Apples, Apples, Apples Apples, = Juice, Juice, Juice!

Apples, Apples, Apples, Apples, Juice, Juice, Juice!

It's finally that time of year again folks. 

We, well my son and I, have been collecting apples from all manner of trees for the last couple of weeks and building up a good stock for our family Apple day. Sometime, there are a few pears to chuck in, to add some extra sweetness to the mix. 

It's always difficult to say precisely when it will occur because the weather can be fickle. It tends to be an outdoor event, normally followed by a BBQ. Although we have done it under umbrellas, a borrowed gazebo and once even based in our shed.

As a result, invites inevitably go out at the last minute and many people will already have other things to do. However, I personally always enjoy not knowing who will turn up and when they might arrive. I simply get on with setting everything up, processing what we have and dealing with the vast amounts of delicious juice that we produce.

After our family Apple day, we have the Community Orchard Public Apple Day and then that is normally it for the year. Although, this year there may be some extra surprises. The press is thoroughly hosed down and stored until the next year; it is a beast of a thing and is constantly taking up space in my shed but it's well worth the inconvenience.

Autumn + Apples + Friends = Fun

September and October are crazy season for many families, with the holidays over, children back to school and the Autumn creeping in to remind us that Winter is on the way. 

For Urbane Forager family this busy period is exacerbated by the fact that we have a huge amount of fruit and nuts to gather and process. It can be difficult to find the time, what with work, shortening days, the after school clubs etc. It can also be hard work; we have already picked and processed over 200 Kgs of apples for example, but it is always fun and it is all free.

We have had two afternoon sessions of pressing apples in the garden with friends and this year we were fortunate to have the loan of a weatherproof gazebo for the day. Once the brief but essential health and safety talk is over, the small army of juice-fuelled children takes over the process and, once they get going, they require only a minimum amount of supervision.

Over these two events, we managed to produce about 50 litres of the most gorgeous apple juice, some of which will be Pasteurised and bottled for drinking/keeping and some of which will become refreshing, golden cider, for consumption throughout the year.

Walnuts have also been falling and we have been collecting these too from our favourite trees. I will combine these nutritious nuts with delicious Pears, harvested from the Mansbridge Community Orchard, to make enough of Pear and Walnut Chutney to last the year.

Wild Swimming in Eerie England

We have been on our holiday, and managed to spend a few glorious days on Dartmoor, one of my favourite places, with a seemingly limitless array of stunning locations to walk to. This time we took a  walk North, following a branch of the Dart river, from Two Bridges to visit Wistman's Wood.

Wistman's Wood is fairy small, and yet, it is a truly spectacular place; stunted dwarf Oaks, huddle together and cling to the sides of the steep valley amidst a chaotic carnage of vast granite boulders. The curious feature that makes it seem like a set from a Harry Potter movie, is that the whole place is positively draped in dense layers of thick green spongy mosses and ferns.

You need to be careful, as you clamber through the boulders, partly because it is slippery and dangerous terrain, partly because you want to preserve this unique environment and partly because there are various legends that indicate that the Devil's ghostly Wist Hounds abide in the area, as well as nests of writhing vipers (really). 

We found it a truly splendid place and it fulfilled my slightly obsessive quest for English Eerie. After eating our sandwiches in the Druidic grove, we trekked back over the nearby tors to the Two Bridges Hotel for tea and scones. Finally, on our route home, we stopped off at Merrivale to visit the fascinating array of stone rows and circle there.

On another day we took a lovely woodland walk from the village of Holne, along the river Dart until we found the legendary Sharrah Pool.

This idyllic spot is perfect for a picnic followed by a bit of wild swimming. The Dart has carved out a massive groove through the ancient granite landscape, which is deep enough to dive into in several places (if you are brave enough) and longer than 100 meters. 

There are several delightful places along the river, where it is deep and accessible enough to swim, and these natural Jacuzzis are becoming more popular with the recent trend for wild swimming in the UK but Sharrah Pool is astounding, an absolute must.

The dark peaty water gushes down-hill via boulder strewn white-water rapids, sluicing into the main pool via a narrow waterfall and channel, "the Sharrah Shoot". The bold can plunge into the shoot and get swept into the pool for further swimming and frolicking. After exhausting ourselves in the pool, we hiked back to Holne for the best cream teas in Devon from the local community shop, the perfect conclusion to a brilliant day out.

An Elderflower Adventure

We had just returned from a trekking/camping holiday during half term (more on that expedition later) and the kids had been spotting Elderflowers.

They decided it was time to make some sweet, delicious, thirst quenching Elderflower Cordial. However, I was just thinking about making Elderflower Champagne.

Elderflowers are virtually everywhere in the parks and streets at the moment, so we thought it might be fun to go by boat, just for the hell of it.

At St. Deny's Sailing and Rowing Club on the river Itchen, we saw that a blackbird had nested in the lower eves of the clubhouse and was feeding two tiny fledglings.

We soon had life-jackets fitted and launched Tern, our favourite family sized rowing boat and even though both children can row, I was given the job of pulling on the oars.

We saw our first Elder straight away, just yards from the pontoon and we were soon filling our bag with fresh citrusy Elderflower heads.

Further upstream we found other bushes hanging over the river, or in amongst the reeds and I even set the kids ashore to harvest from one particularly busy tree they spotted. As I predicted, with two pickers and one rower we had soon gathered more than enough.

On the way home we bought 5 lemons and one Kilo of sugar, which was enough ingredients to make 3 litres of Elderflower Cordial and 6 litres of Elderflower Champagne.

All the rest was done by the kids in the kitchen and it didn't half look a mess when they had finished but, to be fair, they did tidy up when I explained that I would ferment the lot if they didn't get cleaning.

Apple Blossom, Pesto & Rhubarb Crumble

The sky was blue and the birds were in good voice, so we took a walk down to Mansbridge to check on the progress of the Community Orchard blossom. En route we passed the Pitch and Putt course, which is sadly now closed due to a lack of funding by our ever more squeezed council.

We are pleased to report that the Apple trees were in magnificent shape and looked fantastic in full bloom. We also noticed signs that other people had been helping prune off dead wood to enhance the health of the trees.

While we were exploring, we managed to open up access to a couple of new Apple trees and continued to cut back brambles to keep them out of the branches.

Later that night we made Pesto for our pasta using our stash of Hazel and Walnuts from last year and Basil. 

The wonderful weekend continued in fine fashion as the Saints (Southampton Football Club) won their final few matches of the season with a flourish, to finish on record points and higher up the Premier league than ever before. 

To polish off the proceedings (after I had finished running around the garden celebrating), we made one of my favourite seasonal puddings, Rhubarb Crumble, made from the first fruits of our allotment. 

Simply delicious!

Cherry Blossom and Bluebells

The transition from Winter to Spring this year has seemed indistinct and largely unimpressive. It has been relatively warm and very stormy and this has affected the timing of flowering plants but the thing that really matters now, is that it's warm enough for me to be wearing shorts again.

Blackthorn Blossom Fizzing in the Hedgerows

Bluebells are flooding the woodlands, like some kind of alchemical spell, and the trees are bursting magisterially into their full leafy green grandeur. We took a wonderful walk up on Farley Mount, to see the equine monument there. The pyramid/rocket shaped tribute is supposedly built on top of a Bronze age tumulus, there are several in the vicinity. 

This area is a fabulous spot for a spring picnic - skylarks sing aloft and swallows swoop over the fields below. On a clear day, you can see all the way to the Isle of Wight and easily identify Southampton docks and the New Forest.

As we ate our sandwiches my daughter noticed something closer by, a tiny lizard had popped out to sunbathe, right by our feet. We explored further, into the delightful Parnholt Wood, where the Bluebells are in full spate and searched for an ancient bowl barrow that a friend had told me about.

Cherry bloom is now flowering along the bare spindly branches everywhere and the Apple & Pear blossom is starting to appear too. Naturally, you will need to check back in a month or so to ensure that the flowers are turning into immature fruit and this is one of the reasons that I favour tree spotting on my regular routes. 

If you examine the Falling Fruit map, you will notice an abundance of locations about my home town of Southampton, as well as around my work places of Hedge End and Segensworth, where I habitually walk during my lunch hours.

Look Closely in this Puddle

Now is the perfect time to spot where those secret fruit trees have been hiding and we will be leading some local blossom walks soon, so check back regularly for details, which are very likely to be at short notice.

Agglestone and Old Harry

It had been quite a bad week for us. Both children had gone down with a virus, which rather spoiled the school holidays for them. We had a couple of sleepless nights ourselves nursing the sick. 

Then, just as I was planning my birthday day out, I started to feel a bit poorly too. We were all a little run down; I wasn't quite laid low like the kids but I wasn't my normal perky self and my energy was quickly sapped.

However, we were not going to let a little virus stop our fun, I just had to moderate my ambition somewhat. I didn't go out with friends Saturday night, I got an early night instead and had a bit of a lazy Sunday morning. Then we fearlessly set out for Studland in Dorset, a beautiful stretch of coastline with miles of soft sandy beaches flanked by extraordinary white chalk cliffs.

Of course when visiting the beach in February in the UK you are not going to be packing swimming costumes and sunglasses, especially if you are not quite feeling yourself. The fringes of the Isle of Purbeck, as this area is known, are wonderful but they are only a tiny part of the appeal of the fantastic landscape. It is an absolutely fascinating place geologically and, as a result, historically.

I planned two short walks to exciting places, Old Harry chalk stacks and the astonishing Agglestone; I hoped that everyone, including myself, would be able to cope. Old Harry was first and it was blowing a gale when we tried to step out of the car in the National Trust car park. We started from the sandy beach but after a short while my daughters legs were going a bit wobbly, so she begrudgingly decided to turn back with Mum. 

No, You Cannot Walk Down There, Even If You Are Very Careful!

My son, who was now recovering, soldiered on with me and we were rewarded with the sudden and quite shocking view over the end of the path. He was permitted to carefully creep a lot closer to the edge than his Mum would have ever allowed. Having said this, neither of us ventured down to the very end of the suicidally sinuous path, that would have been highly irresponsible.

Pepped up by fresh air and the exhilaration of peering over the edge of the world, we set off down ancient holloways and across the sodden heath to hunt down the simply brilliant Agglestone.  We even spotted a group of Apple trees on our way.

From our first distant glimpse of the rock my son simply did not believe it, and thought initially that it was a tree. Later he said it looked like a giant broccoli stalk (it does) and renamed it the Brocclestone.

"The Brocclestone"

The Agglestone used to stand straight up but it did wobble and eventually it fell over, about 100 years ago. However, even lying down it is still a truly weird and wonderful piece of multi coloured, rippling rock. 

It does look alien, as if an asteroid dropped from space or a flying saucer landed and became fossilized. It sits atop its own special hill, standing out in the landscape as if deliberately placed there.

Many visitors have carved their initials and names in the soft sandstone around the base and it would be simple to say that this is a bad thing, but you can easily see the temptation. We decided to climb the Agglestone, it would have been a shame to get all that way there and not show our fascination for this beautiful geological beast in some significant manner.

We had to squint to stop sand blowing into our eyes and cling on like limpets to prevent ourselves being swept clean off. I let my son go first, he's a very good climber but I stayed very close behind him. We did quickly gain the summit without any trouble, then scrambled back down and victoriously squelched our way back to the girls.

We arrived in Studland via the millionaire's row of Sandbanks, a short-cut around the gigantic natural harbour of Poole but we returned via the ancient towns of Corfe and Wareham, tipping our caps to the castle on the way and stopping for well earned fish and chips in Southampton.

Because it was there! (Sandbanks in the background)