Michaelmas

A plant with spiky-looking flower heads and narrow pink-purple petals around a yellow centre
Michaelmas daisy at Wimpole Hall

St Michael and All Angels. Don’t pick any blackberries after today: the Devil spits on them. Or possibly wees on them. Actually, they’ve been looking a bit sad for a while now. There’s the odd one or two that still look tempting, but mostly they’re all very shrivelled.

It’s definitely getting to the end of the fruit harvest. As always, there has been more than I could triage despite my best efforts. Not so much in the way of apples and pears, this year (the apples mostly went bad and fell before they got good); a few raspberries eaten straight off the canes; loads of Victoria plums; the most greengages we’ve ever had.

Yesterday I filled four carrier bags with grapes – too small and pippy for eating off the stalk, but enough people from the local free-sharing Facebook group wanted some to make it worth the picking. Again, we’re approaching the end of the harvest: I passed some bunches over for being either mouldy or wannabe raisins, and the recipients will have to pick them over before making wine or jelly or whatever it is they’re going to do with them.

Last night I made baked apples: the last three from the tree. There’s still a punnet of greengages in the fridge. I think I’ll make another plum torte. Green, not purple, in this case.

And everything else will have to be for the birds, or the invertebrates, or the compost bin. Or, I suppose, for the Devil to leave his bodily fluids on. Time to accept I’ll never get to everything, and move on.

December Reflections 20: gold

A packet of 12 gilt plastic apple-shaped Christmas tree decorations

I’ve been spending more time (and also more money) in charity shops this year; it comes of spending more time in town. Yesterday I wandered into the Sue Ryder shop (with some assistance from a kind person who held the door for the pushchair) and found these golden apples. They reminded me immediately of a set of four polystyrene, white-leaved, iridescent-glittered apple-shaped Christmas tree decorations from my childhood. The fight over who got to put them on the tree was always vicious: for some reason the obvious solution, do one each, was unacceptable. So I bought these ones in a fit of nostalgia, and because I was already on a bit of a kick buying tree decorations that the toddler and the cat probably couldn’t break. I hope they’ll turn out to be not so much the apples of discord.

But they sparked some other associations, too. Narnia. Jesus Christ the apple tree. The fascination with orchards and walled gardens and fruit trees that’s been a fixture in my head since we first viewed this house, five winters ago, and realised that the bare trees against the garage wall had labels telling us what sort of pears they were. Martin Luther claiming that even if the world were going to end tomorrow, he would still plant his apple tree. (Was Nevil Shute thinking of that when he wrote his gardening couple facing down the apocalypse in On the Beach?)

The best time to plant an apple tree being twenty years ago. Well, our predecessors in this house did that for us. (Yes, apples as well as pears.) The second best time being now. As for the best time to convert an evergreen into an enchanted tree growing golden apples – well, probably Tuesday.