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The River Itchen - My First Time Fishing for Trout on a quintessential beautiful English Chalk Stream

5/31/2015

The Beautiful River Itchen

The Lower Itchen Fishery, is an absolutely stunning quintessential English chalk stream. It's just picture perfect. Clear water, broken by chalk runs and green streamer weed.

The trout are usually around the 2lb mark. They catch around 300 salmon a year from this stretch and there is a huge run of sea trout.

We found that, Grey Wolfs and GRHEs were the flies to use on the day. Although we did catch on Adams, when the trout were feeding off of olives.

It was a wonderful days trout fishing on a picture perfect English chalk stream.

A classic Itchen Brown Trout.

The Lower Itchen

Another Itchen Brown Trout

The Grayling run to over 3lbs

Crystal clear watchers of the Lower Itchen

A classic Itchen Brown Trout

Another River Itchen Grayling

River Itchen Brown Trout

Baked Itchen Trout

River Itchen Trout on the plate.

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Foraging for Edible Spring Plants along the Bristol Frome

5/15/2015

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Hairy Bittercress - tastes just like water cress.

Today I took my 8 year old daughter and our dog to see if we could find and forage for some of the common spring edible plants. We found quite a lot within a very short space of time. We found bittercress as soon as we stepped out of the front door. It tastes pretty much like water cress and was growing against our driveway wall. The rest of these edible plants were found growing along the Bristol Frome within a few hundred yards of our house..

Another picture of the Hairy Bittercress that we found.

Wild Garlic - Bristol Frome

Wild Garlic growing close to the Bristol Frome

Crow Garlic or Wild Chives/ Onion - amazing foraging find. These have a really strong oniony flavour.

Another picture of the wild chives/ garlic this time I dug a couple up to show the bulbs. Commonly known as Crow Garlic.

Hedge Garlic. Note the Ground Elder growing around it. Ground elder is also edible.

Cow Parsley or Wild Chervil

Be careful of picking Hemlock (pictured), when foraging for Cow Parsley, as it is deadly. Hemlock has obviously blood spotted stems, as opposed to hairy, silver stems with Cow Parsley. Hemlock also smells nasty when rubbed, as opposed to chervil like with Cow Parsley.

Another confusion species Hemlock Water Dropwort (Water Hemlock). This is deadly poisonous. Care must be taken not to confuse Cow Parsley with either Hemlock or Water Hemlock. The latter 2 are very poisonous!

Lesser Celandine - should be cooked. This was growing along the Bristol Frome, along with all the other plants that I took pictures of today.

Another picture of the heart shape leaves of Lesser Celandine (should be cooked).

Comfrey - young spears can be picked in March and eaten raw in salads. Older leaves boiled like spinach.

Bitter Vetch - the tubers can be eaten.

Stinging Nettles - boiled and eaten like spinach, the ability to sting is destroyed via cooking.

Dead Nettle - treat as above:

Balm - Lemon Scented - Balm can be used as a herbal tea or to flavour drinks

Ground Ivy makes a good herbal tea

Wild Mustard can be found growing everywhere. It's flowers and young leaves have the same hot flavour as mustard. Used sparingly can add flavour to salads for example.

Chick Weed - makes tender wild greens

Red Valerian - a tad bitter, but very young leaves can be cooked as greens.

Goosegrass (sticky weed) can be boiled up and used as greens, like spinach.

Sheep Sorrell

Common Sorrel - if you chew a young leaf you will get an amazing and unexpected taste of lemon. Sorrel adds an great twist of lemon flavour to food such as soups and fish.

Thistle's stems are surprisingly good to eat. Just strip them back to the stems and then cook them.

A field full of Common Sorrel, clover and Pig Nuts all are edible.

A Pig Nut one of my favourite edibles. See my Pig Nut Blog.

Crab Apples - here there are a mass of trees on the Bristol Ring Road. Deer love to eat them, which is why we may sadly see deer run over on this spot on several occasions.?

Plantain - the very young leaves are dwindle as greens. The seeds have an interesting nutty taste.

Horseradish - see my post on how to make creamed horseradish sauce.

Camomile - can be used to make Camomile Tea.

The large root of the Burdock plant is edible. It's very good sautéed or roasted.

We have Wood Sorrel on our driveway. For some reason both the Wood Sorrel & the Bittercress turn red on out driveway as they get older?

Another Picture of Wood Sorrel. This one was growing against a pub wall. It has a similar lemony taste to the Common and Sheep's Sorrel, despite the difference in appearance.

Ground Elder. I've seen Dog Mercury growing amongst Ground Elder, which is poisonous. Both carpet the floor and before the Ground Elder flowers, can be confused. Make sure you can tell the difference.

Silver Weed - Easily Identified by its Silver Underside. The roots can be cultivated and eaten, boiled, baked or raw.

The Edible Roots of the Silverweed Plant

Silverweed and it's pretty yellow flower.

A huge bed of wild water cress.

Elderflowers can be used for Elderflower Champagne. The recipe is in another of my blog posts.

Meadow Sweet - it's unique flavoured flower make a good alternative to Elderflowers in making Elderflower Champagne.

Wild Carrot - identified by the tiny blue/ purple spot in the middle of the white flower. I found this one today in the grounds of a hospital. They have small carrot like roots that are often white, rather than orange. When rubbed they smell just like the carrot that we all know and recognise.

Another confusion species according to others. Lords & Ladies or Cuckoo Pint. Some people believe that you can confuse this poisonous plant with Sorrel, as they have similar shaped leaves. Although I'm not personally convinced. The Lords & Ladies plant is associated with woodland? Has dark green and veiny leaves, that are much thicker. As it matures it's reproduction parts are obvious. Sorrel is associated with meadows, fields & verges and is an altogether much taller and finer plant. The reproduction parts are very different. The leaves in general, much smaller, finer and paler. But please do research before hand to ensure that you can tell the differences.

The tiny little but tasty wild strawberry

Wild Parsnip

Wild Parsnips

The wild parsnip root, it looks and smells just like the cultivated parsnip that we all know, it's just smaller.

The small wild parsnip.

Wild Raspberries - yummy!

Cuckoo Flower or Lady's Smock

Lady's Smock or Cuckoo Flower - very peppery. The flowers are milder.

Cuckoo Flower or Lady's Smock - here in the grounds of the Royal Glamorgan Hospital

Penny Wart a beautiful salad leaf, here with cheese and wild cherry chutney.

Penny Wart growing on an old roof.

Three-Cornered Leek. A member of the Allium family. And yes they taste like leeks. Milder than Ransom but a similar taste. Love them. They often flower abs grow amongst the blue bells.

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