Apple Harvesting - Chutney & Pickling & Apple Day - Sunday, 5th October 2014

Garden Harvest for chutney and Pickles

Well, its that time of year again.  Apples, pears and other fruit everywhere; in friends gardens, in the Supermarkets, country markets and baskets and trays of garden fruit outside garden gates everywhere, from over-burdened householders, willing for passers-by to carry off their extra apples - PLEASE TAKE THEM AWAY!

Its been a glorious year for fruit, everywhere!  Our freezers and store -cupboards are becoming "full-to-bursting" with apple concoctions, bottled fruits, pickled fruits with onions, tomatoes and herbs and spices. Jams and chutneys, savoury and sweet fruit butters and cheeses and preserves of all kinds.   Purees of fruits to be used in puddings and pies, trays of uncooked fruit, frozen whole to be bagged up and stored for the winter months.  Wild fruit - blackberries, autumn raspberries and looking forward to sloes, hazel nuts, rose-hips etc.  There's just so much fruit - oh dear, are we going to have a dreadful winter?

We do what we can to get ready for the winter months to come and enjoy what we can of our home harvests from garden and allotments, country markets, village markets and Supermarkets.  We celebrate Harvest Festival with gifts from home.  We give our produce to our favourite groups and societies, like the Women's Institute or to our children's schools for Christmas Bazaars, gifts of home-filled jars to family and friends for Christmas presents or for a prettily gift-wrapped jar of something delicious to our dinner-party hostess.

Apple Day will soon be here; our annual celebration of our own individual surroundings  instigated by the Charity Common Ground in the 1990's.  Their first Apple Day held at London's Covent Garden Market on the first celebration on Sunday, 21st October 1990 to showcase the wonderful and diverse array of apples, pears and other fruit grown and cultivated in our home gardens, our glorious countryside and within our old and sometimes, neglected, fruit orchards.  The bees and other insects which pollinate our fruit, national awareness of customs involving fruit, the loss of hundreds of different fruit varieties due to specialisation and marketing, our wild life and insect life and the interest and enthusiasm engendered by Common Ground's campaigns to make us realise what we were in danger of losing forever - our countryside and our traditions.

Apple Day has been an annual celebration to look forward to and enjoy and has since become a day for all kinds of events and activities like, fruit and tree identification, sales of fruit produce from chutneys to ciders etc. and everywhere, people honouring their local area customs, all having a wonderful time in the October sunshine, trying out unknown apples and glorying in the local and national fruit diversity of the UK.

My kitchen has been very full of apples, a prize-winning onion, marrow and beetroot, sugar, sultanas and spices, small onions from my own garden, Kilner Jars, my store of jam jars and all the equipment for making chutney and pickled fruit.  At last, it's beginning to clear and here's what I've produced -

Chutney No. 2 with minced green tomatoes, apples and onions

1st Chutney with sliced green tomatoes, apples and onions - lots of lovely texture

3rd Chutney with garden grown marrow, apples and onions

Hot Pickled Veg in Vinegar in Kilner Jars

1st Pickled Vegetables - Hot Apple & Onions in Olive Oil (in Preserving Jar) then my 1st jar of Cold Pickled Veg. in Pickling Vinegar (and Sarson's jar)

Vegetables ready for picklng...!

Happy days!!!

Daisy