Always a good culinary moment. The first ones just seem to taste so much better. The act of peeling allows the anticipation to build pleasantly, before that opening bite allows the sweetness to cover the tongue. Well, it was the best bit of an otherwise very mundane working day.
So many blackberries. So little freezer space. This clump dangles tantalisingly off the wall at the end of Victoria Road, ten feet up; no one can pick them. But then again so much of this free bounty remains unharvested at the end of a summer; and so in November, the shops feel it’s OK to sell the imports from Guatemala. What a waste…
Wilfully ignoring the political developments of the day — let’s photograph some food instead. Two days after being picked, these blueberries have darkened to become indistinguishable, colour-wise, from the blackberries tossed in the bowl with them. Add some sugar and cream, and eat to forget.
Having eulogised the plums and blackberries already this year — and for good reason — let us also add the glorious amount, and richness, of 2018’s apples as well — not to mention a second good crop of rhubarb. In this aspect, no one can complain about the year.
Plums. We are drowning in them. Possibly not as many as the all-time Bumper Plum Year that was 2015, but after a final harvest this morning, the now-empty tree has given up at least 30 lbs this year (14 kg). Want plums? We have them.
Each year I have done this a picture has appeared of the blackberry bounty, and that provides a chance to measure its position in the year. They are early this year, probably unsurprisingly, but not as early as 2014. Either way there has been a sudden ripening (blackening) of thousands of them in the last week or so. I went hunter-gathering today. The stump in the background is Heptonstall Church, by the way.
The plants in the allotment are starved for water (as we will all be, if this weather pattern carries on a great deal longer), but this doesn’t seem to have affected the loganberry plant that went in last year and has fruited merrily this summer for the first time. This shot was taken with a long zoom into the heart of the plant, lit by the evening sun. Not quite sure what is going on with the strangely-shaped fruit in the centre but it might have been where one was not picked very well. Either way I like the effect.
In both 2013 and 2015 our plum tree fruited in ludicrous profusion. In 2015 we were taking bags of fresh plums down to the pub and giving them away, we had too many to use: the tree produced about 45 pounds of fruit (20kg) that year. Not so much in the last couple of years — but looking at it right now, it’ll be a bumper harvest in 2018. As long as the branches can bear the weight.
As August winds down each year there are some regular events, firstly, I get a year older and so the title of this blog becomes one more year out of date — that’s coming on Friday. To ease the pain of this, however, the garden finally begins to pay off. Blackberries, blueberries and rhubarb in this shot, with apples and plums gathered but unseen here (we have realised fruit is much less hassle than vegetables). There must be a photo like this every year around this time, and hopefully that isn’t going to change however far I take this blog.
Always a pleasing event of the year. Not many blackberries around yet, but they will come. Plums… for us will, I hope, be just as much in glut as they were two years ago. Believe me, if you live in Hebden Bridge and want cheap plums, give us a couple of weeks, we will be overflowing.
