Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Country Diary
The pros and cons of a long, hot and dry summer are summed up by a bumper fruit-picking trip and a near miss with a terrifying wildfire
At the time of writing, it has been 160 days since it last rained with us — possibly the longest run of dry weather I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Love it or loathe it, the drought has been an interesting period, with numerous consequences, both good and bad.
The increase in wildfires has certainly been one of the main headlines. They have always seemed rather far away from home, but the problem was brought firmly to our doorstep on Friday when someone threw a cigarette into the bottom of a hedge by the side of one of our fields.
The fire ripped across a stubble and torched several hundred metres of hedgerow, thankfully being brought to a stop a matter of feet away from an estate cottage. It was a terrifying incident caused by the stupidity of one person, but all credit to the local fire service, which was on site and had the situation under control within 20 minutes of the first phone call.
While the wildfires are an extreme negative, the hot weather has some positives, too. Seemingly, around us, the cereal crop yields are generally holding up OK and the farmers have been happily bringing grain into the barns at a moisture content so low that they haven’t had to use their expensive, energy-consuming dryers, saving what is often a significant annual cost.
The general harvest seems to have been finished a bit earlier than normal, but the hot weather appears to have brought forward another harvest. The fruits in the walled garden at Burghley have been ripe and ready to pick for some weeks now. The 100m-long trellised archway down one side of the garden has apple trees of numerous varieties growing down its length, with some old English varieties including the estate’s own Lord Burghley.
Another sunny Sunday afforded my wife and me the time to wander down to the walled garden with baskets in tow
(top)
(above right) to plunder the rich pickings. It didn’t take long to fill our baskets, despite a battle with the wasps that had already made significant inroads into the fruit.
They, along with the ants, had also made a dent in the figs on a couple of the trees. The fruit was perfectly soft and ripe. In the knowledge that the ants would win the battle if they were left, we filled our hats with figs and then headed home.
It was difficult to know quite what to do with so much fruit and a quick plan had to be hatched to preserve what we could. Cynthia set to on the baking front, whipping up a number of delicious apple cakes, and I flicked through some old books looking for a chutney recipe.
Eventually I found one that looked suitable, made with equal measures of
(above left) fig and apple. It didn’t start too well, with my plan of using a mincer to process the fruit not really working. The soft fruit simply mushed in the mechanism rather than actually passing through. I got there eventually and simmered the vat of mushed fruit with some onion and balsamic vinegar for five hours.
Along with the cakes now in the freezer, the eight Kilner jars of chutney are safely stashed away in the shed to mature for a few months.
While we were on a roll with our fruit preservation drive, we finally got around to straining the blackberry vodka we’d made last autumn. After a quick wash of the jars, they were immediately replenished with more vodka, followed by a kilo of quartered figs. Fig vodka? I bet it’s delicious.
“The fire ripped across a stubble and stopped only feet away from a cottage”
Jamie Tusting is a keen Shot, fisherman and stalker who runs a small driven shoot on his farm in Bedfordshire.