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Home Beekeeping
Find out more about keeping bees in your garden for honey
grow your own
15:40, 4th Jan 2012
Storing Apples
Find out how to store apples
fruits
12:23, 28th Jul 2011
Pear and Lemon Jam
Instructions for making pear and lemon jam
preserving
14:59, 27th Jul 2011
Making Apricot Jam
Instructions for making your own apricot jam
preserving
15:44, 26th Jul 2011
Grow and Make Harissa Paste
A recipe for harissa paste with ingredients you can grow yourself
grow your own
11:57, 30th Jun 2011
Grow Your Own Chilli Peppers
Find out how to grow your own chilli peppers
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16:06, 17th Jun 2011
Dry Chilli Peppers
Find out how to dry fresh chilli peppers
preserving
16:05, 17th Jun 2011
Make Lavender Biscuits
Find out how to make delicious fragrant lavender biscuits
foraging
12:22, 16th Jun 2011
Review of The Treehouse Diaries
A review of the book The TreeHouse Diaries by Nick Weston
Review Of The Treehouse Diaries
books | general | educationThis is a review of The Treehouse Diaries - How to live wild in the woods by Nick Weston and published by Collins & Brown (ISBN 978-1-84340-564-4), available here from Amazon:
buy The Treehouse Diaries.
Nick Weston is a survival and foraging expert and part time cook who took part in Channel 4's Shipwrecked in 2008. In 2009 Nick decided to escape the London rat-race and live off the land for 6 months in a treehouse he would build himself in the woods of Sussex using natural and recycled materials. This book is his diary from the start of April to the end of October 2009 and covers everything from designing and building the treehouse, to hunting, gathering, growing, and cooking food, and life in the woods.
At the beginning of the book photographically illustrated instructions for building a wood burning stove from an oil drum are then followed by a further 40 pages in which the full treehouse build is described and explained, again with plenty of photographs. It was a good idea to pull all this out from the body of the diary and put it together in one passage as it would otherwise be spread throughout the book and be less easy to read and follow. Insufficient information is given if you are planning on building your own treehouse, but what there is certainly gives the reader plenty to think about (and this book is not meant to be an instruction manual on treehouse design and construction).
What follows is the daily diary itself which is interspersed with snippets of information on various flora and forna (e.g. hops, puffballs, wild garlic, the buzzard, mink), recipes (e.g. blackberry fool, nettle beer, elderflower champagne) and instructional guides (e.g. how to make acorn coffee, how to make an underground oven, how to cure a rabbit pelt, how to smoke pigeon).
The book is certainly very pleasant to read and should be enjoyed by anyone who has ever aspired to live in the woods, or who played as a child building treehouses and dens. I personally would prefer to have had a bit more practical information and a bit less on the author's love life and his attempts to publicise himself and this book, but superfluous information is easily skipped and does not make the book any less readable. The Internet Resources section at the end of the book lists only three websites which was disappointing as a book such as this leaves people wanting to find out more.
Nick Weston's blog can be read here: huntergathercook.com.
Article Published: 10:17, 26th Jul 2010
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