Isilme’s harvest report

The picking and collecting are done, the report and the pics are below …

The garden

We’ve collected loads of apples. We gathered two carrier bags full for the local pantry. And two carrier bags full for the church folk to help themselves. My Beloved has smashed several buckets full of windfalls for cider making. And the tree still seems overly full of apples. Likewise, the eating apple tree – some kind of pippin, but not Cox’s – is so dripping with fruit it looks like a weeping willow! But they’re not quite ripe yet. Not far off though.

I collected several punnets of blackberries a while back, intending to bottle them in light syrup. However, they quickly softened too much so I made blackberry and apple jam instead. I’m still gathering blackberries. Also lots of raspberries are keeping me busy. And strawberries!! For years we’ve had about a breakfast bowl full. This year we’ve had a mixing bowl full (roughly – if you added them all together)!! Some are still ripening out there.

All the plums are over now, although I still have a few in the fridge which I shall make into a crumble. The tomatoes are very slow to do anything. The crop is very small altogether and they’re mainly still green. We’ve had about a dozen ripe ones so far. One or two tomato plants got blight and are no longer with us.

The French beans we bought as baby plants, which I thought were haricot beans, turned out to be black beans. Oh well, it all goes down the same way, although I don’t think they will look so good on toast with a tomatoey sauce…. 

The runner beans have gone crazy. We’ve had them with everything and they were well loved by our various visitors, but we’re still picking loads. I picked an overflowing bowl full yesterday. The bean plants are still covered in flowers and still lots of beans are on the way. I shall have to bottle some. Sadly most of the beans I collected yesterday are too far gone and the pods are tough so I will have to use the beans on their own, out of the pods. We neglected them in the haste to recover from our hoards of visitors.

I have also attached a sunset photo (above) which was actually taken by my Mum and I altered it to be portrait rather than landscape so I hope it’s good enough for you to use.