Matthew Crawford

Hi, I'm not sure about mixing with other berries, but please may I come and stay with you? I'm bored of my country and I love mountains.

Thanks folk,

I live in sw England and have inherited a large patch of black currants (as well as jostaberries) as part of the agroforestry land I help manage. However lots of people have their own black currants round here so I need a Unique Selling Point...yes we make some jams etc but they are common too, and I personally have given up eating sugar so would like some way of preserving them without using sugar (even no fructose).

Leaving them on the bush to dry is tricky because the blackbirds take them...better I pick them as soon as they are ripe -if there are recipies for unripe black currants that would also help me!!!

I have heard of something called pemmican which I would love to try one day but I don't have livestock.
I have some pig farmer friends but I am not sure I have time to sort out with them drying their meat and combining with black currants, and I have no idea how it's done anyway or what regulations we may have to follow.

I think I'll just try picking them when they are ripe (hopefully before the blackbirds) and drying them above the woodburner in the wooden cottage I live in.

If they are very tart as has been suggested....I wonder what to combine with? We have plenty of natural herbs growing on the land that we make teas from, but I guess making all the blackcurrants into a tea mix is a bit of a waste as the blackcurrants themselves aren't ingested...

...or can they be combined with some vegetable? ...or perhaps I put a serving suggestion on the packaging, like, 'good with meat and cheese' or something?

I wonder, once dried, how long they store? I could wait until I shoot some squirrels in the winter and make 'squirrel pemmican' ?!!

All very useful, thankyou. Time to contemplate and experiment now.

Please has anyone got tips on how to dry blackcurrants and then store or package for selling?

Hi, I am quite new to keeping ducks...kept a few pekin and they slept in a house on the ground. Want to integrate with the woodland where I live and get a tougher breed so...
...has anyone heard of Muscovies successfully being kept to roost in trees? would the way to do this be
1) gradually 'train' them to roost in the trees
2) just don't give them anything to sleep in...let them find their own cover (what about the winter?)

And how do you get eggs from them if they wake up on a branch in the morning? Do they lay nearby always or anywhere they choose or what?

I was thinking of building a shelter, a kind of treehouse with some open sides but a rougher and quicker (less energy expenditure) structure than building a proper shelter as was done for the pekins, with a big branch running through the middle of it or something like that, but actually resting on big posts in the ground, so the branch(es) move freely through the middle of the structure. Anyone done something similar?

Thanks!