Autumn in the air

Spot on time at the end of the Italian holiday season, the weather is starting to change. Not that it's getting cold mind, but fresher. Thursday and Friday we had some much needed rain, although not enough to really soak the ground, and we were out watering again today. The rains have brought a cooler northerly wind with a lovely crispness in the air and the odd fluffy cloud over our village.

My arm is slowly on the mend, but whenever I get over-confident and try doing too much, I get a stabbing pain. So although we need to prune the peach, plum and cherry trees and need to do some digging over for the winter crops, I haven't been able to do much yet.

So in my boredom, we've been out for a wild food foraging walk, but found we were too ealy for juniper berries and almost too late for blackberries. However we did find some which need to be turned into jam, but we still are short of jars. We filled some with pears and peaches in syrup, made more fig sauce, not to mention litres and litres of tomato sauce. We have piles of aubergines, which we preserve under oil, but only short term in plastic containers in the fridge. It looks a good year for chestnuts this year, so looking forward to starting to pick these next month.

Incidentally, this is also the time of year, when our birthdays come up (Susan on the 29th September, me 17th November) as well as Christmas coming closer. I don't want to be presumptious, but if anyone would like to give us something I have made a wish list on www.amazon.co.uk. They don't only stock books and music, but also gardening tools and kitchen equipment. Useful things include a grain mill, so we can grind our corn to polenta or chestnuts into chestnut flower, a juicer (at the moment we'd be drinking gallons of tomato juice!), some decent gardening tools rather than some of our antiquated equipment, a pasta maker as well as various books and music. The link to it if you feel so inclined is http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/wishlist/36GU4M3JTSSJB/ref=cm_wl_sortbar_o_page_1?ie=UTF8&page=1.