Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
My right thumb is doing well – I’d sprained it with a marathon session of snipping back the ivy and hawthorn – but I’m still keen to practice drawing with my non-dominant left hand. These chitted Maris Bard first early seed potatoes are ideal subjects for my wobbly pen.
Happy birthday to Iris.
“How old is Iris?’ asked Barbara as she read my caption about ‘hyper-parabolic, pan dimensional alien visitors.”
“Old enough to understand ‘hyper-parabolic aliens’,” I reassured her.
Our friends Jill and John presented us with a pizza stone for Christmas. Admittedly our first attempt at using it was a bit of a disaster, so we’re still working on our technique for using the stone but at least it was crispy and it tasted good.
Most recipes suggest making enough dough for several pizzas, so I scaled it down here to make a pizza that comfortably fits on our new pizza stone.
I’m dipping into the Adobe Color online program to cook up and save colour schemes in a variety of ways. Here I’ve used the ‘Extract Theme’ option on one of my photographs from this morning and opted for a ‘Muted’ set of swatches.
Happy birthday to Paul. Who isn’t actually a pizza chef, but if he wanted a change from his day job he’d look the part in the uniform I’ve designed for his cartoon alter ego.
We’ve gone for a traditional variety, Bunyard’s Exhibition, for our broad beans which I sowed this morning.
Last summer a fox family flattened our leeks. I harvested the last of them today but didn’t get much off them as they were starting to produce tough flowering shoots. We planted a second crop so I used a couple of rows of those instead.
They were smaller but perfect for leek and potato (and celery and pea) soup. Barbara found a leek and cheese muffin recipe on the internet.
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
This was all the fruit that I could muster for my still life. Unlike the vegetables I’ve been drawing, this time I felt that I had to add colour.
The apple is a British-grown Royal Gala, originally a hybrid bred from Golden Delicious and Gala. According to Wikipedia, ‘it now accounts for about 20% of the total volume of the commercial production of eating apples in the UK.’
These celeriacs smell deliciously of celery but as they aren’t much bigger than golf balls, by the time we’ve trimmed them down there won’t be much left. We’d never grown them before but a neighbour had plenty of seedlings so we thought that we’d give it a try. We probably won’t grow them again.
As the name suggests, our Stuggart Giant sets gave us plenty of onions from a 4×6 foot section of our raised beds. Unfortunately because of the unpredictable weather last summer we weren’t able to gather the whole crop in to dry them in the greenhouse – there wasn’t room on the staging for the whole crop – so a lot of them stayed out in heavy rain. Probably because of this we found that a lot of them had gone soft before we got the chance to use them – including most of those in my drawing; they’ll be going straight to the compost bin.
This wouldn’t put me off growing the variety again, they’re a mild onion, which we like. We’d just make sure that we started early drying them off.
On an online course I’m doing, Become a Better Presenter, a free FutureLearn course from The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we’ve been asked to write a script for an imagined talk about making a sandwich pitched to a specific audience. I’m going for our local naturalists’ society:
So, you’re heading for the Peak District: what are the essentials for fieldwork?
OPENS HAVERSACK
Notebook? yes, got that . . . binoculars? Check! . . . waterproofs . .
And, yes, thought someone would suggest it: lunch! But this is no ordinary packed lunch . . .
OPENS BOX
. . . this sandwich was developed by survival expert Ray Mears, who says he always takes one with him whenever he heads for the hills.
GETS OUT INGREDIENTS
And it’s simple to make:
The bread, I’m going for wholemeal and actually this is homemade and in this case the flour was ground at a centuries-old watermill at Worsborough.
Butter? To give us a protein boost we’re going for peanut butter, organic of course, and – controversially – I’m a chunky man.
Instant energy? This is pure Peak District heather honey from last August, which was exceptional for heather, hope you managed to get out there, it was a sea of purple over The Strines. One teaspoon, so that’s 1,500 bee miles across the moors . . . but it’s going to be a tough hike so let’s make it two: that’s 3,000 miles!
Finally the main event: a superfood developed in the greenhouses at Chatsworth by Joseph Paxton: the Cavendish banana!
Become a Better Presenter : Improve Your Public Speaking Skills, a free FutureLearn course. Learn how to improve your presentation skills and add personality into your presentation style on this three-week course. Learn from The Presenter Network at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.