DB Lenck's Mutinous Musings: The Quince Harvest

I have been seriously busy!

But today I took out some time to get the Quince Harvest done. Possibly because of the slashing back earlier this year of the ambitious foliage that overgrows my garden I actually had quite a few fruit on my quince tree this year, for the first time ever.

Sadly, all the best quinces are just out of reach ...

But I still managed to get two baskets full of them. Now quinces have a limited range of usages. It is either jelly, or jam, or quince bread/cheese (a sort of thick fruit paste, popular in Portugal). I have had some success with baking them like apples, or turning them into a compote, but really apples are better for that. So the harvest is more than sufficient for my purposes.

Quinces are usually ripened after picking, by keeping in a cool room, and, to accommodate the larger than usual harvest, I invested in a few fruit crates - basically crates with a wooden frame and a wire-mesh on the bottom. Lined with newspapers they make a very passable storage facility for apples and quinces and similar. Currently mine are nestling on top of my wardrobe in the spare bedroom, full of ripening quinces.

Since quinces smell rather lovely, I trust my sister, who is coming to stay in my house, will not be too distracted by them. The fact that the quinces need to be kept cool - about 15 Celsius - and the resulting necessarily low temperature of the spare bed room, could cause some strife, of course. What is more important, the comfort of my guest or the well-being of my quinces? Decisions decisions!

Anyway, I had a lot of fun harvesting today. My regular ladder doesn't have much reach, but luckily a kindly neighbour donated a much taller ladder to the street (where I found and joyfully appropriated it), and this allowed me to gather another two dozen fruit that would otherwise had been out of reach.

Picking from the bathroom window likewise added to the yield. My walking stick, kept precisely for this purpose, served as a grapple hook and enabled me to pull fruit-laden branches in my direction. Lastly, a net on a stick, usually employed in fishing bits of flotsam out of the pond, extended my arm by about 4 feet and also aided the gathering effort.

All in all it was a very satisfying, wholesome experience.

The sun shone throughout - much better than last weekend, when the Triplets and I went sloe-picking, and it drizzled for the entire afternoon. I processed those sloes today as well, after a spell in the freezer. I had managed to stake my claim on almost two gallons of the communally picked fruit. We had collected four and a half freezer bags worth, and I kept two and a half of them, fobbing the other two triplets off with a bag each. I justified this shameless piece of rapacity by pointing out that (a) I had knowledge of the best sloe picking spots, which I shared with them, and (b) had supplied the necessary equipment (old milk churns - there is nothing better for picking sloes, you pick the sloes into the lid, and keep the churn dangling on your arm). They were very gracious about it, bless them.