Well, it’s been a while! No matter how hard I try to be disciplined and write more often, there are always jobs that need doing at the top of the list…

Last season was not only full of wonderful and engaged guests, but we saw an enormous, bumper harvest of all of our fruit, along with managing extremely dry conditions. So when I wasn’t busy running the B&B side of our business, I was flat out harvesting, preserving, and watering very sparsely by hand. We have 7,000 litres of rainwater storage around the site, and David has also dug several new ponds, all for watering the site. We were left with about 700 litres when the rain started in September (and hasn’t really stopped!), but had to sacrifice the more thirsty crops like pumpkins and squash, as we couldn’t justify the water needed. And this is with very heavy mulching around everything which definitely helps to conserve moisture.

I estimate that I have picked and preserved around 130Kg of fruit, and I went back to the more old fashioned bottling (in the US they call it canning), as well as jams and a little bit in the freezer. This took almost 6 months from the first gooseberries to the last medlars, and everything in between – tayberries, raspberries, currants, jostaberries, quinces, apples, a few pears and walnuts, Chilean guavas, rose hips, damsons, plums, haws, elderflowers and elderberries, autumn olives. What a privilege to be able to do this, and you may be glad to know that quite a bit of this is likely to end up on the breakfast table, or appear as the daily afternoon cake!

I also invested in a large pasteuriser to preserve larger quantities of produce at a time, and a dehydrator to produce ‘fruit leathers’ from the fruit pulps and purées left over from jelly making. I also dried sliced fruit as well, so very little indeed went into the compost heap, so vey little waste at all.

We are not expecting anything like this next year, but who knows? Our young orchards are starting to produce now, and I can’t resist taking cuttings every time I prune the fruit bushes!