August 2022

At Chigwell Rise car boot sale my organic plants, drinks and chutney were especially popular. A gentleman said that if I made jam he’d buy it from me the following week - which he did (yellow damson jam), and I ended up making my biggest profit yet.

The Swiss-French pastry chef famous for his beyond spectacular chocolate sculptures, Amaury Guichon, and Mama Dút Vietnamese vegan restaurant in Portland, Oregon (a place I feel I’m meant to visit), inspired me to start experimenting with food art, and I was very pleased to discover that I could taste each distinct flavour in Gemma’s yellow damson, orange and star aniseed ‘made with love’ cordial. I also invented creamy fig, cinnamon and vanilla syrup which is very nice in a leafy vegetable stir-fry, and can heartily recommend raspberry, loganberry and lime cordial.

I sold one of Gemma’s Sugar-Free Pineapple, Plum, Strawberry and Banana Jam (infused with lemon as a preservative). The problem with sugar-free jam, though, is that it doesn’t keep in the fridge for longer than about a few weeks so I must sell it straight away. I opted therefore, to make products low in sugar because they stay fresh for longer.

Surprisingly (aided by daily watering) my allotments didn’t suffer too much in the prolonged record-breaking drought, but I did. My knees swelled up and I could neither think straight nor move around in it. When eventually the downpours came it was such a relief to put my hands in the wet earth and smell my gorgeous marigolds.

I also realised that I need to learn more about how to encourage humans closer towards living off the land again, especially when part of Claybury forest near where I live was burnt down deliberately - just for the hell of it.

On a day when I felt particularly down, I discovered Paul Wheaton’s free permaculture and homesteading website, permies.com and Wheaton Labs. All of a sudden I was chatting to loads of people who are on my wavelength, and a week later I deleted my depressing Facebook account completely.