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Since moving here I’ve been blessed with the best counter space I’ve ever had. So for this series I decided to start a fresh batch and show you the first thirty days in the life of a vinegar.

You’ll see me use the word wsad. In Polish it loosely means “insert”: whatever fruit, flower or herb goes into the ferment. This time my wsad is marigold (Tagetes). It isn’t a classic like apple, and if you’re new to vinegar I’d still recommend starting with fruit. But I have litres of apple, apple-and-cardamom and plum vinegar to last me at least a year. So I chose something with a different flavour: one of my favourite garden flowers, and a staple of Polish flower borders to this day.

The science made simple

Every vinegar is made in two stages, by two different groups of microbes.

1. Sugar to alcohol. Yeasts eat the sugars in your wsad and sweetening and turn them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This is the lively, bubbly stage. Flowers carry very little sugar of their own, so with marigold almost all of it comes from the sugar you add.

2. Alcohol to acetic acid. Acetic acid bacteria (Acetobacter and their relatives) take that alcohol and oxidise it into acetic acid, the acid that makes vinegar sour. As they work, they also build the vinegar mother: a rubbery sheet of cellulose that floats on the surface.

Acetobacter needs three things:

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It’s the drink my mum or grandma made me every time I was poorly as a kid. It was served warm, just before I was tucked tightly into bed under a heavy duck down duvet, to properly heat the body up and let the medicine do its work. Every time, I’m convinced I feel better the next day. What I definitely get is a deep, heavy sleep.

The drink most likely hit its peak in communist-era Poland, the PRL years as we call it. Milk, butter, garlic and honey were in every home, while medicines were often scarce. That’s probably why so many people of my generation know it from their mums and grandmas.

When I described mixing milk and garlic to friends back in the day they usually responded with horror. Trust me, it’s actually considered delicious. This weekend I felt something was lurking, so I made a cup and decided to share the recipe as soon as my eyeballs allow me to cope with the screen.

The recipe

• 1 cup of whole milk

• 1 teaspoon of butter

• 1–2 garlic cloves, crushed

• 1 teaspoon of honey

1. Crush the garlic and leave it to sit for about 10 minutes.

2. Warm the milk with the butter until hot but not boiling, around 60 Celsius.

3. Stir in the garlic.

4. Let it cool a little, then stir in the honey.

5. Drink it hot, then straight to bed under the heaviest duvet you own.

Garlic: the “natural antibiotic”

Garlic earns its reputation in the lab, though the story in the body is more modest. A whole clove is fairly inert. When you crush it, an enzyme called alliinase meets a compound called alliin and converts it into allicin. Allicin gives garlic its sharp smell and does most of its antimicrobial work. I often wonder if Spaniards got it right with their Pan Catalan style with garlic rubbed into the bread. I always feel like I am more protected after having it, despite the lab tests not showing so.

Poles have trusted garlic for a very long time. Szymon Syreniusz’s Zielnik (Herbal), published in Kraków in 1613, was the largest Polish herbal of the Renaissance. Among its remedies for plague, or “morowe powietrze” (pestilent air), it listed onion and garlic alongside angelica, valerian and tormentil. That gives garlic as a defence against disease and “bad air” at least 400 years of documented tradition in Poland.

Practical tip: crush the garlic and let it sit for about 10 minutes before adding it. Heat stops the enzyme working (from roughly 60°C), so this gives it time to make allicin first. Then add it to milk that’s hot, not boiling.

Milk and butter

The fat is what turns raw garlic into something you’d actually want to drink. Research on garlic breath found that whole milk, and the fat in particular, binds and neutralises garlic’s sulphur compounds. So the milk tempers the harshness, though it probably dampens a little of the garlic’s potency too.

Warm fat also coats a sore, scratchy throat. Butter acts as a soothing demulcent, a bit like a lozenge. I use All Things Butter brand because I love the approach the brand’s founder, chef Thomas Straker, takes to butter. A friend of mine described him as looking like “a homeless man cooking insane stuff on my Instagram feed”, which is true. Check his Instagram out.

The old idea that milk increases mucus isn’t supported by studies; some people simply notice the coating feeling. I generally don’t drink milk at all, not in my tea or anything else. But on Monday, when I felt something was lurking, I got a bottle of full-fat, unhomogenised organic milk, which I was surprised to find in Sainsbury’s.

Honey

Honey is the best-evidenced part of the cup. Reviews, including a 2020 Oxford analysis, found honey worked better than usual care for coughs and upper respiratory symptoms. It soothes the throat and may calm the cough reflex.

Milk with honey is an even older layer of the tradition. For the Slavs, honey was the main sweetener and a medicine long before sugar arrived. Warm milk with honey for a sore throat and cough turns up across Central and Eastern Europe, from Poland to Ukraine and Russia. Butter was added to coat the throat and warm you up.

Adding it at the end, when the milk is no longer too hot, is right, and our grandmothers knew it. Heat breaks down honey’s enzymes, including glucose oxidase, which produces small amounts of hydrogen peroxide. It also degrades some of honey’s more delicate compounds.

I always use whatever nice local honey I can find. Earlier today I chatted with a friend about Manuka honey. Despite claiming to be superior, it’s one of the most faked food products in the world, so I go local, ideally from someone I kind of know.

Warmth, sleep and healing

The ritual around the drink may matter as much as what’s in it. Mum and grandma’s instinct to get me hot and asleep has real science behind it.

A hot drink eases symptoms. A study at Cardiff’s Common Cold Centre found a hot drink relieved runny nose, cough, sneezing, sore throat, chills and tiredness. The same drink at room temperature helped far less. Steam also helps loosen congestion.

Cold viruses like it cool. Yale researchers found that the common cold virus replicates more easily at the cooler temperature inside the nose, around 33°C, than at core body temperature of 37°C. At the cooler temperature, airway cells produced less interferon, one of the body’s antiviral defence molecules. That work was done in mouse cells, so it isn’t proof that a duvet cures a cold. But one of the researchers suggested that keeping the nose warm, even with a scarf, could help hold the virus back. Grandma’s tucking-in suddenly looks less like folklore.

Warmth helps you fall asleep. A warm drink warms your hands and feet, which releases heat and lets your core temperature drop. That drop is one of the body’s main signals to fall asleep. Warm milk also contains tryptophan and some calming milk-protein fragments. The amounts are small, so the comfort of the ritual probably does more than the chemistry.

Sleep is the real medicine. In a 2015 study, 164 healthy adults had their sleep tracked for a week and were then given cold virus nasal drops. Those sleeping under six hours a night were about four times more likely to catch the cold than those sleeping over seven. Sleep predicted who got sick more strongly than stress, age, smoking or income. Your immune system does much of its work while you’re asleep, so a drink that reliably knocks you out may be doing most of its good by getting you a deep night’s rest.

A gentle caution: warm and cosy is the aim, not overheating. If someone, especially a child, has a high fever, don’t bundle them up so much that they can’t cool down.

So, does it work?

There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? A mix of honey for the throat and cough, fat to soothe and make the garlic bearable, garlic as a gentle extra, and warmth and deep sleep doing the heavy lifting. If you take blood thinners, go easy on large amounts of raw garlic.

I had ambitious plans to share my recent harvesting and pantry tips. For now, here’s a remedy in case you or someone you know needs it. The celery harvest is to follow soon.

Say “vinegar” in Britain and most people will picture malt vinegar, shaken generously over fish and chips on a cold seafront. Say it to a French cook and they’ll reach for red wine vinegar for their vinaigrette. In a Polish kitchen it’s the clear 10% spirit vinegar, the workhorse behind every jar of pickled cucumbers and mushrooms my grandmothers ever lined up on a shelf. And a Portuguese friend will happily talk you through the artisanal vinegars their country quietly excels at, for longer than you planned to listen.

So vinegar takes many forms, and we’ll dig into its long history in another post. Today I want to untangle two methods that people mix up all the time, because both belong in this series and they are genuinely different things:

• Infused vinegar is a finished vinegar (usually shop-bought apple cider or wine vinegar) with herbs, spices or fruit steeped in it. Nothing new is being made. The vinegar is simply a solvent, pulling flavour and some compounds out of whatever you drop into it.

• Fermented vinegar is made from scratch. Fruit, flowers or herbs with water and a little sugar go through two living fermentations: yeasts first turn sugar into alcohol, then acetic acid bacteria turn that alcohol into vinegar. The plant is part of the whole process from day one, not added at the end.

One is an afternoon job. The other is a slow, living craft that takes months. Both are worth having in the cupboard.

Infused vinegars: the quick way to bottle a flavour

Most of us reach for vinegar in the kitchen first, and that’s exactly where infused vinegars shine. A good infusion carries the character of whatever went into the bottle, so one splash brings both the tang and the herb, the fruit or the spice. It lifts a dressing, deglazes a pan, sharpens a soup at the last minute, or wakes up a plate of roasted roots in the dead of winter.

They’re quick and forgiving. Pack a clean jar loosely with your chosen plant, cover it completely with vinegar, lid it (a plastic lid or a layer of baking paper under metal, as vinegar eats metal - and you will see some evidence what happens when you learn without knowing this fact), and leave it somewhere dark for two to four weeks. Strain, bottle, label. That’s it.

A few favourites from my garden:

• Thyme. Woody, warming and slightly resinous. A thyme vinegar turns a basic potato salad or a tray of roasted beetroot into something you’d pay for in a restaurant. A few sprigs of rosemary or a bay leaf alongside work beautifully.

• Chive blossom. If you only try one this year, make it this one. In late spring, snip the purple pompom flowers just as they open and drop them into white wine or apple cider vinegar. Within days the whole bottle blushes a gorgeous pink and picks up a soft, sweet onion note. It’s the prettiest thing in my pantry and gorgeous over cucumber salad or new potatoes.

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This week I finally went through some of the jars I’d had stored in various spots around the place, and one thing stood out: ferments kept in Kilner jars were less likely to survive.

The jar that caught my eye held cucumber chunks, made last year I think – honestly, I’m not sure. I’ve got a few jars older than that which st…

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How it all started

Just like with lacto-fermentation, my vinegar journey began with a glut. This time it was apples. When I took on my allotment, it came with three old apple trees, overgrown and dormant. After two seasons of pruning, they started producing like crazy. I couldn’t let anything go to waste. So after a few rounds of whole lacto-fermented apples, I went to the Motherload for inspiration.

The Motherload is what I call the Polish Internet. Women in Poland have taken Facebook groups to another level: dozens of recipes, methods, local variations, old forgotten techniques. You name it, it’s there. One group is literally called Ziołowe Słoiki, “Herby Jars.” Whatever knowledge you’re looking for or want to share, it’s welcome there. That’s where I discovered homemade vinegar.

I started with one or two. As the season went on, I realised how much more could go into a jar, and how many flavours and uses I could unlock. Imagine a raspberry and mint vinegar whisked into a vinaigrette, or a plantain hair tonic that brings the shine back without any chemicals. My slightly ADHD brain found a new obsession and embraced it wholly. Very quickly I learned what mould looks like, that fruit flies can drive you to madness, and that every step of the process matters just as much as the next.

What vinegar gave me

Once I had all these vinegars, I had no excuse not to use them. I made a facial mist, a hair tonic, a cleaning spray, and cooling compresses for hot days. I drank them in warm and cold drinks, and I cooked with them far more than I expected. Bilberry vinegar with honey and soda water is one of the most refreshing summer drinks there is. And a spoonful of fire cider keeps me going when the evenings turn cold and demanding on the body.

Twenty years ago I’d have dismissed all of this as having no real effect. But I’ve seen it first hand.

At one of our tasting evenings with Triangle Bakery, Fermentation Sensation, guests tried their own baked sourdough, local cheeses and a selection of fermented snacks and sauces. We began with a glass of water with a little apple vinegar in it. A tablespoon of vinegar diluted in water before a carb-heavy meal has been shown to reduce the glucose spike by up to around 30%. Over the evening we tried two more vinegars the same way.

As she was leaving, one lady told me she was type 1 diabetic and wore a glucose monitor. After bread like that, she said, her reading would normally be around 25, but that night it was 15. She was convinced the vinegar had helped.

I can’t prove every claim myself, and I’d never suggest vinegar in place of medical advice. But people who try these old methods often report back to me, and that’s how we all learn. That’s the spirit of those Polish groups. It’s also why I think it matters: so much of what fills our kitchen cupboards now is made in a factory. For most of us living in towns and cities that’s simply reality, but we can still reclaim some old wisdom if we give it a good go.

What I didn’t expect to learn

• It’s not a fast game. The longer you give the process, the better the result.

• It’s a bit smelly at first, but after all the hassle the end result is beautiful.

• I’d have to learn the life cycle of a fruit fly. Hey ho. Make vinegar and you’ll learn to be at one with them.

• Resting and ageing matter as much as fermenting. That’s where the depth of flavour develops.

• I’d actually use them all, in the kitchen and the bathroom especially.

• It would sharpen my senses. Often I could smell a ferment turning long before I could see any mould. That same nose now picks out subtle notes, and my taste buds work out which herb in the mix has taken over.

So why is vinegar good for you?

The star of the show is acetic acid, the compound your ferment works so hard to create. When you drink a little diluted vinegar before a meal, it slows down how quickly your stomach empties and how fast starches are broken down into sugar. Your muscles also take up glucose more readily. The result is a gentler rise in blood sugar instead of a sharp spike, and that’s why the tasting-evening glass of water made such a difference. Some studies also suggest vinegar helps you feel fuller for longer, and a small Japanese trial found people taking a daily spoonful lost a little more weight and belly fat than those who didn’t.

Homemade, raw vinegar brings something extra. It carries the polyphenols and antioxidants of whatever you fermented, whether that’s apples, bilberries, raspberries or herbs. It’s also alive, cloudy with its mother, unlike the pasteurised bottles on the supermarket shelf. And its natural acidity is the reason our grandmothers used it to clean, preserve and soothe long before anyone measured anything.

A few words of care: always dilute it, because neat vinegar is hard on tooth enamel and your throat, and a straw helps. If you have reflux, are on diabetes medication or diuretics, or have any health condition, talk to your doctor before making it a daily habit.

Before you start, ask yourself honestly:

• Do I have counter space at room temperature where I can tend to my baby vinegar every day for the first month?

• Do I have a room-temperature spot where it can keep fermenting, with weekly check-ins after that first intense month?

• Do I have a cupboard or storage space cooler than room temperature where it can age in peace?

• Can my household cope with a funky-smelling room for a while?

If your space and your family pass the trust test, you’re ready for one of the most fascinating flavour journeys there is. Get excited!

Coming up for paid subscribers: the full method step by step, stirred vs unstirred, with or without a mother, every disaster I’ve had (yes, including the wet-dog vinegar) and how to avoid it, how to test your acidity, storage, and my graded list of every flavour I’ve made. Upgrade to come along for the whole season.

Apologies for missing last week’s notes. We moved our tiny home to a new spot down the road, and although it wasn’t far at all, it still took us two days. I also finally got to unpack my beloved teas and herbs, which raised the question of where on earth all the jars are going to live. Rob has been tasked with a new shelf. Meanwhile the garden was left to get on with it. The weather is still kind and nothing needs urgent attention.

Changing the beds

The season is turning, though, and we have some interesting improvements planned for the next few weeks. We’re reworking the raised beds, dividing three huge ones into six narrower ones. A narrow path will run down the middle of each original bed, so every new bed can be weeded or harvested within arm’s reach from the path or the side. Less walking on the soil means less compaction, so we can build a good soil structure that is properly aerated and easier for roots to grow through.

Goodbye, courgettes

The summer courgettes were officially terminated on Tuesday, and I was impressed by how long each stem had grown. Oddly, I planted six and ended up with nine. Towards the end of the season, three of them produced a baby plant at the base of the stem, sadly too late for any meaningful fruit. Next time I’ll simply cut them off to save the plant’s energy. They had a right good run, and I’m truly courgetted-out for the season.

What’s going in for autumn and winter

For autumn and winter we have a few salads and radishes sown, and the spring leeks have popped up. These will probably stay in deep pots until the beds are changed over. Usually I’d grow plenty of mizuna, lamb’s lettuce and late root veg, but with the bed makeover I’m keeping the workload to a minimum.

If you sowed beetroot in August, there’s still time for it to bulk up a few roots before winter. Colder mornings actually help here: as temperatures drop, some of the starch in the root turns to sugar, so it becomes sweeter and stores better.

Tomatoes telling tales

You can spot the cooler nights on any remaining tomatoes. A purple hue on the underside of the leaves signals phosphorus deficiency. Often the phosphorus isn’t actually missing from the soil; plants just struggle to take it up when temperatures drop. We often see the same thing in spring. The days may be lovely, but the nights are leaning colder, and plants always show us what’s going on. This morning it was 7 degrees, so the last of the tomatoes need harvesting and preserving before they get too acquainted with the cold and the fungi.

A special mention for parsley

Flat-leaf parsley deserves a special mention this year. It has been absolutely phenomenal despite the heat. I grew it from seed this spring; it took three long weeks to germinate, then grew slowly but steadily. It had one hiccup while I was on holiday, when it ended up in a hot, closed greenhouse sitting in an inch of standing water. Not the best combo for any plant! It shook that off, and once transplanted into the beds around May it settled in happily next to the scorzonera.

I’m convinced the key was the worm tea, plus a magnesium spray I gave all the plants morning and evening during the hottest weeks. The shine on it is insane. The texture is firm and crunchy rather than chewy, and the flavour is dense and aromatic. A friend came over for dinner recently, and the one thing he singled out from the whole meal was how intense and fresh the parsley was. It’s going into a blinding salsa next week!

Top tip: get your mulch now

For anyone preparing their soil for winter: get your mulch now! Many forests and public parks have resumed mowing and tidying for autumn walkers, so there’s plenty of good mulch material lying around. I was lucky enough to find freshly mown grass in a local forest, but you can also use your neighbour’s grass clippings, the leaves that have just started falling, or old hay and straw. Choose the really tired, rained-on kind of hay and straw rather than fresh. Fresh straw is very high in carbon, and as soil life breaks it down it borrows nitrogen from the soil, which can leave plants yellow. Lay your mulch on thickly to protect the soil from cold, drying winds, heavy frosts and birds scratching about.

Most gardeners focus on physical compost, spreading it on their beds at the end of the season as a dense, chunky, black layer. But that isn’t the ‘food’ for your plants, per se. Plants don’t have teeth to chew a nice piece of phosphorus off, so they need nutrients in liquid form to absorb them easily. Think of a smoothie or a protein drink: mineral-dense, but easily taken up through the roots and built into the plant tissue. Solid compost is still important. It builds soil structure, and its nutrients will gradually wash down into the soil beneath, where plants can reach them in the right conditions.

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I’d never been to a Seed Talks event before and wasn’t sure what to expect. What I found was a beautiful auditorium at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, full to the brim with people who wanted to hear about gut health. Uplifting! The talk was in two 45-minute sessions. I was quietly pleased that the first was almost like-for-like with what I present in my own workshops. It’s satisfying to have a proper nutritionist confirm what I’d learned by following my gut, reading books and lurking in the depths of Polish housewife Facebook groups. The second part was where I only had a basic understanding: how the nervous system works, how certain neurotransmitters are made and what they do, and how nutrition and brain function are connected. Truly fascinating.

The talk

The talk was given by Natasha Draycott, a nutritionist specialising in eating for brain function. Her overall message was that digestion is about more than what you eat. You need a calm nervous system to digest properly.

She also talked about fibre, which many of us, probably including me, aren’t getting enough of, and kiwis came up as an easy win. It turns out green kiwi has just become the first fresh fruit ever to earn an official EU health claim: that eating green kiwifruit contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency. The EU is notoriously strict about these claims, so that’s no small thing. The research behind it points to two green kiwis a day, or about 200g of flesh. Golden kiwi, she added, has more vitamin C than an orange.

There was a short section on fermented foods. She said sauerkraut and kimchi are the superior ferments, mainly thanks to the variety of bacteria they contain. Sorry, tempeh!

The vagus nerve and a free hack

The vagus nerve is the two-way line between brain and gut. The nerve cells of your gut begin life in the same part of the early embryo as your brain, then migrate down to the gut, so the two are closely connected from the very start. As we develop, the traffic expands, and about 90% of it runs from gut to brain. Around 90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the gut too. That serotonin doesn’t travel up to the brain itself, but what’s happening in your gut shapes the raw materials and signals your brain works with, so good food matters. We think our brain is running the show, but the gut has more say than we give it credit for.

I also learned that the vagus nerve responds to vibration. So here’s a simple hack for better digestion: hum for 1–2 minutes before a meal to relax the vagus nerve and prime your digestion.

When I heard that, I immediately thought of all the traditions around meals: saying grace, singing, giving thanks, celebratory songs and poetry at the table. She got all of us humming together for a few long seconds, and it was glorious with nearly 300 people in the room.

Being among people who care about gut health was fantastic, but in the break I overheard chats that made it clear most people still know very little about it. That’s what finally pushed me to commit to writing regularly and sharing what I learn along the way, so more of us can stick two fingers up at Big Ag and Big Pharma and take small steps towards homestead freedom. Don’t hand over your money for nutrient-poor veg, grow your own, properly. Spend on proper nutrition first, because so much of what we end up treating starts on the plate. (But I’m not a doctor ok, this is friendly advice.) That’s at least some power we can claim, even on a small scale.

Another thing that made me feel yuk this week

This one I saw on Instagram, in a clip from the Transcendence series I saw on @FoodMatters, a healing series of 35 interviews, featuring Dr Libby (@drlibby). Two groups each ate a meal and then swallowed a pill-sized camera. One group had noodles made from scratch: flour, water and a simple broth. The other had supermarket packet noodles with the flavour sachet, washed down with a blue sports drink.

Four hours later, the homemade meal had broken down into what looked like white fluff. The packet noodles still had teeth marks in them, and the blue drink had dyed them blue inside the body. Dr Libby’s question is the one the host says he keeps coming back to: do these things belong in a human body at all? To be fair, he’s upfront that this was a small demonstration, not a large trial. But it’s an image that’s hard to unsee.

Honestly, it made me feel sick. I know a lot of our food is fake, but seeing it at this scale, noodles that were still recognisable after four hours of digestion, was a bit much. A decade ago I developed IBS, and this kind of food, alongside cereal and cheap carbs, was a big part of what I ate. I can’t prove a link, but I can’t help wondering. The way food has been engineered and sold to us over the last couple of decades is, I think, one of the worst things we’ve done to our gut biomes.

Putting it together

What links a humming room in Oxford to a bowl of blue noodles? Two things shape digestion: what you eat and the state you’re in when you eat it.

A rushed, stressed, scrolling-at-your-desk meal reaches a nervous system that isn’t ready to digest, however good the food. Humming for a minute is a small way of telling your body it’s safe to switch into digestion mode. And on the plate, simple homemade food made from ingredients your body recognises is food it knows what to do with.

That’s also where fermentation comes in. Everyday kitchen alchemy like teas, syrups, vinegars and ferments is what I teach at Magic Martyna Ferments. If you’d like to learn how to make them, upgrade to the paid version, and you’ll get my 30-page fermentation workbook as a welcome gift.

This week

• Hum before a meal. Just one or two minutes, and see how it feels.

• Tell me: packet noodles, still in the cupboard, or gone for good?

For good health there’s a lot to look after: the brain, the diet, exercise, daylight and good sleep. But so much of it depends on the food we eat, and sadly, in my opinion, most of the food in Britain is now substandard. That’s before we even get to school and hospital meals. Generally, what’s available on the high street just isn’t right. We deserve better, and I think we have to claim it ourselves.

You’ve asked so here it is! This is the mayo we’ve made at home for about a year now — no shop-bought jar has stood a chance since. One tall jar, a stick blender, and about a minute of actual effort.

You’ll need:

• A 1.5l jar — tall and narrow enough to fit a stick blender in with room to move

• 3 eggs

• 400ml olive oil (we use a spicy, extra virgin green one — it makes a real difference to the flavour)

• 3 tsp English mustard

• 25ml apple cider vinegar

• A gherkin, about kornishon-sized (a fermented courgette works just as well — same method, and it’s in the fermentation course PDF every paid subscriber already has)

• A good 6–8 pinches of salt

• Black pepper

• 2 tsp garlic powder

Method: Crack the eggs into the bottom of the jar, then add everything else on top, oil last. Sink the stick blender all the way to the bottom and blitz — it’ll emulsify almost immediately, but keep going for 30–45 seconds for a better consistency. If it’s not thick enough for your liking, add a little more oil and blend again — strangely, more oil makes it thicker, not oilier. Refrigerate for a couple of hours to let it firm up to proper mayo consistency. Thanks to the fermented cucumber it lasts a lot longer in the fridge than normal mayo, though here it disappears really quick!

Once you’ve got the base down, it’s a playground: smoked paprika, extra garlic, extra herbs — make it yours.

This is just “How faces age”

Gut health gets blamed — or credited — for almost everything these days. Mental health, we talk about constantly. Thyroid health, I know a little too well myself, having grown up in the shadow of the post-Chernobyl cloud, in a part of the world where thyroid problems run through most of the women in my family and half the region besides. But skin and hair health? Almost nobody’s raving about the gut connection there, and I think that’s a shame, because it might be the most visible proof of all that this stuff works.

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Talking to a friend last week, and watching more and more people I know — close friends and looser connections alike — move their kids from classroom to home education, took me right back to my own patchwork of teaching over the years: Incredible AquaGarden, Halifax Academy, Climate Challenge College, and one I think about often: a January, mid-lockdown, teaching a small group of kids in a stable on top of a hill in the Yorkshire moors, horses leaning over the door, a gale blowing outside.

It was a strange time. Nobody was sure whose breathing was safe. So while everyone else was staying as far from each other as they could, we were sat on a hay bale with a flip chart, learning about the nitrogen cycle — with a manure pile a few feet away doing a very good job of proving the point.

Looking back, I feel genuinely lucky to have had that experience, and to have lived in that place. It was hard at times, but the hard work paid off in some of the most beautiful moments I’ve had. In retrospect, many people then realised that learning their own way is also possible and serves the kids better than the school curriculum.

The thread: nitrogen, then and now

That flip chart said NITROGEN. Turns out it’s the same word I’d reach for today to explain the easiest, cheapest, most back-to-school-appropriate project going: a wormery. You don’t need to trek to a farm to get some manure, possibly grazed on sprayed fields, you can can be your own farmer, a worm farmer.

Kids are wired for this. Worms are gross enough to be exciting and safe enough to hand over without flinching — which is exactly why every kid in these photos is pulling a different face: delight, fear, disgust, sometimes all three at once (but of course you can’t see it, just trust me). That’s the whole sell.

How to build one (genuinely, this week)

A friend messaged me this morning offering a decent second-hand wormery for £50, and my first thought was “gosh, that’s steep” — the Yorkshire in me talking. You can buy a new one for about £100, or build one properly for a fraction of that:

• Two sturdy plastic boxes from a hardware store — check the thickness. Thin ones split under the weight of wet castings, so it’s worth paying for quality here.

• Drill holes in the smaller box. Kids can do this bit too, with supervision.

  

• The second box sits underneath as a reservoir, catching the worm “juice” that drains through. You’ll need to empty this out from time to time — fair warning, it can get properly gross.

• Fill the inner box with shredded paper (plain, not glossy or laminated), cardboard, egg boxes, or any paper packaging without plastic print or coating on it.

A healthy wormery needs a balance of browns (carbon — your paper and cardboard) and greens (nitrogen — food scraps). Get that right and the whole thing looks after itself over the following weeks or months, depending on the season. The cardboard also soaks up excess moisture, which is what stops a wormery turning into a stinking swamp.

Once your cardboard base is down, start adding a small amount of food scraps — carrot peelings, courgette ends, bean trimmings, cucumber, tomato, banana, strawberry, whatever you and the kids actually eat. Over time you’ll all notice how differently each scrap breaks down, what moulds show up, and how long each one takes to disappear. A wormery quietly teaches more chemistry and biology than most worksheets manage.

Once your browns and greens are sorted, the last thing you need is a starter batch of worms — buy composting worms (Eisenia fetida, or “tiger worms”) online, or ask around at a local gardening or home-ed group. More people have worms tucked away than you’d think.

What it actually gives you back

This is what you’re aiming for, a few months in: dark, crumbly, alive. A handful like this holds millions of beneficial microbes and no shortage of other soil life — it’s essentially concentrated plant food, and adding it straight to soil measurably improves what will grow there. The worm “juice” earns its keep too, diluted as a liquid feed or worked into a potting mix.

The Swiss chard is loving the treatment this year.

Same story, different bed: this cosmos, usually a fairly modest plant, is thriving among the courgettes and cucumbers on the same feed, and the bees clearly agree.

If you want to go one step further than castings alone: paid subscribers got the full compost tea recipe in last week’s post — something I made time for in the garden this year despite everything else going on, and it paid off. If you actually want to get your hands busy, that’s where to get involved.

The ask

Find one small box, ask around locally for a handful of composting worms (or just order some online), and let a kid handle the drilling — supervised, obviously.

It’s a genuinely easy project, and the kind of small, hands-on thing that sticks with a kid — or with you — a lot longer than most of what gets marketed as back-to-school prep this time of year.

And as a fellow millennial, my other recommendation for this theme: go play Worms.

If you build one this week, I’d love to see it — tag me, or just reply to this email with a photo of your wormery-in-progress.

There comes a point in every grower’s summer, though, where storage stops being the problem and volume is. You end up with more courgettes than you know what to do with — it’s hard to say exactly when that tipping point arrives, but if you grow, you know it when it hits. There’s always a hidden “alligator” lurking under a leaf you didn’t check for three days, and suddenly you’re wondering whether it’s still good to cook. My summer has been exactly like this. The garden I’m growing this year has six courgette plants, and they’ve been producing amazingly — mostly thanks to soil treatment: worm castings and compost teas that brought vigour and life to the plants despite dry clay soil, baking heat, and limited watering.

So courgettes have been on the menu all summer, no question.

From the classics to the caviar

We started, of course, with the classic: courgette in tomato sauce. It goes with anything — meatballs, other meats, other vegetables, cold in a lunch box, or hot with potatoes. A little chilli, a little spice, and it’s a warm, nourishing staple of a meal.

We’ve had some roasted too, though not too many — I find them a little soggy that way. It seems the best flavour comes from removing some of the moisture first, either by cooking it out or salting and drawing the water out before you start.

And then, inevitably, comes the point where you can’t eat any more fresh courgette and start thinking about preserving it — locking it all into jars for later.

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“Today is the day.”

That memory came to me this morning, while I was completely overwhelmed with love and joy, petting my cat Nutmeg in the morning sun. He is an absolute delight, an angel of a being — cute, funny, silly, a total cartoon cat. This morning, as he does every morning, he was rolling around outside the door while we got ready for work, peacefully enjoying being alive, off to the side of it all. As I stroked his velvet fur, white and ginger shot through so beautifully with the easterly light coming through the trees, a thought arrived unbidden: how long will I get to enjoy moments like this? He’s getting slowly but surely older, and there’s a death at the end of it. That’s when I remembered today’s date.

Immediately, two thoughts rose up to meet it. One: enjoy the moment, because everything you experience or remember is happening now — so don’t let yourself fall into misery for no reason when what’s in front of you is beautiful (I had the tendency to this doom and gloom). Two: let life surprise you. He may live till twenty-five and end up chief mouser of the farm, peacefully stretched out on the veranda in the setting sun. Those are some of the lessons I’ve had to learn along the way to find peace — a peace that’s now present even when I remember that today “is the day.”

The closure

The moment the grief I’d been carrying truly seemed to dissolve — like ink in water — wasn’t one I expected. I was driving to work, listening to a voice message from a friend in Australia. I’d told her that the emotions around the anniversary somehow creep up on me every year, and I’m not really sure why, given how long ago it all was. Then I told her the story of the evening it happened, and her first word back on the voice note changed everything:

“FUUUCK!!”

I swear, the moment I heard it, something in me just calibrated. It was the first time anyone had met the news with that reaction, and it was exactly what I’d felt back then — I finally felt heard, and seen. This isn’t to take anything away from anyone who’s met me with compassion or sadness on learning this — but that simply wasn’t a place my nervous system had been able to get to for twenty-five years. Only when I heard the shock, the anger, the rage in that one word from across the globe did I feel like I could access everything else that came with it. Credit where it’s due: we met during a powerful mastermind run by Peter Crone, whose work on “grieving with gratitude” has shaped me profoundly in the years since. But it was Nicole who broke the spell, and I’m eternally grateful to her — for truly listening.

Every day above ground

My other friend Mary, who’s in her seventies now, could often be heard saying, “Waking up above ground is already a reason to be grateful.” Hearing this in my late thirties, I lived by it, no matter the circumstances. Gratitude is so important — it was also the first tool I reached for when things were at their hardest. These days, the instant connection and relief comes from practising Heart Coherence, but back then, when my mind and body struggled to focus on anything deeper, a daily one-minute action was the first step toward recovery. I don’t know if it still exists, but there was an app called Presently that nudged me every night at 11pm — yes, I was only just getting to bed at eleven back then, mad to think about now — to write down what I was grateful for that day. And even on the days I felt like writing “nothing,” I made myself think, made myself really look at the world. A bus driver who was kind and smiley. A beautiful pink cloud. A good night’s sleep. I was practising something that eventually became a daily, even hourly, habit — the art of noticing. When we really look around, there’s an infinite amount out there to repair and grow our nervous system with; we just have to exercise the muscle. Sometimes an app is a good place to start.

One evening, a balloon popped on my phone, congratulating me on 250 days of gratitude, and it startled me into looking back through them. I remembered every single one — the day, the moment, the person. I felt all 250 gratitudes again, all at once, and I realised: it’s all out there, all the time. It’s up to me to notice it.

I deleted the app after just over a year — I didn’t need it anymore. Gratitude, love, and appreciating the small moments turned out to be the greatest blessing over the years, slowly training my nervous system to relax and stay at ease. No more walls to build, even when death comes along — and it will, folks, that’s the nature of life. The key is to make space for all the feelings, even the painful and the ugly ones.

*I didn’t expect to write this post at all — it just came to me. And the title that followed it so aptly is in memory of my brother Tomek, who was the one who introduced me to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If you know, you know.

(If you are one of my Skool people: I’ve closed the classrooms and moved everything here instead — same me, same soil-and-ferments world, just landing in your inbox now instead of behind logins and modules. The format’s changed to regular newsletters rather than a static course, but there’s more coming your way through it, not less.)

I want this to be an entertaining journey for anyone hanging along — equally a diary of life passing by, whether that’s the changing seasons in the garden or the kitchen, and a slightly random library of the experiences and knowledge I’ve picked up along the way.

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Truth is, there’s a lot I’d like to share, but I rarely schedule the time to put it into something coherent enough for people like you to actually use. Instagram is both addictive and pointless for this — it never lets the real depth of a story come out. I love posting a picture of something beautiful the moment I capture it, but there’s usually a story behind it too, and the reel-editing does my tits in. I’m old-school enough that I’d rather ramble than edit.

I’m hoping Substack suits the long-form writing I’ve always loved, though I’ll warn you now — I digress. I was an avid reader as a teen, read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings three times before I turned eighteen, and used to lug 600+ page books back from Polish bookshops to fill the hour and a half I spent commuting to and from work when I first moved to the UK, almost twenty years ago. I now live in Oxford and had the pleasure to visit the Master himself.

Fermentation found its way into that same restlessness, years later. After a long stretch of my own gut health struggles, coming back to food that was alive — properly alive, not just fresh — taught me that our bodies are far more capable of healing than we’re often told. That’s the thread running under everything here, even the silly stuff: soil, ferments, and the slow, unglamorous work of feeling well again.

So what you’ll actually find here: a hell of a lot of fermentation content, soil nerding, and general biohacking for lazy people — some professional advice, some opinions, quite a lot of recipes and hacks for toxin-free homes, and the odd bit of nonsense about cats and vibes. Read at your own risk :)

How this actually works, since I know some of you like structure:

Free, for everyone — a note roughly every couple of weeks. Less step-by-step recipe, more the feel of a season or a theme — growing, food, or something more heart-led, whatever’s alive for me at the time.

Paid subscribers get a weekly post every Sunday, alternating between a growing newsletter (soil, compost, the garden apothecary) and a homesteading one (what’s cooking, pantry remedies, home crafts) — proper, practical, and straight to your inbox. You’ll also get the fermentation course that used to live in Skool, now yours to keep for good rather than borrowed from behind a login — it lands in your inbox the moment you join.

If you were part of the Skool community, keep an eye on your inbox — I’ll be sending you something separately as a thank you for being here from before this even had a name.

No pressure either way. See you in September!

Martyna