We expect you've all been on tenterhooks, wondering who won the case of wine for the most popular picture. We can now reveal that it was Eddie Potts's picture of Nichol Chair. Congratulations, Eddie!
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| Eddie Potts with winning picture (photo from The Herald). |
The Countryfile programme was shown on September 4th. We were only on for about 2 minutes and they didn't say who we were but we had a number of enquiries as a result. Even though the programme showed us only starting to make this year's wine and Matt giving Clare Balding "their last bottle" of last year's wine it didn't stop people ordering beetroot wine! We are going to have it ready by the beginning of November. It's certainly a fantastic colour!
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| Pressing beetroot. |
We've had a busy month dealing with damsons and elderberries. Most of the damsons came from Colby but a few came from the walled garden at Highhead Castle, a fascinating ruin, owned by Christopher Terry. There has been such a bumper crop of damsons this year that we've had to turn people away. We crushed the damsons and they are now fermenting happily.
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| Crushing damsons. |
Elderberries are our least favourite fruit to harvest. So many bushes have a mixture of completely ripe fruit, completely unripe fruit and all states in between! This year we even found flowers with the berries! We have bushes in our field but we also have to go out on the lanes. Then we have to strip the berries off the stems with a fork. This is very labour intensive and monotonous, leaving us with purple hands, but we get a lot of TV watched!
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| Dense bunches of ripe elderberries. |
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| Flowers and berries on the same bush! |
As part of the Eden Artists Open Studios we visited Haydn Morris in Tirril. As a result we have agreed to make him some wine from his prolific harvest of grapes grown in a poly tunnel. They are now fermenting. Our Rondo grapes on the fellside are not in such good condition!
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| Presssing Haydn's crushed grapes. |
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| Our Rondo grapes - waiting for the compost heap! |
