As promised in my last post, and before winter claims what is left of lingering autumn feels, here is a little account of how we pressed our homegrown apples into bottles and bottles of lovely, organic juice.
One crisp and sunny morning in October, we drove our 60 kgs of harvested apples, mainly Bramleys, to Newtown, where we had hired a pressing, juicing and pasteurising facility. A couple of years ago, we had tried juicing at home with a small, domestic juicer that some friends had lent us and the process was slow, messy and very noisy! The machine had …
The Wheel of the Year has turned some more and we have now reached Samhain, the major festival in the Celtic calendar that marks the end of the cycle of birth and growth and the start of the dark half of the year. Summer is well and truly over and the final harvest is all gathered in. The life cycle is complete; it is the point of death and decay. Nature now enters a quiet, fallow period with the seeds of the harvest fallen into the nurturing folds of the dark earth and waiting, dormant, for their time to begin …
We've arrived at the Autumn Equinox, the point of balance when days and nights are just about equal in length for a little while before the darkness gains. We are invited to pause and reflect so we can move into the transitional season of Autumn and prepare for a restorative and rejuvenating Winter.
We now leave Summer behind and step into Autumn. There is a nip in the air and we have had a few dewy and misty mornings. Fungi are sprouting up here and there. The colchicum autumnalis in the meadow are up and counted up for the botanical …
It's Lammas tomorrow, the festival on the Wheel of the Year that marks the mid-point between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox. The high energy of Summer is now waning and as we move into the month of August nature offers us the very first glimpses of Autumn. Have you noticed any signs where you are?
Here in the Welsh hills, the landscape around the smallholding is dominated by the purpley-pink blooms of rosebay willowherb that mingle with the creamy froths of meadowsweet and the vigorous and abundant green bracken. At home, the fruit trees in our orchard are …
The clocks have gone back, the nights are long, the last of the harvests are now all in... and tonight, it's wild out there with high winds battering our hillside and rain lashing on the windows. It's Samhain, the celtic festival that takes us into the darkest weeks of the year. Summer is well and truly over now.
Yesterday, I spotted a soggy rudbeckia standing alone in the big pot by the woodsheds, the last one, poised to give in to the elements and give up blooming. Today, it was a clump of forgotten about and now decaying poppy seed …
Oh dear, oh dear... are you still with me, dear Readers? A whole four months have passed since I last posted on this blog, a whole season and more! The combination of a busy Summer season and some procrastination on my part accounts for this gap in my more regular musings. I remember the beginnings of a Summer Solstice blog formulating in my mind, then one about the joy of first harvest but I have had to let go of both of these as time passed and neither of these write-ups made it out of my head unfortunately. Being a …
Tonight is Noson Galan Gaeaf in Wales. This translates from the Welsh as Winter's Eve: Nos(on) is the night (before), Calan (or Galan when the spelling of the word has a mutation applied to it) means the first day and Gaeaf is Winter. It originates from the ancient celtic festival of Samhain, celebrating the end of autumn and harvest season and the beginning of Winter.
If we divide the year into light and dark, we are now about to enter the darkest segment, between Samhain and the Winter Solstice, when the light returns to us once more. For me, this …
This afternoon, at 2.31 pm, the Sun crosses the celestial equator (or the imaginary line in the sky above the Earth's Equator) from South to North and the Autumn Equinox will occur. At that particular point, days and nights are of equal length, a moment of balance between light and dark, a threshold between two seasons.
As I write this, the scene on our patch of Welsh countryside is typical of Mabon time. Looking out, the landscape is still mainly green with only a few dots of autumnal yellows and oranges here and there and the blue sky continues the …
It's still another two weeks till the official start of Autumn at the Equinox yet there are plenty of signs that Summer has retreated and Autumn is settling in. There is a chill in the air, the colours of the landscape are changing and nuts and berries are abundant in the hedgerow. But there is something else that heralds the new season: the robins are back singing their Autumn song.
During Summer, robins are conspicuous by their absence, so much so that they seem to disappear. Of course, that's not true as they don't migrate (most don't anyway) but they …
I am sitting at our dining room table, the fire lit in the woodburner behind me warming my back and the sweet scent from the orange and clove candle flowing through the room. It's just before 5 pm and I have just come in from shutting the hens in their coop, having taken themselves to bed already. It's dark, cold and damp outside and I am glad of the warm and welcoming, cosy room where I can settle down to write my thoughts and reflections about Samhain, the ancient festival on the Wheel of the Year that falls today.
