Sweet Chestnutting

As Autumn progresses, the storms start to blow in, and when the wind comes from the North, we begin to feel the cold again. We have picked most of our allotment goodies now,  the grapes have been pressed and the juice is now fermenting vigorously. 

The wind also brings exciting new things down from the trees for us to eat. Sweet Chestnuts are falling now, and you'll need to be swift to beat the squirrels. 

We squeeze the nuts out of their spiky husks, with our feet and collect the biggest ones to take home.

There are all sorts of things you can bake and cook using Sweet Chestnuts but we prefer to simply roast them over a fire or BBQ. On a chilly Autumnal evening, there is little that I enjoy more than sitting in the garden, watching for bats, while nibbling hot Chestnuts.

We had a lovely Apple Day at Mansbridge Community Orchard. The fruit was plentiful, as was the juice. The sun did come out, we met new friends and caught up with some old ones too.

Vine to Wine

While doing our walk over Peartree Green and also at the Apple Day we met John and Pixie; they mentioned that they had too many grapes growing in their Southampton garden. They wanted help harvesting their hoard of fruit before it dropped all over the garden.

They did warn me that there was a lot and so I popped over. It was only when I saw the size of the vine did I realise the scale of what was required, but I set about picking as many as I could, before having to pick the kids up, after their swimming lessons.

I managed to fill my big bucket and as the weather was nice we set about crushing and pressing the fruit that same afternoon. It was a sticky job but a very tasty one non the less.

We added Uncle Loz's white allotment grapes, while we were at it. They were a bit sweeter than the dark ones from our friend's vine.

I pasteurised several bottles and set the rest off to brew into wine, it is bubbling away merrily now but there's no way of telling what it will taste like until it has finished fermenting. I am already very pleased with my cider this year, it's definitely my best batch so far.

We also put a couple of pints of grape juice aside to turn into Grape Jelly. I haven't tried this yet but it looks very promising.