Orchard fruit

If you’ve seen our Instagram posts, you’ll have seen what’s been keeping us busy throughout the late summer and autumn evenings. Not wanting to waste any of the fruit from our orchard, and once we’d made enough apple sauce & cut up crumble slices to see us through to next year, we decided to look at other ways of using up the fruit. As well as apple trees (eating, cooking and cider), we have pear, plum, damson, crabapple, quince, fig and medlar trees. We also have a mulberry bush although the berries had been eaten by birds before we moved in. And even though we lost a lot of fruit due to disease and insects, we still had plenty to try different recipes with.  

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

So – for the first time ever, we tried our hand at making jam. The first couple of batches were ‘experimental’ (at best) and needed to be recooked – but luckily we had my aunt and a few friends on hand for advice, which gave us confidence to keep trying. And with our variety of fruit that needed using up, we started experimenting with random mixes of fruit (namely green figs that hadn’t ripened – green jam anyone?). I’d never realised quite how much sugar goes into jam – it pretty much makes up half of the weight, so we’re a bit more cautious about how much we eat now. 

We also made our own chutney – using up the remaining green tomatoes and chillis that we brought with us from London, before starting to google recipes to use up the orchard fruit as it ripened. The smell from the spices as it cooked down kept the kitchen smelling lovely for the next couple of days! 

• 

• 

• 

Our final challenge with preserving the fruit was making jelly from the juice. This is certainly more hit and miss, with several batches not setting and needing to be recooked (mainly mine). It’s so tempting to use a smaller saucepan to cook it instead of a huge one that takes ages to heat up – until you see just how much it increases in size when it boils.  

We did find one other very-effective use for the fruit – infusing various sorts of alcohol to create flavoured gins, liqueurs and brandies. We quickly learnt to balance our mixtures between those that took a couple of weeks and those that take several months (or even years), so we could start tasting them and wouldn’t need to buy collections of large mason jars, only to have them sitting round the house. Although we’ve still not tasted everything yet, our favourites are quince gin and spiced apple liqueur – the latter is fabulous on a cold winter’s evening. 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Our longer-term aim is to sell these to provide a little extra income, and to leave small samples in the cottages as surprise & delights for our guests. We’ll need to speed up our chopping and peeling skills first though!! We’d planned to use up all the fruit by the end of the year, but didn’t quite make it as we still have a couple of boxes of apples left. At least there are still dark evenings to fill, before we’ll be spending the spring evenings out in the garden. 

• 

• 

•