There's autumn in the air

Yesterday autumn arrived. This is not to say it has turned chilly and cold, but the last two nights we’ve had heavy rain, the first serious rain in 3 months really. There were odd showers before, it’s been threatening occasionally, but nothing that left proper puddles behind until yesterday. During the day yesterday there were a few showers too and drizzle on and off and there is now even a slight chill in the air, which is actually quite refreshing after weeks of constant heat.
Nevertheless we walked over to Arcola yesterday to pick as many ripe tomatoes as possible, before they would be attacked by rot. Made a few more jars of tomato sauce today with it. Above you can see the dark clouds threatening above our village on our way back home.

Today was a beautifully bright and fresh day again and after the rains I thought this should be the ideal mushroom hunting weather, but no luck. We went into the woods and came back with virtually nothing, just one tiny mushroom of unknown provenance. We found some blackberries though as you can see. Soon it’ll be time to collect chestnuts.

I have, lacking any further advice, started making beer from maize and hops. I tried malting it (soaked the maize in water for 3 days, then spreading it out for another 3 days, until it started to sprout) and it worked to an extent, but there was not sufficiently enough sugar produced to turn into beer. So I added a bit of sugar to come to a potential strength of 5% AbV. It’s bubbling away merrily now. The colour of the brew is an odd yellow and it does not smell as good as the real thing in a brewery, but it’s only a small experimental batch, so we’ll just see.