Late fruits

The gardens hereabouts have been full to overflowing with ripening fruits and it started with our raspberries. These usually appear in May, but everything seemed late this year. (Our daffodils, for instance, normally bloom in January, but this year the rain must have fooled them into thinking they were back in Wales and they arrived in time for St David's Day.) It was the same six-week delay with the framboesas, which first ripened in June. However, to compensate for their tardiness, they carried on producing enough fruit for breakfast right until early September – three months worth. Just behind the raspberries came the gooseberries. As much as I enjoy both fruits, gooseberries hold a very special place for me: they remind me of my aunt's garden and my mum's cooking. My aunt must have had a prodigious number of bushes in her admittedly very large garden for there seemed to be a never-ending supply of gooseberry fools, tarts and pies. Sadly, we only have the one solitary bush in our garden.

Unique gooseberry bush

I sometimes wonder how unique our gooseberry bush is. I bet there aren't too many of them in the country. We bought it from a local garden centre where I spotted what it was instantly, it's spiky traps provoking long buried memories. The vendor dismissed it as some kind of uva branca aberration and we picked it up for a song, planted it and waited a few years. Now, eight years on, it produces annually and this year it gave us about two kilos of the precious fruit and I wore my thorn scratches, nay gouges, with pride and, like a fool, lovingly ate my desserts with bandaged hands.

Round about the same time, the passion fruit vine was indulging in its customary habit of producing flowers and fruit simultaneously – a weird characteristic - but it wouldn't be until the end of August before the first fruits dropped into our hands. Meanwhile, our neighbours down the road had a problem that they wanted us to help them with: they had a kumquat tree that was producing a prodigious amount of fruit and as they didn't much like kumquats, they asked us to help them get rid of them. Well, anything to help a neighbour in need, of course. Over the course of the summer, they handed us kilo after kilo after kilo of kumquats and when I glanced at the cost of a tiny punnet of them in the supermarket, I goggled at the price.

But what to do with them? We had little experience of using them – just a cautious taste here and there in the past, but now we were faced with (literally) bucketfuls. It soon became clear that they work equally well as a fruit and a salad vegetable and as the heat ramped up through July and into August, we were glad of new variants of our salad menus. One special favourite came about when I grated some of the kumquats with grated red cabbage and sweet onions and played around with various dressings. The fruit gave the salad a very special flavour and it combined beautifully with cider vinegar. Yum. Chop in some red peppers from the garden and we reach some kind of salady nirvana. I also tried making jams, marmalades, preserves and chutneys - the spicy chutney was especially good and popular with our kumquat-hating neighbours. However, my favourite discovery of the many trials and experiments was kumquat ice cream. I soon found that a nicely eggy ice cream made with yoghurt rather than cream was perfect. De luxe stuff it was; lyrical even. Our neighbours were thrilled with the result too, and asked for more - which they got. Only now do I realise how cunning they have been.

The kumquats

As the summer progressed, the kumquat numbers dwindled but other neighbours gave us other buckets, this time filled with small but delicious plums as payment for me fixing the cunning solar powered vespa asiática trap in their apiary. My brother-in-law also turned up with another few buckets of the same: 'small but sweet' he apologised.


By this time, the maracujá fruit had finally matured and as the last of the raspberries were consumed, the passion fruit took their place at the breakfast table. I always think I like raspberries best of all, until I taste gooseberries, which are then queen. That is, until I rediscover maracujá and my taste buds go into overdrive. Heaven.

The inverted flowers

Now it's a surfeit of figs. Figs, of course, aren't strictly fruit as they are inverted flowers, but let's gloss over that. Bountiful hardly covers it - they ripen and fall from the trees quicker than we can eat them. Also, pears and apples are arriving from the fields on a daily basis, joining the last of the blackberries in zappy crumbles. We are about to be buried under tons of grapes (vindimas here in the north is only just starting, though it's getting earlier each year for some reason) and before long, it will be time for the annual persimmon mega-glut. Feast followed by feast. The famine is far far away and forgotten. For now.