Jack Pyke Technical Dog Vest - A dog's review

Archie’s review:  We were a tad surprised when Archie took to the laptop after a long walk in the falling snow, but are very pleased to share his review of his new ‘Technical Dog Vest’ made by Jack Pyke. 

Dave-man got me a Fancy-Vest to keep me warm. I’m not too bothered when it’s sunny as my coat is nice and white and not too thick, I enjoy the breeziness in my fur.  But Dave says my new coat will be very useful for when the cold white stuff falls again.  He said it will even help me not sink when I fall off the boat like last time, I don’t really want to talk about that though.

My first thoughts were not too good; Fancy-Vest was brought to Dave’s house by the Bad-man who wears the small trousers, he comes almost every day and pokes things through the hole in the door, sneaky Bad-man is definitely up to no good. 

But when I tried it on, I discovered the Fancy-Vest is very comfy and fits nicely. Dave-man says he got me an extra small but I’m a pretty big dog so there must have been some mistake.  He helped me put it on and tells me it does up with a zipp and Velcro and is made of Neoprene, whatever they are. There’s foamy bits for floating too which you can take out if you want, but I like them because they’re extra warm. 

We crossed the road to go for a walk over the fields and woods.  This is the most dangerous bit of the whole walk because the cars sneak up on you if you’re not looking.  That’s why you have to BARK BARK BARK so that they’re scared of you and drive away. I’m the best at this, Dave-man has to hold me back with my lead or the cars would get too scared of me.  My lead attaches to my Fancy-Vest very cleverly, you can’t even see the silver bits.

Dave lets me off the lead in the field. I run with my mouth open to try to catch the white flakes but all I catch is a wetter colder tongue.  The Fancy-Vest is very easy to move in and feels much warmer, mostly on my tummy where my fur is rather thin. 

In the woods Dave takes ages and doesn’t keep up with me because he’s looking at leaves as usual, he doesn’t like it when I try to lift my leg on them but I thought maybe that would make them smell better.  I find a good stump tree instead and have a snuffle right in it.  I reckon the dumb mice living in the stump tree wont know I’m coming because it turns out I’m invisible in my Fancy-Vest.  The mice seem to have left the stump, probably scared off by impressive digging.  My Fancy-Vest looks just like trees and Dave can’t see me when I keep still. 

Me mice hunting.

As well as invisible, I can also zoom around even faster after those stupid rabbits without getting hurt on sticks and prickly plants, because my Fancy-Vest has armour plating at the front. I’m going to be the best dog hunter in Sussex.

I don't need to use these leaves to be invisible anymore.  Thanks Jack Pyke!

All I need now is Fancy-vest attachment to help me climb trees and get those sneaky squirrels.  

Me working on my plie

iPhone Apps for the Great Outdoors

I’ve been asked by quite a few friends recently what are some of the best apps when it comes to finding your way around in the wild. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would consider this heresy but when if comes to nature there’s room for everyone. Here are a few of the apps that I personally use and think can accentuate the outdoor experience.

Chirp+ £1.99 - This is a great app for identifying and learning bird songs. Most of the European breeds are included often with multiple calls for each bird. When you’re not outdoors you can listen through specific birds song or watch a slideshow swat up and then take the test when you think you are ready. With a little time you’ll be amazed how much it changes your perspective of a walk in the country.

Spyglass A.R.  £2.49 – Spyglass is a massively useful app for any outdoor enthusiast with far too many uses to go into in any depth without boring the majority of people.  Spyglass utilizes every sensor the phone has available to provide a vast amount data, on the screen via an Augmented Reality type head up display (HUD). I personally use it to remember locations of wild plants or patches where I’ve found mushrooms, the beauty of it is that unlike nearly all other apps out there you won’t require a signal to use it (once your location has been defined). As well as this Spyglass can also be used as a speedometer, sextant, compass, range finder, waypoints tool and inclinometer.

iTorch  Free – Not much to say here really, it’s a torch, it’s free!..... OK well I guess I could go into a bit more detail here. It has a strobe setting for that disco effect should you need it and also flashes a Morse code SOS which hope no one reading this ever needs to use.

Star Walk  £1.99 – Have you ever looked up at the stars and wondered what’s out there? Of course you have! Star walk can tell you a huge amount about the night sky, simply fire it up and point your iphone to the stars. The app again uses augmented reality to tell you the names of the stars, planets and galaxies as you point your phone at them.  It will also give you the rising and setting times of the sun and any planet that will be visible in the sky that night. On top this there is a search function, simply type in name of the star, satellite, galaxy or planet you are looking for and it will point you in the right direction.  Other functions include a calendar to inform of events in the near future, a time function so you can look at what the sky looked like all the back to 1600 and my favourite which points out the places in the sky to watch for meteor showers.

Find Friends Free – My friends and I often set off from different locations to meet up in rather ramdom parts of the countryside, the find friends app makes it very easy for us to located each other by showing everyone location on the same map. To get it set up you have to email you friend to request permission and hey presto they appear on the app. You and your friends have the option to turn off sharing your location at any time to maintain your privacy. Over all just very useful to have even in town! 

Rogers Mushrooms £1.49 – This is a digitally enhanced version of the book “Mushrooms and other fungi of Great Britain and Europe” by Roger Phillips. I guess RM Mushrooms is a little punchier! It uses a key system to help you identify wild mushrooms you find which is the preferred method of professional mycologists. RM Mushrooms has over 2400 colour photos and 1550 species listed to help identify what you are looking at also whether it is poisonous, hallucinogenic, or edible. As a word of warning I’d say never EVER identify a mushroom you plan to eat by photo alone, there are often similar looking species which will do you no good at all.

The Foragers Apprentice £1.99 – This app is a great start for anyone wanting to learn about wild food and foraging created by the highly acclaimed Ashburton Cookery School. You can search by the habitat you find yourself in be it Beach, Hedgerow or Woodland. Also included are some useful if basic recipes to give you some inspiration on what your wild haul can be used for.

tideApp Free – Personally I don’t live that close to the coast  so when I do make the journey down there I like to know what the tides doing. This is mainly because I’ll be out looking for food in the intertidal areas and getting the tide right makes the difference between a muddy walk and a scuba diving mission. tideApp includes tidal information for 4,364 ports worldwide with tidal forecasting up to 2029 so you have plenty of time to plan your beach trip in advance.

That’s my list for now, please let me know what you think and if you have any other recommendations I’d love to hear them.

Allotment Dinners ON TOUR

I believe the usual adage is something akin to ‘WHAT GOES ON TOUR STAYS ON TOUR’. Not in our case. That would be highly frustrating and this post would end here.  So for the purposes of public interest, I will cast that age old instruction aside and divulge every gory detail of our latest adventure in the world of outside dining. 

You may remember a chap called Dave who visited our allotment dinners patch a couple of months ago and generously wrote us a guest post of his experience with us – well this is where the favour is gladly re-payed.  Dave lives in a lovely spot in Ardingly in a house built by his great grandfather’s very own hands using the scraps left over from constructing the beautiful Nymans in Handcross.  I love this story.  I oft romanticise over the notion of building ones own house.  I love that he also built lots of the other houses in the lane and his son, Dave’s Grandfather, built another house just next to his using the skills passed down to him but in a completely different style.  I love I was told this story in a construction Dave had created, to suit his own needs of being outside.  It’s a lovely wooden structure comprised of sturdy stone posts and a roof of  mainly hazel.  Generations of building skill on one parcel of land, each so different but each so wonderful. 

 

We sat happily on benches beneath the snow melting drips of the roof in front of a roaring fire – all welcome comforts after James had told me on route there was nowhere for us to sit and did I have a carrier bag he could borrow so his bum didn’t get wet when sitting on the floor. 

Dave had stoked up the clay oven a fair few hours before our arrival to get the heat up to optimum cooking temperature and had prepared the starter some days earlier I believe.  He’s so Blue Peter, we were already miles apart from mine and James’ usual last minute cobbling together of dinners. 

So, first up: Potted shrimp with lightly toasted ciabatta.  A previously unknown delicacy to my taste buds but what a happy new entrant it was.  This dish is served in small pots, the type you’d serve dry roasted peanuts in for nibbles in the 90’s.  The paprika flavoured shrimp is packed into the bottom of the dish and topped with clarified butter which has set to quite a mean consistency.  Sealing dishes in this way was one of the few methods our pre freezer ancestors had of enabling the preservation of meats and fish for many weeks.  Clarifying – the heating and filtering of butter – removes the proteins which could potentially go rancid and creates a thicker set seal.  Well, there was nothing rancid about this.  It was devoured in moments, much to the disappointment of the two canine guests.   

 

A pause between courses and time then to introduce all of the guests present that evening. Me and James you know, Dave and his lovely girlfriend Alice and two dogs Archie - alice’s mums, and Hattie – my mum’s puppy.  Whenever dogs are present conversation tends to centre round them, how old they are, japes they may get up to, how muddy they are, how they’re not usually this mental.  Not unlike parents with kids I should imagine, just with leads.  James did manage to steer conversation away with a long tale of a known fraudster getting into a right pickle with his company and how he was managing the situation without giving on that he'd read the Daily Mail and knew exactly who she was and no she was not going to get the better of him, so there.  Interesting yarn but after a short silence – ‘so where do you walk him?’   

Next course:  Wildfood Pizza’s.  These home made pizza’s were topped with pigeon, pheasant (some roadkill defrosted from james’ freezer) and bacon alongside the usual suspects, mozzarella and tomato.  Bacon often features alongside these two meats to provide some much needed fat.  They were all lightly fried off together on James’ skillet over the fire and added to the pizzas for a last minute firing.  Absolutely glorious.  To accompany was Hairy Bittercress pesto and a wild rocket salad.  Alice, not a meat eater, joined us with her many cheese pizza and helpfully held my dog whilst I ate.   

Now this is where things got hairy – and I’m not talking about the pesto.  The perils of bringing two dogs together in the night, surrounding them with nice smells and expecting them to behave came very suddenly to light.  One moment we were appreciating a gobful of game, the next a ferocious roar (well, I say ferocious - he’s a jack Russell) and the yelps of the cheeky pup who ordained to go near his eagerly awaited food scraps.  It was horrendous.  A full blown dog attack/mild scuffle (depending on your experience of these events, mine is none so i’m opting for the former) happening right under our feet.  I have never had that happen before and for the entire time I was looking after my mums dog, was the thing I had dreaded happening most.  For Archie, it was completely out of character, it is normally him getting mauled by his long term dog wife Matilda.  I’m still not entirely sure how it ended, I'd leaped up shouting Oh my God, and couldn’t bare to look – not massively helpful.  What I do know is that I got Hattie’s lead back in my hands and after a horrible moment of thinking the mud she was covered in was blood, managed to sit back down and get my shaking hands back on another slice of pizza.  Archie had been unceremoniously removed from the scene, disgraced and no doubt still a bit peckish.  Now this is what I’d call awkward.  When neither of you actually owns either dog, and then one has a go at the other, well there's not much you can say other than profusely apologise and hope no-one sues.  But then that’s dogs isn’t it.  Not really much like kids at all actually. 

By the third and final course my dog had been put in the van and Archie had returned, although still spurned, to witness us scoff down Honey Buns which I had made the night before.  They’re lovely little things and very easy to make. The recipe is Stephen Fry’s and found in the ‘Essential Scout campfire cook book’ tweaked only slightly by me with the addition of cinnamon.  I’d recommend seeking it out, there are many great recipes in there for the outdoor inclined cook. 

The evening, cut slightly shorter than it may have naturally ended due to fears of dog welfare, was overall, a grand evening.  It was such a treat to do ‘our thing’ somewhere else and be so wonderfully welcomed.  And what’s an evening without a spot of drama anyway. 

Thank you to Dave, Alice and Archie (hopefully now allowed back in the house), we’d love to come back please.  Without the dog.