First session of the year!

Brilliant loofah,the fruit is ripening early this year up here and disappearing fast,I need to get a move on...

 

Nice one Loof

I just picked 5 litres of prune juice off the shelves in Morrisons with the same intention

 

I've already picked over 200lbs (we've been going out picking every day for about 2 weeks), virtually all for wine and they're between 5 and 10 minutes walk away. It's going to be a mega harvest this year. The local damsons (falling off the trees) and elderberries also ripe and I've already started pressing apples. Everything is 3 weeks early, but that will probably mean it will also finish 3 weeks earlier.

But just look at the state of my hands! But it's all free fruit and that's my favourite price.

 

Yes, just one part of my new 'career' called early retirement. I do take it rather seriously, using a 6 litre bucket (holds 8lbs) hanging from my neck using a wide (holdall) strap so I can use both hands to pick and I have a sheet of hardboard that I use as a sort of 'breastplate/shield' so I can push my way right into bushes without getting my T shirt/me torn to shreds (a small rug or piece of carpet also works well). I also carry gardening gloves, secateurs and a short stick with a hook on the end for pulling those berries just out of reach within my grasp.

Have a look for the price of Blackberry Wine kits and work out how much I've saved so far then double it for what I expect to get by the end of the season.

 

Jeez Scrungee. you must be stripping the bushes bare is there any left for anyone else???

Val

 

And I haven't even mentioned the ladders yet. Picked another 20lbs 8ozs this morning. Hope to get the total up to 250lbs by this afternoon or tomorrow morning. My previous best for a year was 350lbs (by October), so might better that this year.

 

@Marley Farley I wondered when somebody was going to pick up on that I'd need either a house full of freezers or a house full of buckets of fermenting blackberries.

The answer is that I steam juice extract the blackberry juice and pasteurise it in bottles every 2 or 3 days, so by the end of the today I'll have no blackberries in the freezers (or anywhere else), but will have over a hundred bottles of juice that will be stacked in a shed (layer of bottles, sheet of hardboard, layer of bottles and so on) together with my bottled apple juice, elderflower cordial, elderberry juice (needs some acid addition for storage), blackcurrant juice, strawberry juice, rhubarb juice (needs some sugar addition to prevent freezing) and later on pear juice, crab apple juice (for infusing flowers the following year to make fragrant jellies), later season apples, etc.

 

We do all those but find the real key to being able to store vast amounts of stuff is to get it into bottles (juice) and jars and free up loads of freezer space. I do all the growing, pressing, fermenting, steam juice extraction, pasteurising, passata making/pasteurising, vacuum packing, flower flavoured jellies, etc. and Mrs Scrungee does jam, jellies, pickles & chutney. Hedgerow picking is a shared activity.

I hate seeing waste, so dislike seeing unpicked blackberries on the hedgerows as much as seeing rotting windfalls under apple trees or the ground under damson/plum trees littered with fallen fruit, but it can get a bit obsessive trying to pick everything, plus pressing/pasteurising juice for everybody else who can't cope with their crops.