October notes 2014

by David Tidmarsh - 12:48 on 16 November 2014

Kens Nature Notes

Autumn is now well and truly in charge, we are blessed with glorious red and yellows in most of the foliage that are still clinging onto their hosts.

I know it has been a fantastic year for certain fruits and seeds, this year has been especially good for hazelnuts, I have never seen such a fantastic harvest. The only use I have for hazelnuts is to expand the population, as I plant as many as I can carry. I usually have a good success rate at germinating these nuts and they are one of my favourite trees.

The apple harvest has been very good this year as well, reading magazines inspired me to try and make some cider, everywhere is promoting apple days in celebration of our wonderful heritage of growing apples, so I thought get the apple press out and get stuck in and make some juice!

I collected all the wind falls off one of our apple trees in the groups allotment, apples that have dropped off usually means they are ripe. It worked out as over six bucket full’s, these were washed, then chopped up, put in a food blender to mash them up and then placed into the apple press to squeeze out the juice. All was going well till the belt snapped on our old food blender, I then tried mashing them with a clean stick, and this didn’t go well, so off to Argos for a cheap blender.

I was now back in action cutting apples, mashing them up and building up the apple press. Juice was flowing into a large container on loan from my mate Paul who was guiding me through the process.

After six hours on Sunday followed by another two on the Monday I had finally finished all the apples that I had collected, and I was starting to have reservations about the whole process.

The apple juice now has to stand in the container for a week before I add the yeast, then after six weeks it will be filtered into some plastic bottles to mature.

I am now thinking is it all worth the bother? Well I will let you know in the December notes.

Today we sowed quite a lot of wild flower seed around our Apiary, which is now surrounded by earthworks in the shape of a large horse shoe. When it all germinates in the spring it should look quite dramatic with yellows and white flowers on the tops, blues down the inner sides and poppies on another side.

The bees should awake in the spring to a fanfare of flowers and colour, fingers crossed.

I have heard it has been a good year for the conker collectors, I have yet to find time for a bit of collecting myself, I still find it enjoyable in my senior years finding the fruits of the Horse chestnuts, what is it they say? You can take the man out of the boy but not the boy out of the man.

Add your comment

Your Name


Your Email (only if you are happy to have it on the site)


Your Comment - no HTML or weblinks


Enter this number in the box below and click Send - why?Unfortunately we have to do this to prevent the system being swamped by automated spam