Harvests

I am told the Czech news has been full of doom and gloom about a failure in fruit this year - no cherries, no plums, no apples and pears. But they clearly haven't been in my orchard.

The branches on my early cherry tree have been weighed down with deep red fruit or they were until I and the birds relieved them of their treasure. The freezer is now full of bags of cherries and in the cupboard jars of cherries preserved in a mixture of gin and sugar are sitting waiting for my return from England in August.

Then there are the strawberries - my friend Hannah loved her strawberries and grew them both at her Krumlov riverside house and the house she was restoring by the lake. I have keeping an eye on both houses, as the slow business of Czech probate proceeds, and I pay myself in soft fruit - strawberries and raspberries.

But the greatest of fruits are the ones that no one plants or tends. They have a special richness that comes from God or Nature being their gardener. The wild strawberries are magnificent this year in their size and abundance. Usually there are too few even to survive the trip to the basket and certainly not to the house, but this year there have been so many that there are bags full in the freezer.

And what shall I drink with these fruits? Of course it is a drink made from another harvest. I have two bottles of elderflower syrup sitting in my cupboard. An easy drink to make and a delicious one that speaks of early summer. My method is simply to layer the flowers with sugar in a jug and leave for a day or two, then simply add bowling water and hey presto - elixir.

Cherries

I have been watching the fruit trees in the orchard as if watching them would somehow encourage them to blossom. Then yesterday or last night or this morning, anyway some time when I wasn't looking, the cherry trees went from bud to full flower in what can only have been hours.

I have a fellow blogger from Prague staying with me at the moment and so have been showing off the fecundity of my garden, with last year's cherries out of the freezer - an exquisite taste of summer! And will this year's harvest be as good? The loud humming sound coming from the cherry trees suggests the bees are busy already, so fingers crossed.

First Fruit

I ate my first fruit of the season yesterday. First there were the early cherries from our orchard. I spent half an hour collecting a large bowlful from the first of our two trees. In a few days it will be a bucketful and I will be resorting to freezing them.

Then whilst on a walk in the woods above our house I came across a bank of wild strawberries. The bank was in full sun and the plants were way ahead of the other strawberries I had passed which were in flower and such fruit as there was was small and green. No, here on the bank the fruit was red and glistening with that “come and eat me” sheen. I duly obliged, savouring each little berry as its flavour exploded in my mouth. The intense taste of wild strawberries is so far removed from those waterlogged Spanish monsters that one gets in British supermarkets as to make one believe them to be totally unrelated.

My feast finished, I walked on through the woods past slopes covered with bilberry plants and raspberry canes. The first boletuses were pushing their velvet crowns through the loam. I made a mental note to bring mushroom basket next time.