Picking season

It’s early July now - the day after the General Election and it’s all go in the fruit picking department.

If it’s June it’s strawberries and raspberries, and then gooseberries if they are ready. As we move into July, we are watching the blackcurrants and redcurrants in our garden to make sure we can pick our fruit before the local bird population helps itself.

This year the current crop doesn’t seem so bountiful. We’ve definitely got less blackcurrants than last year. That means we need to top up from a local pick your own farm. We usually pick from Cattows in Heather, Leicestershire. It’s nice and local, the fruit hasn’t travelled very far at all and it can go from the plant to the preserving jar in the space of an hour.

By August we are into plums and once again, our tree isn’t looking too heavily cropped. It was so cold this Spring, that the flowers didn’t set with fruit. Luckily we have loads of wild plum trees hereabouts so we will be making sure we catch as many of those as possible too. And we’ll supplement our plum bounty with some excellent Worcestershire Victoria Plums sourced for us by Stodd’s Fresh Fruit and Veg.

Towards the end of August, we’ll be picking mulberries and then the cultivated blackberries start to be ready, We’ll be picking wild brambles til the end of October most probably. We like to mix wild and cultivated blackberries: for the juice of the big garden cultivars and the sweetness of the smaller wild brambles. But soon the frosts will come and the picking season will be over for another year. Then we’ll be bottling for Christmas….but more of that another time.