we’re going to find a good spot for it, line the base with cardboard, and fill it with compost ready for sowing in the spring.

Light a bonfire. We asked the farmer who cut our paddock hedges to have a go at tackling the briar that was taking up a large section of the sheep’s grazing area (our misty-eyed love of blackberries and rosehips had led to it growing completely out of control). He managed to cut it all back to ground level, but there is now a lot of tidying up to do. A bonfire is the best option for such a large number of splintered, thorny branches, so once the weather dries up, we’ll get out the thick gloves and matches.

Hedge cutting. While a tractor comes in to cut the paddock hedges, the ones that border the rest of the smallholding are mostly our responsibility. Each section is a knackering 45 minute work out with the hedgecutter, followed by an hour’s worth of clean up.

Tree and branch felling. There is quite a lot of chopping down to do this year. A rotten alder by the stream needs to be felled for safety reasons (rather than removing it completely, we’re hoping to coppice the newer growth that has sprung up around the main trunk in the years to come). An oak tree by the paddock has had it’s bark so intensely nibbled by squirrels that two large branches have snapped off. And there’s similar squirrel damage on a walnut tree, which needs to be cut out before more branches fall. Lastly a wonky willow that is blocking light to the orchard needs to come down. All of the felled wood will need to be cut, split and stacked for firewood. It’s going to take a while.

Make a new log store. There’s an old IBC tank (a huge plastic container in a metal cage made for transporting liquids) in the paddock, which we originally bought second-hand to store water for the sheep, but in the end have never needed to use. It’s an ugly thing, so we’re going to repurpose it into a log store. With the plastic tank removed, the sturdy galvanised steel frame will be perfect for storing and seasoning fire wood.

Organise the storage bottles and jars. Working our way through our winter larder supplies, means that we have an abundance of empty glass jars and bottles that need to be washed and tidied away. Normally they get shoved back in the kitchen cupboards wherever there’s space, which makes them tricky to gather when we need to start preserving again in the summer. So we’re going to come up with a less hotchpotch, well-labelled, system for keeping them in order.

We so hope you enjoyed reading the Seasonal Supplement. As ever, please do feel free to leave a like or a comment - it really does brighten our day to read your thoughts and chat with you in the comments. We absolutely love hearing from you.

The Journal of Modern Smallholding