Living Off The Land
Should you wish to make a go of things on your own, this is what it would now take. Figures are US-centric, but you get the idea. Click the image to see all the detail.
Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’ Pole Beans
Earlier in the year, I planted a reasonably rare variety of climbing beans called ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’ pole beans. According to the Guardian, this variety was:
originally saved from the winter death march of 1838 when 17,000 Cherokees were forced from their lands in Georgia and an estimated 4,000 died.
The results of the crop are now in. They’re sweet, nutty, complex, much better than any green beans I’ve tasted.
Locus Review & Courgettes
Stolen shamelessly from my agent’s site, here’s a scan of a review of Nights of Villjamur, in esteemed industry magazine Locus.
Thanks to Mark Yon who also spotted the really lovely review and brought it to my attention. If you’re not a Locus reader, click the image to see the whole review in full.
Otherwise here’s a quick snippet:
I’ll join the enthusiastic chorus for a work that deserves all the favourable notice it can get…
I look forward to whatever Mark Charan Newton has to offer, for he’s already the master of the SF/fantasy hybrid.
Well, it’s funny they should mention whatever I have to offer, because I’ve plenty of courgettes going at the moment. Seriously. Does anybody want one?
Cherry Wine
So, we’ve used about 5 lbs of morello cherries, which we picked the other day, in this homebrew effort. Popped them in a pan with 5 pints of water, boiled them for a few minutes, then let it all cool before shoving the cherries and liquid all into a fermenting bin. At the same time, we’ve got some starter yeast on the go separately (which we bought from a homebrew specialist shop around the corner), and have now added that to the cooled boiled cherries. Add sugar, and let the brewing begin!
There are stacks of wine recipes online and in books that all have little variants to this method, so the best thing to do is pick one and stick with that. It’s not really rocket science – so long as you keep more or less on track.
Morello Cherries
Two gardening posts in two days? You lucky things…
Here we have Morello Cherries, plucked from a tree in Oxfordshire (belonging to my girlfriend’s father), poured into four big pasta bowls. Is there anything nicer than picking fruit in the English countryside when the weather is scorching hot? (Yes, the addition of the knowledge that the fruit you’re picking is completely free.) The plan for half of these is to go towards making Cherry Wine, and the other half, who knows.
Blackcurrants
A pasta bowl full of blackcurrants (alongside a cup, for scale). This was a decent crop this year from just the one bush, despite some weird wilting leaf thing it seemed to suffer from a few months ago.
Now we just need to work out what to do with them all. Any suggestions?
Review & A Cabbage
There’s a rather pleasing review of The Book of Transformations over at Fantasy Book Review, where it gets a score of 9.8/10:
… one of the superheroes that the city’s cultists create is slightly different from the average superhero, mainly due to the fact that she’s transsexual, which is awesome. She isn’t a joke character… it’s just a fact that she happens to be a transsexual… It’s a long, long time since reading a book and series from a new author has made me this excited. How he manages to fit it all into one book is amazing. The style of writing is so clean, no paragraph is wasted. This is such a pleasure to read… I really believe in years to come we will be talking about new authors, and asking, are they the new Mark Charan Newton?
Well, if any authors are to be the new me, I shall set the new criteria – before any such claims are made, they will have to grow vegetables like this:
What a mighty cabbage! I had to wrestle the damn thing to get it out of the ground.
Broad Beans
First of the broad bean crop. Now for the endless shelling and skinning part, before being served for dinner. Apparently broad beans go very well with all things pig – pork, bacon, ham etc. – so these might well end up with bacon in a salad. Or, alternatively, on toast.
Garden Watch
Whereas the first half of the year largely seems to be about putting things into the garden, we’re finally getting to the good stuff. Some of the onions are ready. Broad beans are good to go. Apple wine (home-brewed) is being sipped. (All this is pictured in Hipstamatic, in an attempt to add coolness.) There’s stacks of other stuff lined up, too – runner beans, strawberries, raspberries, lettuce.
The Blenheim 2011
The Blenheim 2011 was brewed between 2010 and 2011 in my house.
It’s apple wine, made from the Blenheim Orange variety. Picked in October 2010 from a tree in Oxfordshire, the apples were chopped, briefly boiled, put into a fermenting bin with yeast, fed ritualistically, filtered, fermented, racked, fermented, racked, aged and finally drunk. Serve chilled.
On the nose: grapefruits, apples, sauvignon blanc, a distant earthy note. In the mouth: surprisingly delicious actually. The same notes as the smell again – tropical fruit notes, very sauvignon blanc – perhaps a little stronger. One of the dangers of home-brew is that you don’t always know how strong this actually is…
Very happy with the results. Here’s a snap back when it ‘looked like sludge’ as my girlfriend put it. It’s incredible how it’s turned out after all these months; we’re going to leave one demijohn for another few months to see how it matures, before we begin again with this year’s batch.
Cheers!
Green Things
Broad Beans, in fact, from the garden. This is the first time I’ve grown them. For a short while, I thought nothing was going to happen after they flowered. Suddenly there they were! With the number of these, and climbing bean plants I’ve got on the go, I will be absolutely sick of beans by August.
More green things: my next review is up at the Ecologist, looking at a fascinating little portrait of Monterey Bay in California.
And while we’re on the subject of greenery, British nature has been valued in the billions of pounds, in what is a fascinating study. While it’s obvious to anyone who’s not an economist that you can’t really put a value on the environment, in our market-based world it’s probably a pretty useful thing to throw some numbers around.
My broad beans are currently a tenner to you – this isn’t mass produced crap, you know.
Reviews & Stuff & Nonsense
Publishers Weekly has reviewed City of Ruin and liked it:
The ambitious second installment in Newton’s Legends of the Red Sun dark epic fantasy series (after 2010′s Nights in Villjamur) contains some deeply weird moments. The corrupt city of Villiren is now home to a number of refugees from the capital, including Investigator Rumex Jeryd and Cmdr. Brynd Lathraea of the elite Night Guard. The residents are more focused on internal affairs, like the rash of mysterious disappearances, than on the encroaching alien army allied with the exiled former empress. Labor issues, mad scientists and their creations, racial and religious intolerance, and extradimensional travelers all contribute to the elaborate canvas of the story. Great balanced battle scenes, offering both individual perspectives and sweeping overviews, leave a sense of lingering horror. While the novel’s reach may exceed its grasp, the expanded world and its inhabitants are consistently compelling.
Didn’t get the star that Nights of Villjamur did, despite me thinking City much better in quality and scope than Nights, but I can’t complain really.
I mentioned a couple of posts ago about how Cheryl Morgan helped me with writing a particular character, and Cheryl has talked about this some more on her own blog.
What is important, however, is that Mark has chosen to put a trans woman in his book, not because she is trans, but because she happens to be one of the heroes of the story. And he has done his best to try to treat that character respectfully. Furthermore, his editor at Tor UK didn’t insist that he drop her for the sake of sales. This is all very positive, and I’m proud to have played a small part in making it happen.
(And once again, I’m hugely appreciative to Cheryl for all her help.)
For those of you who are begging for more garden updates (I’m sure someone is) here is a picture of a bee enjoying itself in the garden with the beans. We’ve had stacks of the little things, which – given the yearly reports of bee population decline – is nice to see. (I’m convinced there was a hornet in the garden, too, but I can’t be sure it wasn’t a particularly devilish bee.)
