Tag: blackberries

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Brambling

Ripe brambles (blackberries) always herald the start of autumn for me.

These days brambles can be bought year round from supermarkets – grown abroad in warmer climates, with big, blowsy berries. I think the small local ones taste better, collected a bowlful at a time from wild hedgerows.

Wind-salted and intense.

Our brambles ripen a fair time later than those further south. I’ve been waiting for them to ripen properly for weeks now, and spurred on by a kind donation of some locally grown cooking apples, Bramleys and Keswick Codlin, (thank you Wildlife Croft Skye) it was time to get picking.

Our access track down from the croft is incredibly steep. Every week husband bravely drags the big wheelie bin down the track to the collection point in the lane, and back up again afterwards. Just thinking about it makes my head spin a bit. But today I joined him after breakfast, walking with him down the track with the bin to forage for brambles.

They’re just starting to ripen. The next few weeks will be when the bulk of the harvest is at its best, but we managed to gather a respectable bowlful for a few apple and bramble pies.

Under construction

It was very quiet as we were picking. Just the sound of the rooks cawing overhead and the soft gurgle of the stream rushing through the culvert by our feet. The water was hidden by a tangle of brambles, yarrow, thistles and rowan.

I’m going to head down to the lane and the bramble patches every few days now to make the most of the free bounty whilst it lasts. Any excess can be popped into the freezer for later use.

There’s nothing like a crisp, sweet apple pie studded with little purple bramble taste explosions on the cold, dark days of winter.

Apple and bramble pie
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Burnished with righteousness

There’s been a distinct drop in temperature over the last few days. Enough for a sharp intake of breath whilst slipping legs between bedsheets at night. I think we may have to put the electric blanket back on. That alone saved us last winter, I’m sure of it.

Autumn blackberries

The hedgerows are full of blackberries which we must find time to get out and plunder. Autumn isn’t worth having without homemade apple and blackberry pies.

Perched atop our windy hill croft

The shed is now built and it’s so startlingly big that I did warn husband that if we weren’t in the house soon we’d be moving the bed into it. It’s better insulated than the caravan and you could seriously house entire families in there.

One of the bays inside

I know better than to get used to its exquisite emptiness, though. It’ll be full of boxes and building material in no time, and glimpses of the floor will soon become a rarity.

The house build continues after a few weeks hiatus with husbands back problems. We will clear the building materials out over the next week and hopefully continue the electrics, kitchens and bathrooms.

Stuff everywhere

We’ve been testing Osmo oil wood treatments on slips of spare wood for the cladding in the bathrooms. The second coat is drying at the moment then we’ll head in and compare. Everything looks so different in situ. The light makes a huge difference.

Osmo oil

We also made a second visit to Skye Sawmills yesterday to try and source oak planks for our sills.

The challenge is those enormous windows in the living area, which will need 4m long pieces, something that it’s proving almost impossible to find. If possible I didn’t want joins.

Brendan didn’t have oak that long, however he did have something interesting – old church pew planks from a dismantled church in Broadford. They’re at least 150 years old, burnished to a patina with the feverish righteousness of all those worshippers bottoms.

I love the idea of reusing old wood from a local church, and having a bit of history in our sparingly new home, so if the price is right we’d love to take them.

The holiest sills on the island!

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Apple and blackberry handpies

Before I put away all the baking stuff I had to make something sweet and seasonal to give us a bit of a lift through all this packing.

Apple and blackberry hand pies. They’re never going to win any beauty contests, but they tasted delicious.

Shortcrust pastry was enriched with egg, sugar and ground almonds to make it crumbly and crispy on the outside, almost like a biscuit. These were filled with lightly poached Coxes Orange Pippin apples and big, juicy blackberries.

We ate these over the last few days whenever we needed a lift. It helped.

Food can be medicine for the spirit, you know.

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The taste of autumn

There are old crab apple trees lining the streets in this part of London. They’re well established, probably twenty metres tall, and planted closely enough that their crowns touch in the wind.

At this time of the year they drop their fruit – tiny, hard, sour crab apples that crunch underfoot in the leaves as you pass by. I walked through them at the weekend, smelling autumn in the air, and it made me crave the apple and blackberry pie that my mother used to make.

This was one of my mother’s specialities. She made it infrequently enough that it was a treat, which considering her busy life, it was. Her pastry was crumbly, sweet and slightly biscuity, with a hint of lemon zest.

The blackberries were never bought from a shop in those days. When the season was right, we kids were dispatched out with a bowl to collect them from the bushes, bribed with promises of pie, crumbles and turnovers. We’d return with purple juice-stained fingers and mouths, and enough pickings to fill the kitchen for a week.

Served with a spoonful of good cream for richness, this is the taste of autumn for me. I can’t wait until we’re picking our own in the hedgerows on the island next year. Bring on the pies, the jam and the blackberry wine!

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Wilding the land

We want to wild the land. And that means trees. Lots of them. I have always been drawn to trees.

Woodland Trust (those wonderful people) are taking applications now for grants for the November 2019 to March 2020 planting season.

It’s pretty amazing to me that they will help with up to 60% of the cost of planting mixed, deciduous woodland, as well as providing advice and tree protection. We are going to need all the help we can get as we plan to use around 1.5 hectares of the land for trees, and along with the deer fencing will plant edible hedges around the perimeter of the croft.

Husband is a a total fruit and nut fiend, and is especially taken by the idea of wild fruit and nuts in the hedging – blackberries, sloes, wild strawberries, cloudberries, raspberries, haws and rowan berries. We may even try planting some hazelnuts.

On a recent summer trip to the island we were blown away by the plant diversity of the hedgerows on the lanes in Teangue, just up the road from where our land is. It was like going back in time.

We’d mainly visited the island in winter before. Summer on the island on a calm, sunny day was an experience that took me straight back to my childhood, with bird and insect life in sleepy, buzzy, happy profusion. We want to help protect and build more of that and to grow as much wild, edible fruit as we can.

I’m being a bit premature I know, but I’m already stacking up crabapple jelly and blackberry wine recipes in happy anticipation…☺️