I can’t wait to…

…EAT BILBERRIES

I’ve never seen a bilberry on a supermarket shelf, not by any of its many names: blaeberry, whortleberry, whinberry, myrtleberry. The only way to get hold of this delicious fruit is to pick it yourself, from the heaths and moors where it likes to spread in low-growing clumps among the heather. The berries ripen in late summer to purple-black with a dusty bloom, a bit like your familiar blueberry, but smaller, and with a tangier flavour. I hear they can be baked into the brilliantly-named Mucky Mouth Pie, but I’ve never managed to get enough home from a walk to try. Jenny Walters, Features Editor

…LISTEN TO CRICKETS

I don’t know if it’s childhood exposure to Huckleberry Finn

& His Friends, or if we’re hardwired to relax at the sound of crickets, but it happens like clockwork.

Couple it with a mattress of pliant heather to lie back on and it’s the recipe for a perfect summery trance.

It’ll probably be a dark bush cricket I’ll hear, and I feel particular kinship with them because they’re walkers not jumpers and they’re rather shy. They’re only about the size of a 1p coin, but their short, dry, irregular stridulations – designed to attract a she-cricket – are a powerful summons to reverie. I hope you find a mate, mate, but not yet. Guy Procter, Editor

…WATCH THE HARVEST

Living in Lincolnshire’s farming flatlands means that at harvest time my world, my everyday world, changes from green, gold and yellow fields of potatoes, wheat and oilseed, back to a heavy earth brown at this time of year. Giant agricultural vehicles totter day and night across vast acres of Fenland, picking, scooping and hacking raw ingredients from the ground, and the fields, one minute swaying, full of life and gentle movement, become spiky stubble, tall piles of root vegetables, and lines of brutalist haybales. In the blink of an eye, life, growth and chaos turns to calm, still, empty, ordered. Tim Unwin, Production Editor