It is the season for gravity to flex its muscles. Round by the lake this morning I walked Lyra under a barrage of surprisingly hard, little green acorns. All around there were mysterious cracks, groans and thunks in the undergrowth and Lyra darted here and there, ever alert for squirrel attacks. Down in the woods the air is full of the sharp-sour, green ichor smell of fallen leaves. I am becoming a connoisseur of leaf fall, alive to the different smells and textures from each tree. The first to fall here are lime. They disintegrate with the utmost politesse into pale ash, soft underfoot with just the barest whisper sound of expensive tissue paper. On most walks these days we stuff our cheeks, and any handy bags, with brambles. Mum and I came home positively laden on Tuesday so Keith and I are now producing competitive batches of hootch. He is doing bramble and bramley gin and I have bramble and crabapple vodka on the go. We can hold a taste off at Christmas. It will be time to forage for the Christmas hedgerow gin soon. The rowans are bright with orange berries and the leaves on the elder are paling to parchment as their dark green berries turn to black. An initial foray suggests that we will be rather short of sloes in the mix this year. The blackthorn hedges were all cut at precisely the wrong time for gin makers and are bare of the dusky blue fruit. However, there are still a few less travelled paths to try……
Our two, long awaited, peaches have finally fallen – both overnight so that by the time I spotted them a cheeky snail had taken the first bite. I’m not picky – I cut those bits off and ate the rest (which was lovely), making a note to pick them a tad earlier next year. In the orchard a brisk breeze is busy separating the truly committed apples and pears from the lightweights, which are rapidly carpeting the ground. The windfalls provide delightful treats for all manner of butterflies, which fly up in clouds as you pass along the path. (Wasps, being arrogant and prideful, eschew such detritus. They are fully engaged in attacking undescended Victoria plums. I encountered one when picking a few the other day. The little sod stung me and, after hurling away the offending, half munched, fruit, I cursed my way back to the kitchen nursing a throbbing right hand. Five minutes later, removing stones, I received a spiteful sting on the left mitt. I’m afraid there was no magnanimous “catch and release” this time).
We remain awash with produce. Salad consumption (mandatory with all meals) simply can’t keep pace. I despatched one cucumber and a few tomatoes into a batch of soap last week but this has made barely a dent (though it has filled up the drying racks nicely). A trip to the courgette patch disgorged three vast marrows which were converted into a range of cakes ( a jam layer number, a spicy fruit loaf and a banana affair.) and I have about four cakes worth of grated courgette frozen in case of future cake emergencies. A visiting party of garden fanciers yesterday were, somewhat to their surprise, all issued with bags and set loose on the plums (I noted bitterly that none were attacked by wasps) which warmed them up nicely to do justice to a rather vast afternoon tea I had pulled together (in which cucumber and tomato sandwiches featured heavily).
Although we’ve still not seen very much rain, the temperature has also, finally, started to come down. Lyra is absolutely loving it. She ran us ragged round the riverside last week, scampering up and down the beat paths to go paddling and positively racing along the top of the flood defences. I did a bit of paddling myself on Friday, finally clearing the weed from the top pond. I fear I did not approach it with canine levels of enthusiasm. I had planned to do the needful earlier in the week, when it was much warmer, but our water was cut off Wednesday morning and the thought of descending into the murk without a bath afterwards was just too much. Mum and I (Keith having sagely gone off for a meeting in the Highlands) limped along malodorously, ferrying watering cans up from the pond to fill the cisterns, for two days until Friday morning when I got up at 3am to check the cattle trough (pointlessly as Raymond had already volunteered to go for a big container, but you know how these things rattle round your brain) and found the cows’ water running. It took the rest of the day for any decent water pressure to get up to the bathrooms, but it finally made it there just in time to remove any excuses I might have been harbouring for not tackling the pond slime before the garden visitors arrived…..
