Jam Today.

It has been dry all day with a warm wind blowing and I was so tempted to work outside but there was jam to be made. I cooked up 4 kilos of jam which should last quite a while. Some friends came round just as I had started so I turned down the heat and kept on stirring while we had coffee and caught up with family news as we don't see them that often. Peter had gone off gig rowing so he missed the visit.
As I had so much blackcurrant puree I thought I would see what else I could come up with. Yesterday I added lots to a basic cake recipe and made the very purple looking cake. I thought it was lovely but Peter didn't like it. Today I put blackcurrant puree in half of some cake mixture and kept the other half vanilla. Then I made cup cakes with both flavours of the mixture. (There was another batch in the oven.) I can freeze these for when we have visitors. I thought a cream cheese frosting with a drizzle of blackcurrant jam might go nicely on them. (Guess who watches Cupcake Wars?)
Yesterday evening we were sat watching Strictly Come Dancing on TV, (we turn into dance experts each year and really enjoy all aspects of the programme apart from the voting), when one of the 'filler' scenes took place on a city farm in London. Imagine our surprise to recognise Stepping Stones Farm, or as it is known now Stepney Farm. We were involved with the running of the farm, nearly 30 years ago, when it had been open for only a year. I served on the committee for several years and was even chairperson for one year.

Photo from Google images.

I used to teach half of each day and spent a lot of my free time beyond those gates, helping to develop the farm, organise events and generally helping our 2 paid members of staff. It was there that I learnt to milk goats and to shear a sheep with hand clippers.

Also from Google images.

We did a lot of work with local youngsters including from the Traveller community. I ran a pony club where the kids cleaned all the tack, groomed the ponies and finally took it in turns to have a lesson on our 3 ponies in this field which was one big field in those days. We also had a number of big open areas to ride on next to us. These were bomb sites from the war. The farm had ponies, goats, calves, sheep, chickens, ducks and rabbits and there were allotments for local people to grow veg.

Each year we would organise a horse show which was attended by youngsters from 2 other nearby city farms, The Mudchute and Spitalsfields Farm. That's me judging in the middle. The black horse on the end is my horse Meg whom I had bought from Lee Valley stables, now upgraded to Olympic standard for 2012, where I used to go for lessons.

There were also a surprising number of horses and ponies being kept privately in Stepney and I exercised and looked after some of those. This is Cream Boy, a section C Welsh cob stallion who was a driving rather than a riding horse and could be 'fun' to ride in traffic. I looked after him for a number of years and I was still riding him when I was pregnant with Vytas, much to my mother's horror.
I may have been living in the East End but I have always been a country girl at heart and as well as the farm and horses I was involved with the Cable Street Community Gardens and the East End Wildlife Group and got to see a lot of the wilder parts of this very urban area. I expect now that it has all been developed and there are no more wild places besides the canals or on the abandoned railway lines.