Oh, our harvest cup runneth over this year especially with plums, tomatoes and blackberries. In another week or two we shall be inundated with cucumbers, too, which have taken their time revving up to deliver, to the point where I was thinking, ‘Well, that was a waste of a packet of seeds.’ But in the last two weeks they’ve gone curcubitaceae crazy, the crafty little green tinkers. The chilli peppers are turning red. They are also growing into comedy shapes, making them worthy of a blog post to themselves. And the grapes - well, providing it doesn’t snow in the next month, we could be in for a bumper harvest there, too. It’s all about the fruit this year. We’ve even got 9 pears, which is 5 more than last year!
His Lordship Malarkey and I, then, have spent a lot of the Bank Holiday weekend picking and freezing plums and blackberries. Plum picking has required his Lordship M to climb up our enormous safety ladder, as the plum trees now extend to over twenty feet high. I’m guessing twenty feet. Looks about right from where I stand underneath them, giving myself a crick in the neck to see the top branches. The plum trees also extend over the Rabbit Palace, so Andy wobbling around up a ladder with a large bowl has sent Edith and Sidney into a bit of a binky bunny frenzy. Wholly unnecessary reactions, of course, but that’s rabbits for you - always the need to over egg the dramatic pudding.
The blackberry harvesting has involved not ladders, but instead wading into wild bramble thickets. Least said about that the better. But the berries are too enormous and juicy to ignore. Blackberry and apple crumble for Christmas dinner? Yes please!!
The tomatoes I’m not freezing. They don’t freeze very well, at least I don’t think they do. But I can’t eat them all on my own, not without some digestive repercussions anyway. And Andy claims to be repulsed by raw tomatoes, although he will eat ketchup, passata on pizza, in lasagnas, in other pasta-based dishes, in soup etc etc. What’s all that about, then? He claims it is the texture of a raw tomato that puts him off. And this is a man who eats corned beef, for heaven’s sake.
In order to make the tomatoes useful, then, I’ve made big pans of soup, which WILL freeze well and be good instant lunches come Winter time.
There’s about ten portions in there. Just cooling off before I divide it into freezer containers.
Bambino has been growing more fur as his contribution to the harvest festival. I swear he gets fluffier, pouffier and more woolly with each passing year. Here he is this evening, having just performed a MAHOOSIVE sigh ‘n’ flump after an exhausting day of doing not very much apart from wrestling his way onto my lap and getting in the way of my writing sessions.
And when he gets up again, he’ll leave a great dollop of fur behind him. I shan’t save that, though, because if I do it’ll set me down the slippery slope of ‘crazy cat lady saves pet’s fur and weaves it into a cardigan’ malarkey. And that would never do.
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KJ