What a bumper year it is for fruit! The trees and hedges are bursting with a colourful abundance of either their sweet or sour seed carriers: blackberries, wild plums, haws, sloes, pears, apples, plums and damsons to name just the ones I can see from my garden. Each tree has branches weighed down by the bountiful and excessive summer growth and the ground beneath the apple and pear trees are full of wasp infested windfalls. According to folk lore, we are in for a long and cold winter. Another one. Nature providing all of us with plenty of goodness that can be prepped and stored to get us through the long and hard months ahead. The nuts are plentiful too and hazels, acorns and cob nuts are being enjoyed by many and squirrelled away into winter storage, and not just by me.

The kitchen is full of the smells of preserving these summer delights: jam, chutney, dried, bottled, pickled, stoned and frozen. The book that I was given years ago on preserving fruit and nuts has been one of my most loved and well used cookbooks. Covered in splatters of numerous creations, I have had a go at most of the recipes within. Some repeated every year and others a disgusting disaster! But learning how to bottle fruits has been interesting. This was the preserving method of choice before the invention of the freezer, but the latter, whilst much easier, quicker and retains more nutrients, does take the best of the flavour from the fruit and often needs more sugar afterwards to replace it.

I assume the great quantity of fruit comes from the dry, warm spring and summer we have had. The pollinators were certainly busy during the blossom stage and now it can be seen they’ve clearly done an outstanding job, which has also resulted in a huge amount of honey. (This is in contrast to last summer which was so regularly wet and cold, our honey bees struggled to get out much over the summer and they only produced enough honey for themselves.) The wild hives all seem to have done well too from what we can tell, but they are obviously, harder to monitor.

The dryness of the summer hasn’t been a great story for all trees though. Our conifers are all showing signs of heat stress and have turned brown in many places, for some of them at the tips and others nearer the trunks. This dry weather isn’t so good for anything that is shallower rooted like the conifers or for that matter, our newly planted hedges and trees which are also struggling. Perhaps unsurprisingly now I think about it, the evergreens are suited to cooler weather so this prolonged hot, dry spell is taking its toll on them. I hope the cooler autumn weather, which is showing signs of being on its way, will bring some relief to them when it extends from just the early morning into the rest of the day.

I trust that whatever nature has in store, it is what and where it is meant to be. Meanwhile, I shall be making sure that my freezer and shelves are packed with the delicious goodness from Her ever impressive generosity and, so that I am prepared in case it’s true that we are in for a long, cold winter; at least it might save the confers.