I know it's only August but autumn will be upon us before we know it! Although I'll miss the summer weather (yes, who could do without rain, rain, and a bit more rain?!) the excitement of the harvest is already making me fidget with anticipation.
The first blackberries are just beginning to ripen, heralding the beginning of crumbles, pies and lovely warming puddings for the darkening evenings. Last year was an absolutely amazing year for apples and haws (hawthorn berries) - this year they aren't doing quite as well, but we'll still be scrumping away and making apple wine, cider, and endless apple sauce and puddings. I can't wait for our kitchen to be permeated with the smell of slowly disintergrating apples - yellow, green, pink-blushed, red...
It's a good prunus year this year though. There are sloes everywhere, so dense in places that the hedge appears blue. They're not quite ripe yet but it won't be long. Their big sisters the damsons are already ripening up - we all went on a walk at the weekend and found one bush where the damsons were already soft and sweet enough to eat raw...with these fruits we'll be making alcohol - damson wine, sloe gin and sloe sherry...these are my favourite drinks. The sloe concoctions are too sweet to drink in any great quantity but they make the perfect apperitif for a cold winter night...it's just a shame that they have to age for at least a year before they're drinkable!
I have my list of foraging spots ready to go, and am hoping to get out in the canoe soon to sample the wild raspberries that nestle in a very secret spot on the canal bank...if I told you where they are, I'd have to kill you.
My squashes are now really fattening up. They've still got plenty of little fruits left to form but the existing ones are really soaking up any sunshine that manages to peep through the cloud. The Delicata is now bigger than my fist and the Blue Hubbard is actually beginning to turn blue-grey. I can't wait to be eating my own recipe spicy squash soup with parmesan croutons, and the roasted spiced squash that we always eat with Christmas dinner!
The sweet corn is flowering, as are the sunflowers, both of whom will be setting seed as summer turns to autumn. Beetroot and parsnips are swelling under the ground. The late flowers, such as lavenders, dahlias, goldenrod and agapanthus are flowering too. White clover covers the fields like snow. It smells like honey!
As far as bees are concerned, the queen will begin to slow down laying through the autumn, perhaps even stopping completely in the depths of winter. At the moment however it is still all hands on deck; the girls are bringing in nectar, propylis, and pollen in preparation for the cold months ahead. It's been so interesting this year to see how the colony changes throughout the season. For example, earlier in the year when we allowed them to build some comb without foundation, they were putting drone brood everywhere. Now even the drone traps are bursting with worker brood.
This year we have expanded our number of hives by more than 300%. Next year however we will be focusing on maintaining our current numbers and encouraging them to produce honey. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it's now time to turn our attention to preparing the bees for winter. We'll be feeding them sugar and honey to increase their stores and to help them build out the new foundation that we've given them. It takes seven parts of honey/sugar for a bee to produce one part of wax, so giving them some extra food will allow them to build comb without depleting their stores before the winter even arrives. Getting the bees through the winter healthy and happy is now number one priority.
This autumn I'll be making a few changes to the garden. We have lots of room to plant new things. I want to cover our fence in Japanese Wineberry, rambling roses, passion flowers (and fruits!) and Clematis. I want to grow some Camassia quamash, Houttuynia cordata (orange bush, used for flavouring in Vietnamese food, aparently) and all sorts of other oddities. I also have my eye on zingibers (gingers) and musas (bananas) for inside the house...the zingibers at work are in flower and they smell like lilies, only better! The citruses are also in flower, their heavy neroli scent hangs like a cloud in the Old Glasshouse. That reminds me that in a few months the oranges and clementines will be in season, and we'll be studding them with cloves to make pomanders! And soon after that we'll be racking our brains to think of a way of making diabetic-friendly marmalade for Dad's delectation and delight! (This year we tried setting it with orange jelly...a complete disaster! But we might try gelatine again).
It's hard to believe that in a few short months I'll be gagging for spring to come so I can get planting stuff in the garden. Most of the plants I've grown this year are annuals so they'll all be gone, but next year I'll just start again and have an even better season than this one (I'll be sowing my peas direct!!!). I also have some new experiments I want to try next year - I want to try growing chickpeas and lentils, and some unusual chilli and tomato varieties too. And who knows, I may even have a brand new allotment for my late crops to colonise!
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