We seem to have gone a bit mad on the "nature's harvest"
front this year…it started innocuously, with a few ripe blackberries scoffed on
the way down the lane. But there were so
many…and it seemed a shame to waste them…blackberry vodka followed (along with
a nice cherry vodka), 9 litres of blackberry wine (last year's is drinking very
nicely, thank you), pies, jams, and fools, with bagfuls going to neighbours…almost
as bad as the runner bean glut that happens every summer. And it's not just berries – field mushrooms
on toast, in stew, preserved in oil – puff-ball fried with lashings of butter -
green tomato/chilli/ginger marmalade - herbs and garlic in virgin Kalamata –
chilli adobo – blanched beans (runner, French, climbing and yellow) in the
freezer – and still the squashes take over the garden, climbing into the hedges.
Other than eating, and preparing stuff to eat, there are
logs to chop for the winter, and now we have clipped past 1st of
September, the next round of hedging can get underway. Today Gavin came to shear the black-faced ewe
lambs (who will stay as breeding stock) and middling sized meat lambs (not so
lucky!) The big bruisers are ready to go
(and going weekly), while the piddly little widgets would just get cold if
shorn, so keep their fleeces…and are enjoying their daily cake to fatten them
up. Five autumn calvers are keeping us
in suspense…we have one with tight udders, so should be any day now.
The season has definitely changed, and the days are often
beautiful in that winding-down autumn way.
Walking the dogs, I pass the bales of silage – wafts of caramel anticipate
the wonderful smells of winter farming.
I wonder how our girls' cousins are doing in Dumfries and
Galloway, where Liz and Hesky have a lovely small flock of Hebrideans that we
met a few weeks ago?
