Tag Archives: Pears

2015 – The Year In Review

Just some of our homegrown produce from this year.

Just some of what we grew and produced this year. Top left - bottom right: winter squashes, parsnip, kohlrabi, a batch of jam, mushrooms, spiralised courgette ('courgetti'), plums, tomatoes and courgettes, squashes in our pumpkin patch.

This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not. Soft Fruits By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have…

Read More

An Exciting Pear Preserve

Pears mulled in cider River Cottage recipe

A deliciously gorgeous sight: pears mulled in cider

A few weeks ago some neighbours kindly invited us to help ourselves to pears from their tree. When we got to their garden we discovered that they actually had several pear trees and they encouraged us to take far more than would keep fresh. Clearly a method of preservation was in order. I had something in mind, something which I had seen in the always inspiring River Cottage Handbook on Preserves. But when our neighbour informed us that it hadn’t been a particularly good year for her Conference pears, and that they were mostly small and woody, my mind was…

Read More