Walnuts and the Squirrel

A few days ago, after the family returned from the UK, I developed a mild cold. As a result, I've been largely lurking indoors until I stop feeling contagious, still working on the same essay and watching Wartime Farm followed now by Tudor Monastery Farm. But on the last day before the cold I made the quince-and-elderberry jelly and fruit leather (or quince paste, if you will); and, having finally figured out — after two sad attempts in past years — that the jelly needs to reduce and boil at 104°C before it will gel, it was a triumph.

Today I therefore avoided the crowds at the Berlin marathon, instead of photographing it and cheering on the runners as I've done in past years. I also avoided applying for a mini-job over the weekend.

Instead I went to the allotment gardens again. I returned with a haul of walnuts that are not yet ripe, Concord grapes, quinces, and a flower that had been ripped off and dropped on the walkway. These grapes turned out to be delicious, as the gardener who put them out in a basket promised, and the flower looks pretty in its vase and comforts me for not having floristry in my budget. We haven't had a proper frost yet, so I didn't bother picking sloe berries on the way home. But I did notice amongst the sloe bushes that a fresh crop of blackberries (the berries were a bright red, like a medieval painting of a bleeding knight) had sprung on their brambles, despite the lateness of the season.

As I was gathering the fallen walnuts in the gardens — the nuts partly looked sepulchral when the green flesh had turned brown or black, mouldering away, some seamed with whitish fibres — I heard more objects plop to the ground at a fairly regular rate in the garden behind me. There was a wind, but it felt too gentle to shake the trees enough to make many fruits or nuts fall off. So I looked up and found a squirrel making its way gracefully, on all four paws and tail trailing behind, along a branch. In consideration of the squirrel's work in dropping the walnuts to the ground, and of its need for winter feed, I decided to take only one more nut before leaving the rest of the harvest to the squirrel. As I am used to the squirrels in Victoria, Canada — who would nibble the green-and-white husks off of the walnut shells from their perches in the walnut tree, chucking down fragments like rain (these fragments stained everything brown with the walnut juices) all over our lounge chairs and us — this Berlin squirrel also seemed remarkably polite. Now, at any rate, my share of the walnuts is lying on a newspaper on my windowsill, waiting to dry in the upcoming days of late summer sunshine.

Inspired by Edwardian Farm, I have also begun tracking the atmospheric pressure with a homemade barometer: a jar with water, which I turned green using water colour paint, and an empty bottle inverted into it. Happily the day on which I made it was just before the high pressure front really came in, so the very first morning I already saw a dramatic rise of the green water level into the bottleneck. Now I'm drawing little lines on the jar and adding the air pressure measurements in hpA that are reported each day on the Deutscher Wetterdienst's website.

Other than that, I cooked a cabbage soup and made oat cakes today. In the morning I listened on the radio to a Catholic church service, which celebrated/commemorated both Thanksgiving and the upcoming 800th death-day of St. Francis of Assisi. When I was little I thought that St. Francis was one of the more interesting saints, even if he did not die in a memorably gruesome way; I liked the imagery where he communicates with birds and animals. In the afternoon Gi. dropped by, so the siblings went off to bond over archery and bouldering as they usually do on the weekends, but we didn't end up looking at the photos from the UK travels as we'd intended.

Rose Hips, Plums and Seedlings

In between working on my Greek-Spanish history essay, exit polling at the Berlin city and local elections, mending socks, and volunteering at an open-air cinema, I've been travelling to the allotment gardens again.

I've also been re-watching the BBC series Tales of the Green Valley, Victorian Farm, and Edwardian Farm, which have nudged me to do more with the allotment garden produce. Unluckily, while there were a few early apples in August, there are almost no late apples this year, so I am concentrating on other fruit.

Rose hips are ripe now, for example. I see them scattered on the garden paths — whether humans, animals or birds tear them off the bushes I don't know yet. At any rate, it feels morally defensible to take them. Before this autumn my only idea for turning rose hips into food was to make jam. But I can't gather enough rose hips to make more than a tablespoonful. This year, fortunately, I thought of turning the hips into tea instead. They are usually blended with other ingredients when you buy tea bags in the store, of course. So today I brewed three of the hips together with half a lemon and about 5 cups of boiling water. The resulting tea tasted nice (fresh, mellow and tangy at the same time) and had a yellowy glow.

For my supper I made a plum compôte with sugar, water, cinnamon, a clove, and the zest and juice of the other half of the lemon. As the fallen fruit itself was past its best days, judging by the musty fragrance, it wasn't a pity to cover up its flavour.

Besides there are pear quinces in the pantry, and elderberry florets hanging in a bag at my kitchen chair, waiting for me to use them... Since most of the family is travelling in the UK, I was thinking I'll try making quince jelly and quince cheese again before they return — this time with elderberries in the jelly, as I like the colour and flavour combination. Hopefully by Wednesday afternoon every sign of the messy pots and implements will have vanished.

I did try eating (fresh and on its own) a Concord grape that had fallen off a vine. But it was sour and it didn't look like 2026 was a good year for Berlin grapes.

It was windy and a volatile mix of sunshine and cloud today, so on the whole a good day to visit the allotment gardens. There were very few gardeners or passersby, but to make up for that many species of butterflies were dancing around the fences.

Lastly, I'm growing rocket (arugula), peas and nasturtiums in an egg carton that I've filled with potting soil and put near a windowsill in my room. The seeds were prodded in on September 15th, many of them sprouted over the weekend, and today I began thinning out the arugula seedlings to give their fellow plants more room. The sprouts that I removed, I washed and ate for dinner.

One thing I haven't done is to gather Turkish filberts. These nuts are smaller than regular hazelnuts, and often fall from the trees lodged in their baroque, fierce-looking swirled spike husks; and at least where I grew up in Canada they don't appear to be common, whereas in Berlin they're familiar. At any rate, in August parents and their children were crouching around the sidewalks, harvesting them from between the cobblestones and from directly underneath the trees.

Returning to the subject of the failed late apple crop, however, I've ended up thinking that at least there is one positive aspect of the variable behaviour of nature: if this is a bad year for apples, we can enjoy next year's good harvest all the more by contrast. There is something to look forward to.

A Revolutionary's Thoughts While Dishwashing

It's been 10 days since my last student mini-job, but that one (to borrow from the vernacular) was a doozy:  a half hour commute both ways, but then 6.5 hours of dishwashing at a canteen in former Eastern Berlin.

The equipment was fascinating. I keep on yearning for my family to adopt a rule that I read about in books and hear about in real life: that the person who's cooking doesn't need to wash the dishes later. But it's been well over a decade. The rule in our household is still that the person who's cooking is making a shocking mess that needs to be cleaned up as soon as possible. One of my former colleagues, frankly surveying our romantic prospects / lack thereof, once commented that he and I are still waiting for 'our Mr. Darcy's. In my case, I hope that Mr. Darcy will wash half the dishes while I do the other half. ... In the meantime, 1. a dishwashing machine that takes about 10 to 20 minutes to rinse the pottery, glassware, cutlery, etc. once you slide in the tray, 2. a piece of steel wool that takes care of almost anything that sticks to stainless steel basins, lids, utensils and pots, 3. industrial-strength dishwashing liquid, and 4. a powerful spray attachment at the tap, come pretty close.

I liked the colleagues, and not just because they gave me a free café au lait and a bottle of water. I barely glimpsed the customers since the only opportunities arose while I was ferrying back and forth the caddies full of dirty lunch trays and glancing at the counter where customers were ordering their food. But I was horrified by an indirect communication: one of the customers left a wasp, which they had apparently cut in two, on their plate for me to dispose of.

But I emerged from the job with sore muscles (in my lower arm, obviously; but also at my thumb, inner thighs, lower back, ... the list goes on) and fiery new socialist convictions. The radicalized political views are not just based on this job, but also the others.

For one thing, I don't think that people should have to work or spend their lunch breaks in windowless rooms.

For another, is cashier work and dishwashing work, really 'honest' work? Or is it just grubbing that is underpaid by an employer who needs to wring out every last cent of profit, in a market where the company is just not making enough money have large margins, and sometimes made unduly difficult by customers who are badly raised? For example, it was no trouble at all to wash coffee cups, cake plates, and cutlery. But scraping off a whole bunch of food that the customer didn't feel like eating after all, or prying crumpled paper napkins out of congealed sauce, felt like nannying or parenting un-endearing 5-foot- and 6-foot-something babies — rather than providing a reasonable service to a paying adult. As I complained to family afterward, only half joking: I'm not their mother! if they don't want to bother to use table manners, they can clean up their own darn mess!

Thirdly, I increasingly doubt the 'American Dream' narrative about low-paying jobs. Maybe I'm just a pampered princess who is not used to scrubbing encrusted cheese from metal bins. But from my point of view, it would be a far better use of refugees' and economic migrants' time and effort to find something fitting for their specific interests and skills, at times and in places that are practical (not '5 a.m., when few trains are running' and 'across town'). It does not make sense to give them needlessly labour-intensive, dead-end jobs and then ask them to spin soap suds into gold. It's like the household revolution in countries like the UK after World War I: when the mistresses of households began to have to do housework instead of domestic servants (who were hired away by factories or shops), they finally realized that maybe they wanted to cook easier, less complex food and have machines to tackle the majority of the hard work. Hard labour always feels more indispensable when the burden falls on another, and I really don't think that enlightenment, valuable life training, and spiritual contentment come from scraping uneaten ketchup into a garbage bin.

Fourth, I think that the current grocery store system is wildly unsustainable. It's not just cashier work at the register that instills a whole different perspective on how much labour goes into creating a small package of food (sometimes empty calories) that is purchased in a few seconds and perhaps eaten in the same amount of time. It's also stocking shelves. At least the grocery stores here in Berlin tend to order an extensive gamut of eclectic groceries in sets of up to 20 packages. Picture the process of raising the ingredients (farmers, fuel suppliers, fertilizer suppliers, etc.), transporting the ingredients, blending the food, transporting the blended food via train or airplane or truck, dividing the food into the desired portions using materials that also need to be sourced from long supply chains (paper, plastic, etc.), then sorting them out into a grocery store's order. All kinds of work that needs to be done in the middle of the night, over long distances, for very low wages and low profit margins, etc. Then, I as the cashier have to open the package (which can be as complex as Ikea furniture assembly) and familiarize myself with the shop's layout to figure out where that package goes. Then I have to move aside the older packages so that the newer ones go in the back. While keeping an eye on the till to see if anyone needs me to ring up their purchases. All so that someone can e.g. buy a tiny tub of yoghurt that will be eaten up in a few seconds. ... Thinking about all of this has made me more of a zealot about cooking food from scratch using bulk ingredients — locally sourced, if possible.