Gleanings

It's been a while since I posted on here, mostly because we've just come back from a lovely 10 day holiday in Eskdale in the Lake District.

It's the time of year now for scouring hedgerows for all the berries and other things that are available for the next couple of weeks. There should still be plenty of blackberries (the smaller 'brambles' rather than the earlier cultivated ones) - we're struggling to keep up with the crop from our garden! I wonder if we might have missed the elderberries, which would be a real shame and it would mean no elderberry cordial for the winter. But we'll have a look around the places we found elderflowers early in the summer to see if we can get a couple of bags full.

Today we were making a concerted effort to find some sloes, small sour fruits of the blackthorn, which work a delicious magic when steeped in gin. We've already had repeat requests from people who had bottles of sloe gin from us for Christmas 07. So we were feeling the pressure. Most of the blackthorn we found on walks in the Lake District was all but bare of berries - we ended up bringing back just a handful or two. But a quick trawl on the internet turned up an area of former peat bog just north of Crewe that was drained and enclosed with hawthorn and blackthorn hedges (in the eighteenth century I guess). A short stroll turned up loads of lovely sloes - enough to start with anyway. We also got a bag of rose-hips to have a go at doing something with.

But the real surprise was finding lots of wild damsons - we were pretty sparing in what we picked but still ended up with over three pounds of the things (the bottom picture). This, according to a recipe we turned up (I'll post it when we get round to trying it) is easily enough to make a bottle's worth of damson gin. What's left over from this we'll probably try to pickle whole. We tried pickled damsons when visiting friends recently and liked them very much.

Now to find some elderberries somewhere..