Autumn Forage

I’m learning to love autumn. So long as it is dry enough there is so much to enjoy still in the garden and woods and meadows here. The colour change is coming slowly this year though as usual the Liquidamber at the end of the wiggly beds is showing off and ‘Being The Best at Autumn’. I am laminating some of her leaves – I don’t know how I’ll use them, but I just have the urge to preserve the beauty.

There was a lot of preserving going on here while we were in Scotland. My friend Jacqui turns our soft fruit into jam for us and our new housesitter Katrina who has been a forager for years (it’s the thing now to be a forager I think, but she’s been doing it for ever) was very excited about the amount of food growing here and set about making all sorts of chutneys preserves jellies and jams. Happily she has left some for us so we get the fruits of our forest so to speak without having to do the tricky bit. But she has also left me feeling that I’m not really making the most of this plot. I’ve been all about making a beautiful, peaceful and healing place to be and not so much about feeding.

Of course there is so much healing and good about eating food from your own soil – it can’t be fresher and more full of goodness than that. So my new love for autumn is also a new love for home grown food and instead of groaning every time Willy brings in another twentysix beetroots, I think “What lovely little balls of goodness – how shall I cook them this time?” (OK I try to think that)  Even better though Willy has started cooking them too – he’s in the kitchen right now preparing something ‘unique’ with beetroot which we will have alongside our homegrown curly kale and some mushroom tart.

Outside, by the way, we appear to have a parliament of owls (Yes I did look that up) They are really quite chatty but sound so very much friendlier than the noise that comes out of Westminster. Which is nice.