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Harvest time
Sep. 5th, 2005 09:38 pmSaturday's walk was through farmland, across fields where the harvester had removed the grain and left the great cylindrical bales of straw, scattered apparently at random, but always making me feel that I'm about to see what the pattern is. Then straight through the woods up the hill, along the track of Dere Street, once the main Roman road north.
( Pictures, because we can )
We must have strayed from our path - or perhaps it was the path that strayed, since we were clearly on land that had been reclaimed after opencast mining - and found ourselves walking along a high ridge, looking down on the farm we had expected to walk past, and the grassy track which we needed to join. But it wasn't too difficult to pick up our route, along lanes between hedges bight with hawthorn and thick with ripe blackberries.
Mysteriously (but this is a perpetual mystery) there were very few sloes. It isn't that the bushes don't bear much fruit, it's that so few of them bear fruit at all: we must have walked past several hundred yards of blackthorn hedge in all, and seen maybe five bushes that actually had fruit on them. What berries there were, weren't ripe: I had thought it might be difficult to tell, since even ripe sloes are so sour, but these were barely turning from green to purple. So there'll be time to go hunting sloes another week.
Meanwhile, we brought our blackberries home. There were stewed blackberries with apple for supper, and fresh blackberries with thick Greek yoghourt next day for lunch, and a sort of blackberry shuttle for tea. And there will be blackberry liqueur by Christmas. What does it say about us as a household that I would have baked more of the berries, had I not run out of butter and sugar; but there was no shortage of spirits to make the liqueur (I used calvados, in the end)?
( Pictures, because we can )
We must have strayed from our path - or perhaps it was the path that strayed, since we were clearly on land that had been reclaimed after opencast mining - and found ourselves walking along a high ridge, looking down on the farm we had expected to walk past, and the grassy track which we needed to join. But it wasn't too difficult to pick up our route, along lanes between hedges bight with hawthorn and thick with ripe blackberries.
Mysteriously (but this is a perpetual mystery) there were very few sloes. It isn't that the bushes don't bear much fruit, it's that so few of them bear fruit at all: we must have walked past several hundred yards of blackthorn hedge in all, and seen maybe five bushes that actually had fruit on them. What berries there were, weren't ripe: I had thought it might be difficult to tell, since even ripe sloes are so sour, but these were barely turning from green to purple. So there'll be time to go hunting sloes another week.
Meanwhile, we brought our blackberries home. There were stewed blackberries with apple for supper, and fresh blackberries with thick Greek yoghourt next day for lunch, and a sort of blackberry shuttle for tea. And there will be blackberry liqueur by Christmas. What does it say about us as a household that I would have baked more of the berries, had I not run out of butter and sugar; but there was no shortage of spirits to make the liqueur (I used calvados, in the end)?
