Rose Hips, Plums and Seedlings

In between working on my Greek-Spanish history essay, exit polling at the Berlin city and local elections, mending socks, and volunteering at an open-air cinema, I've been travelling to the allotment gardens again.

I've also been re-watching the BBC series Tales of the Green Valley, Victorian Farm, and Edwardian Farm, which have nudged me to do more with the allotment garden produce. Unluckily, while there were a few early apples in August, there are almost no late apples this year, so I am concentrating on other fruit.

Rose hips are ripe now, for example. I see them scattered on the garden paths — whether humans, animals or birds tear them off the bushes I don't know yet. At any rate, it feels morally defensible to take them. Before this autumn my only idea for turning rose hips into food was to make jam. But I can't gather enough rose hips to make more than a tablespoonful. This year, fortunately, I thought of turning the hips into tea instead. They are usually blended with other ingredients when you buy tea bags in the store, of course. So today I brewed three of the hips together with half a lemon and about 5 cups of boiling water. The resulting tea tasted nice (fresh, mellow and tangy at the same time) and had a yellowy glow.

For my supper I made a plum compôte with sugar, water, cinnamon, a clove, and the zest and juice of the other half of the lemon. As the fallen fruit itself was past its best days, judging by the musty fragrance, it wasn't a pity to cover up its flavour.

Besides there are pear quinces in the pantry, and elderberry florets hanging in a bag at my kitchen chair, waiting for me to use them... Since most of the family is travelling in the UK, I was thinking I'll try making quince jelly and quince cheese again before they return — this time with elderberries in the jelly, as I like the colour and flavour combination. Hopefully by Wednesday afternoon every sign of the messy pots and implements will have vanished.

I did try eating (fresh and on its own) a Concord grape that had fallen off a vine. But it was sour and it didn't look like 2026 was a good year for Berlin grapes.

It was windy and a volatile mix of sunshine and cloud today, so on the whole a good day to visit the allotment gardens. There were very few gardeners or passersby, but to make up for that many species of butterflies were dancing around the fences.

Lastly, I'm growing rocket (arugula), peas and nasturtiums in an egg carton that I've filled with potting soil and put near a windowsill in my room. The seeds were prodded in on September 15th, many of them sprouted over the weekend, and today I began thinning out the arugula seedlings to give their fellow plants more room. The sprouts that I removed, I washed and ate for dinner.

One thing I haven't done is to gather Turkish filberts. These nuts are smaller than regular hazelnuts, and often fall from the trees lodged in their baroque, fierce-looking swirled spike husks; and at least where I grew up in Canada they don't appear to be common, whereas in Berlin they're familiar. At any rate, in August parents and their children were crouching around the sidewalks, harvesting them from between the cobblestones and from directly underneath the trees.

Returning to the subject of the failed late apple crop, however, I've ended up thinking that at least there is one positive aspect of the variable behaviour of nature: if this is a bad year for apples, we can enjoy next year's good harvest all the more by contrast. There is something to look forward to.