Preserving the Orchard's Harvests

Producing palatable presents - for those requiring the prevention of rot (particularly the cabin fever variety)

Put a date in your calendar (in october ish) to forage for sloe berries and apples
No matter what the weather, (in fact it's even more refreshing in the wind and rain) go and collect a bucket or two load

NB it may be useful to bring a step ladder or a stool - keep your harvest location secret

2 recipes for sloe berry produce

• Apple and sloe berry Jelly (v v tasty especially with meat and root vegetables)
• Sloe gin by Si (below)

Sloe gin recipe

• Wash sloes and freeze (when ready to make gin, take sloes from freezer and defrost)
• Sterilise some bottles 
• Fill a bottle to 2/3 full with sloe berries (no need to prick berries as this sometimes makes the gin cloudy) - remember to weigh the sloes before putting them in the bottle
• pour 1/2 the weight of the sloes in granulated sugar into the bottle
• Fill the rest of the bottle with gin and seal the bottle
• Turn the bottles daily until the sugar's dissolved
• Leave to rest for a minimum of 6 weeks before drinking
• After a year decant the sloe gin from the bottle (this will ensure that the sloe gin doesn't go off) 
• Soak the sloe gin berries in sherry for another yummy drink

A Heavenly Yarn from the Orchard

A remedy for those in need of inspiration

A simple graft for the protection of future harvests

Visit shop to pick up yarn and hooks unless you have some already.

Raid drawers to find an old button

Go to Crafty Anna's Blogspot to see free apple cozy pattern

Use You tube to learn how to crochet

Make apple cozies till you are totally exhausted

Sleep determindly and with conviction

Repeat until you find you have re-awoken to the root of your inpsiration

Then act on inspiration

WARNING: Crochet is addictive

THANK YOU- to Norma for two beautiful knitted baby blankets and to Tracey for the crocheted baby blankets to keep the boys warm this winter.

Select the right palette of words

I totally under-estimated how long and how hard it would be to write text for my 'book'.

I'm currently on re-write version 6 (or so)

I'm really grateful to Hazel for her feedback....she's taking the 'this isn't working' approach to editing rather than the 'change it in this way' approach. Never having worked with anyone to edit anything before I'm finding it really helpful.

Firstly the time between re-writes, when you're not looking at it is good ( I reckon my sub-concious does a great deal without explaining how)
Secondly the type of feedback means that all the decisions about how to change the text are mine, so I'm not beginning to feel detached from it.

Best bit of feedback for me so far was - 'The language is very grey at the moment, whereas the pictures are very colourful. How about visiting a dictionary / thesaurus and collecting some favourite words and then playing around with them for a bit.'

It has amazed me how limited my vocabulary has become over a decade of writing finance papers and emails for work and little else. Each of the new juicy words I re/discover feels so refreshing! and each new word I use opens up new vistas in the text.

People keep asking me who my story is for... At the moment it feels like it's for myself...This is really not a very commercial proposition I know!.....I have started using words which are just not fashionable for children's stories which is what you might expect the story was if you glancingly picked it up. I like to think that it doesn't completely matter if you recognise the words or not, that they should be tasty enough for you to get some flavour from them anyhow. I like to think that there are other people in the world with not dissimilar tastes / interests to me and that maybe that means it's okay to be totally self-indulgent! I like to think that it doesn't matter that I don't know in advance what I'm doing and that it's okay to make stuff up as I go along. Actually thinking about it....I think it's just that this is all I can do, and the only way I can do it, dress it up how I like.