Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Autumn makes me feel like a fieldmouse or squirrel, gathering up my harvest and firewood and battening down the hatches before winter. Making elderberry cordial is an annual rite, for its vitamin C, we drink it hot.

I find elderberry wine the stuff of stripping the enamel from your teeth even though we make a lot of wine from home-grown produce.

There is, however, an eighteenth century recipe which is spicy and suitable for mulling. I also use it as the liquid in spiced plum jam.

If anyone wants the recipe I'll post it on here but elderberries are finished for this year.

Love the song janerowena

It's Damson Gin for me.

We made elderberry wine at our last house and then stored it, in a demijohn, in the garage and forgot about it. It subsequently moved house with us and is still in its demijohn. I guess it must be about six years old now. DH won't try it, so I suppose I will have to, but I can't imagine it being still drinkable. Last year's damson wine exploded in its bottles, all over the garage - must have set up a secondary fermentation! Our garage still smells like an alcoholics dream of home!

I well remember the wine-making years. MiL has never forgiven DBH for six bottles of exploding raspberry wine in the car on the way up the A1M. They thought they were under terrorist attack. (Ex RAF jitters!) But as I drenched my kitchen twice last year, with elderflower champagne, I am no better!

On the subject of exploding alcohol, does anybody remember ginger beer plants?
It was all the rage among my parents' friends when I was a child and one of their friends, who was Manager of the local Trustee Savings Bank used his strongroom to store his bottles in ( being cool and dark).
That was until the time the police called at his house above the bank in the middle of the night to say that there has been reports of the sound of gunfire in the vicinity of the back of the bank, or possibly dynamite(?) and they feared an attempted break-in. So Mr Walker in his PJs followed the police into the bank, down the stairs to the basement and (somewhat fearfully) unlocked the strongroom.
Only to find shards of glass everywhere and everything soaked in ginger beer!

I was only talking to a friend about ginger beer plants the other day. She had never heard of them. My mum always seems to have one on the go. You can, I believe, get them from Lakeland now. Problem is finding suitable bottles to store it in because, as indicated above, it builds up quite a head of steam! Delicious though!

Seemed! She is deceased (not killed by exploding ginger beer though!)

After very wet start this morning it's been a lovely afternoon! Warm wind drying my washing!! Garden starting to slow down, although many plants still looking good! Begonias and rudbeckia in particular! Once we have a frost though all will change. The days are much shorter now here, by 8.15 pm it is dark! I don't like it at all. Give me long warm days and light evenings any time. Sorry autumn! Give me spring and summer any time!

Agreed!

Alea How awful!

Yes, we too had a dreaded ginger beer plant, started in desperation by my mother one school summer holiday, she said it was cheaper than buying squash back then. It lived in the scullery, where it couldn't do too much damage, after it broke the kitchen window! I used to watch her halving the yeast and starting off another batch, but she also started off one to allow it to become alcoholic. To me it tasted vile, but the adults seemed to like it at summer lunch parties. She made it for years and years. It put us all right off gingerbeer for decades!

season of mists and mellow fruitfulness... if only.

Alea, love your poem.

I also love the autumn season. I'm already looking forward to walking the same woodland route I took today in a month's time. By then, the colours will be so different but the sun may still be shining through the trees, as they were today.