Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

It's Keats weather. I can tell this by the smells, as leafmould jostles with the scents of apples and bonfires; I can tell by the sounds, from the commentary of passing geese to the clack of rutting deer; I can tell by the sights, as the evenings sidle closer and the trees smoulder their way into autumn; but mostly I can tell because I was up until midnight last night, making sodding jam. Out of marrows. Again. Oh yes, it's definitely Keats weather.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Keats, despite being forced at gunpoint to study Ode to a Nightingale at school. It's just that lines like "find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor" or "on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep" clue you into the fact that like most Romantic poets, Keats was rather less for mucking in, and rather more for sitting in his coach sighing about how very profound it all was. Keats, in short, never made his own jam. Probably would have brought on a coughing fit anyway.

So what's the Hedgewizard moaning about now, then? First of all, it's not about the jam. Well, not just about the jam at any rate. It's about the chutney, too; the chutney, and the dried fruit, and the liqueurs and the wine and the pickles and the frozen veg and the mushrooms. Mainly, though, it's about the fact that it all happens, all at once, just as the nights draw in and I start to feel like hibernating with a hot water bottle and a big bar of chocolate. By the time the harvest festival of Hafow* happens at the equinox, I'll have had just about enough of the horrible tyrrany of the jam jar. If you see a headline about someone being beaten to death with a butternut squash, there's a fair chance I'll be behind it.

Blackberries, frankly, are a bit of a trial. Having selected the piece of (admittedly beautiful) bramble-infested hedge that is most likely to attempt to garotte you, you gingerly approach and pluck a few outstretched berries from a safe distance. At this point the bramble's stretegy comes into play, for the easily-obtainable berries by the roadside are small, dry and disappointing. The ones a little higher up look much better, and so you are tempted inch by tantalizing inch further and further into the hedge, until you realise too late that you're held immobile and a bunch of grey squirrels makes off with your wallet. It's like subscribing to Sky TV, except with jam at the end.

The apples, though... ah, the apples. Owing to my rather distinctive approach to the remedial pruning of the Hollow's old apple trees, there have been no apples for the last two years and I really miss them. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter how many kilos of beans and carrots I stagger up the path with; if there are no apples the harvest feels as anticlimactic as rounding off a really cracking seduction with a lacklustre shag up against the fridge.

Happily, we have plenty of friends with trees which produce truly terrifying yields, and they're only too glad for us to come and save them from being wasped to death - especially if they get repaid in cider, chutney or dried apple rings. So this Saturday, the Family Hedge is off a-scrumping - and all next week there will be a great wailing and a peeling of apples. The next question is - what will we do with them?



*The autumnal equinox is celebrated by pagans under the name of Mabon.** I've never been particularly fond of the title, being as it's the truncated title of a Welsh god with no particular connection to harvest at all. A much better name could be made from a more recent God of Self-Sufficiency - hence, HaFoW...

**Or some of them, at any rate. Pagans are a naturally diverse, free-thinking and above all argumentative bunch, and it's a sad truth that if you want to immobilize a pagan political rally the best way to do it is to leave them alone; sooner or later they'll get bogged down in an argument about what to call themselves, what their aims are, or how exactly to define paganism anyway.

This article originally appeared in The Ecologist Online, but the Hedgewizard is nothing if not thrifty. And if anyone can tell me why some of the Blogger onscreen help text has started to appear in German, I'd be very grateful.