And so Autumn comes.
My garden has been particularly pleasing in the last couple of weeks - payoff for the many months of slog and little to show. The tomatoes have reddened up and the crop has been good - although I suspect they have now contracted a case of late blight, so I might well be collecting green tomatoes for green tomato chutney. (Every year is a new lesson learned...)
The sweetcorn have now finished and been pulled up. As years go, its been okay, if not bumper. Each corn plant has yielded an ear, which isn't exactly staggering, but enough for our barbecue needs.
The cucumbers have had a late flourish and I have suddenly got several fruits off one plant - which is great, since my cucumber-growing record is a bit dismal. And the late-fruiting raspberries that I put in at the end of last year have cropped really well - a good handful for breakfast every morning. My `miracle' butternut plants, grown from the seed of a supermarket butternut are running riot and there are one or two fruit - not sure what will actually be harvestable, but they have been fun.
There have been failures too. The courgette have been dismal and frankly, I am wondering why I bother. I'm the only person in the house who eats courgette (although I grate it up and sneak it into bolognaise sauces) and a large courgette-come-marrow can take quite a lot of eating! I also read an article that some rogue seed had got out this year and some home-grown courgette have actually turned out to be toxic (cheers from my family who are delighted to have a reason not to eat the stuff!) Apparently, if your raw courgette tastes bitter, it is possibly poisonous. I can't remember the particulars, but I don't think it will kill you - just make you quite ill. If you want more details, I have pasted a link from the Metro below. Its all a bit tabloid, but you'll get the general gist. (I must add that it is a genuine article, not one that I made up to create general hilarity - and erm, Wetwang is a real place)
The highlight of my Autumn garden is my wonderful crab apple tree. Seriously, if you don't have one, consider getting one. The wildlife love it, the blossom is beautiful and the fruits are absolutely gorgeous to look at (and to eat, given a bit of effort). My little tree produces wonderful clusters of cherry-red miniature apples.
Processing the fruit is a bit of a mission, because they are small, but I make crab apple jelly (delicious) and last year experimented with crab apple gin - an experiment I will repeat this year. In the past, I have also frozen the jelly and used a teaspoon of it in the bottom of a tot of gin as a home-made exotic liqueur. Really good! The jelly sinks, so its not perfect, but that's what experimenting is all about. The crab apples are really tart, so processed crab apples added to normal stewed apples in a pie or a crumble give an extra layer of flavour.
But be warned, processing crab apples is a whole day affair with much cooking and straining. My husband bought me a contraption to strain the jelly, but I found it was a lot easier to peg a muslin cloth over the top of a large bowl. You aren't supposed to force the liquid through, but I don't have the patience not to. There are lots of recipes out there on the internet which take various amounts of time. I tend to ignore the bits that sound too laborious - I add the sugar first time round and never add lemon, mostly because I hardly ever have a lemon in the house. So I would say this is really a `make it up as you go along' sort of exercise (which are always the best ones!)
Talking of making it up as you go along: my long-suffering husband has had to make stuff up for me as the summer has progressed (`I need a climbing arch for the cucumbers', `can we have a pergola for the grapes to grow on?' and so on...) He has, however had a reward of sorts in that I have given him my old washing machine drum as a fire-pit. The drum itself was salvaged by a friend of mine (she gave me two at one point) to be used as a large outdoors container. I used it for a while for a large chilli plant and it has also housed tomato plants, but as it turns out, it makes a fantastic fire-pit! So, as the nights draw in and we burn the garden refuse (and left-overs from projects), we have an excuse to sit around a warm fire with a marshmallow or two (and something alcoholic). Its made for a happy, if rather smoky husband who has forgotten that all my demands (I think...).Wishing you all warm Autumn evenings, wherever you are.
