433 days ago
I showed you yesterday my growing harvest of crabapples HERE. Hey presto, after a few hours in the kitchen spread over two days, I have six jars of jelly. I might sound conceited here but the colour and texture are absolutely spot on. Next year 12 jars. And now onto the damsons.
766 days ago
Last night it was rhubarb as you can see below. This morning it was a sheet of the last green tomatoes, sliced. Tonight more of the tomatoes. And so it goes on day after day, until there will be nothing left to flash freeze.
824 days ago
We have one damson tree here at the Welsh hovel up in the vegetable patch. It overhangs the road down to the hovel and you know when the fruit are ripe as they spatter onto the road and your car crunches over them as you drive in or out. There was a second tree alongside it but the gales took it and I have planted a cherry tree in its stead. For there is already a second source of damsons. My neighbours have a tree which leans over into our garden so we are allowed to pick its fruit too. Our neighbours are in their nineties and their needs are not that great.
875 days ago
Much to my surprise, all 12 tomato seeds have taken. Thus, I worked late into the night on a small patch of the jungle, bringing it into life as a tomato bed. In addition to the ten plants I was given by a friend, I hope to be drowning in tomatoes by autumn. We shall see. It was about nine when I finished. I leant on my rake, pondering the last roped-off patc
1268 days ago
When we arrived here two years ago, the grass, ferns and nettles were more than six foot high in bits of the small field above the barns. You could not see the gate fence and chicken shed at the end of the field which separated it from our upper meadow which goes all the way to the churchyard. The glass-filled ruins of an ancient shed just before the chicken shed were hidden from view. I had no idea it existed. What a difference two years makes. This is the field onto which five of our neighbours must look at from their houses and it was one of them who made my week by saying thank you a couple of days ago. So what does it look like now?
1516 days ago
I harvest not just for myself but for the pensioner couple one house up the lane and 95 year old E one house further up. And so we have a small number of crab apples from the two trees I planted this year – enough for one small pot of crab apple jelly, the last of the damsons for gin and then stacks of cooking apples from the orchard by the river and pears from a tree in the centre of the vegetable patch. Then finally some rhubarb which I planted this year… I have promised the family rhubarb crumble this evening. But I will also be making apple jam, pear jam and maybe a bit of rhubarb and ginger gin.
1551 days ago
Yesterday I showed how, thanks to God’s intervention, Joshua and i were able to pick our neighbour’s damsons without leaving our own garden. With c250 damsons picked and weigfhed up to 1.5kg exactly it was time to play with the new toys ordered from amazon.
1552 days ago
I have used most fruit known to man in my cooking over the years but never, until now, damsons. I just viewed them as small, not very pleasant to eat, and altogether rather pointless. We have a tree in the area formerly known as the jungle but which is slowly becoming a large vegetable garden and which runs alongside the lane down to the hovel so I had pondered what to do with its fruit. I stumbled across a recipe for jam which refers to windfall damsons but, in this case, my fruit arrived thanks to lightning.
