Autumn pickings

Last weekend Elaine and I headed to Underhill on Friday and Geoff and Jen and the girls arrived on Saturday morning.

The job for the visit was to pick all the autumn produce which included pears, quinces, apples and nashi pears.

 There were actually 2 trays of Nashi but this is what came home with me.

The largest quince was 650g, the largest pear was 350g and the largest Nashi was 600g. The apples are suffering with black spot but will be OK for mint jelly and there are just a few that are able to be eaten straight.

Yesterday I was able to sort out all the damaged fruit from the tree 'pear' varieties and made a batch of jelly liquid and a batch of stewed fruit ready to puree and cook today to make Autumn Fruit Paste. Today's job with Jen's help will be to deal with all the apples ready to make Mint Jelly.

Unfortunately this apple tree (5 Crown) had blown over in the wind but we are going to see if it grows at its angle of 45 degrees as it will be easier to pick at that height.

We came across a jewel spider on the drive. We had to walk in to get the WD40 as the lock on the gate would not budge.

The WD40 did not work either so I rang Cal who has a padlock on our gate as well so he can get in if there is an emergency. Luckily he was home and came straight down.

We spent a lot of time cutting back weeds and Geoff even did some 'mowing' with his whipper-snipper. Elaine found an amazing spider in the weeds.