September – free food for the taking

April might be the cruellest month, according to T S Eliot, but I would nominate September as the most demanding. All that mellow fruitfulness is wearing me out. It’s a joy to see the trees laden with fruit and the hedgerows bursting with blackberries and sloes, but I know that it will translate into hours of harvesting, sorting, washing, weighing and cooking. Going back to school was a doddle by comparison.

September is relentless if you’re determined to take advantage of all the food freely available around you and I, never one to pass up a bargain, can’t resist the lure of the orchard and the hedgerow. I start with plums, which must be picked, prepared, washed and then either stewed or made into jam. Then I move onto apples, making some into apple sauce and wrapping the rest individually to be stored in a cool, dry place for use throughout the winter. Except when you forget about them and discover that one bad apple can indeed spoil the whole bunch. Although who ever heard of a bunch of apples? I looked it up and the bible quotation actually uses the word ‘bushel’, which makes much more sense, but still leaves you with a lot of rotten apples.

Then it’s time to pick blackberries from the hedgerow. Those bushes don’t give up their fruit without a fight and we return scratched, torn and blackberry-stained, but triumphant. The berries are then de-stalked, washed and weighed. Some are frozen, some combined with apple sauce and some made into jam. I do wonder about the jam, though, when I look at the four measly jars it produced and think how much effort it took.

Finally, the best bit – sloes. This is only important if sloe gin features as prominently in your life as it does in mine. Friday night is not complete without a sloe gin and tonic, and it must be home-made sloe gin. Nothing else will do. I can still recall that year when sloes were nearly impossible to find and I recruited everyone I knew to look for them. A few were found, but it was a very meagre year. Now I start fretting in the spring. Are the blackthorn bushes blooming well? Did the farmer decide to chop the whole hedgerow down? Will there be a late frost? Will it rain too much and prevent the insects from pollinating the flowers? Maybe that was T S Eliot’s problem with April – sloe anxiety.

Luckily, that one year was an exception and we normally gather kilos of sloes, which are taken home to be washed, weighed and frozen. Once they’re thawed the sloes are mixed with sugar and cheap gin and then left to hunker down in their demi-johns until the following spring. The flavour improves over time and if you can manage to save a bottle or two each year, you can compare the deepening flavours. Or so I’m told.

Once the work is done, I contentedly survey the jars of jam lined up on the shelf, the sloe gin pinkly glinting in its giant bottles and the many pots of fruit neatly arranged in the freezer. October is the smuggest month.