First Fruits

Today I picked some of the first fruits from our garden - the first gooseberries, white and black currants and some strawbs. We've been picking the strwabs for about a week now but there are still loads more to come. Our ones don't have that perfect balance of sharp and sweet that you get with the best strawberries, but they have such a flowery honey taste - they're just so fragrant, I can't believe that strawberries can actually taste like honey!

So far my phormium fruit net appears to be working! I don't think the blackbirds have had any yet so it's looking good. The strawberries are doing so well this year because although they're in the ground (lots of people prefer to grow them in containers) Poppy, whose plants they are, has tied them so that the plants are raised well above the ground. This stops all the creepy crawlies getting to them first and I think it helps them to ripen too.

The rest of the garden is looking good too. I'm fairly late planting out my tomatoes - the first couple of fruits have set now, with more flowers on the way, although the plants are pretty pot bound so I need to get a move on. The rest though is looking promising - the loofa has gone beserk, we're harvesting the first batch of turnips now, the peas are flowering and out the front...the sweetcorn is making good progress (it literally doubled in size with the rain last week), I've got the first couple of courgettes getting bigger every day and the beans are beginning to climb and even to flower!

Above: dwarf Lingua di Fuoco borlotti bean flowers.

Above: Dwarf beans (French & runner), sweetcorn and climbing beans (French, Italian & runner) growing with a couple of sunflowers, ppurple elder, foxgloves, snapdragons and other pretty things.

Above: First courgette!

The comfrey has more or less finished flowering now so I'll be chopping that back and making nice things with it - everything from liquid manure to luxurious hand cream with any luck! There is still plenty of stuff in flower though; take a look.

Over the past fortnight we've been doing a bit more alcohol too. We racked off our Damson Jam Wine - it's lovely, almost like a liqueur! Because it was made from jam however the sediment included solids that looked like this (below). This is what happens when your wine has pectin in it. When you make jam you need pectin to set the jam to the right consistency; in winemaking you try and kill the pectin off with an enzyme called pectolase. It looks like we didn't put in quite enough pectolase, but it was easy to rack the liquid off and we'll see what the wine's like when it's matured!

We also made some elderflower champagne a couple of weeks ago, and racked it off into demijohns earlier this week. We used Hugh F-W's recipe from River Cottage Spring...smells great, but at the moment it just tastes like sugar water. It's bubbling away now though so the magic will be happening. We'll be going out in the canoe this weekend (great for reaching all the wildfood that you can't reach from the bank!) and picking another batch, as well as looking out for other goodies...on a very small strecth of canal we can pick blackberries, hazelnuts, watermint and even wild raspberries...

Elderflower wine. See Hugh F-W's recipe at this link here: http://www.channel4.com/food/recipes/chefs/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall/elderflower-champagne-recipe_p_1.html

We were called out to a swarm yesterday and it turned out to be an entire wild colony living inside the cavity wall of a farm shed. So we have a major operation on our hands tonight. It's really important that we get this colony - a) it's nice for us to have more bees (and to get them for free) and b) wild colonies in the UK are very rare now, due to varroa, and they almost invariably die out over winter. So we need to save these honey bees and take them somewhere safe and warm.

There have been a lot of bee thefts in our area of late - a few up in Shropshire, I think, but most of them down here in Hampshire. So we're keeping the location of our apiary sites under our hats! The really sad thing about it is that it's definitely a beekeeper doing it - you can't steal bees without knowing how to move them safely! There are two theories: as bees are very expensive now, they may just be stealing them to make a bit of money, or, even sadder, it may be a bee farmer who has lost so much stock that they don't know what else to do.

Our bees are looking OK at the moment, apart from some new nucs we made up and gave new Carnolean queens. They were fairly small to begin with but a few are even smaller now. The queens have been released now though so soon their populations should start building up. We had to rescue one queen though when she was more or less abandoned by her colony and left to freeze to death. She's living on top of the stove at the moment with some workers to keep her warm, and this weekend we'll find a home for her, ASAP!