Springtime and Harvest

The Orchard, which is also The Apiary (but currently has no bees), we call 'The Field'. It's an inappropriate word for one hectrare of land - and that includes the long approach track. I think it probably carries a bit of borrowed irony from the 1990 melodramatic film of that name - a bit of Irish emotional overload that the critics liked to call 'overwrought' but the audience on Rotten Tomatoes scores at 82% perfect

As I promised ceridwen on her blip, I went to see our baby oak tree and check on its marcescence. I took a picture that shows it and its stag-headed mother in the same frame, one with many of its leaves still in place, as promised, and the other with most of them gone. I thought it would be a good blip. There are also two twenty-five year-old oaks that we planted for the millennium; they still have 5-10% of their leaves, so I suppose they are growing up

I also visited the hazel and took some fun pictures. I thought I could be the first to blip 2025 catkins! They are not open but, as the supermarkets would say, they are ripe and ready. Intimations of spring even before the equinox. The snowdrop leaves have emerged too. The natural world is not as shut down as we like to think in the depth of winter

Finally, I picked some apples! They are Sturmer Pippin, which should have been picked at the end of October, then stored and forgotten until January at the earliest, by which time they might be edible. Again, for fun, I took pictures of a December apple harvest, very blippable. They were forgotton in the busy weeks we have had. I was surprised to find any still on the tree; they have survived the storms so far, I wonder if they would have made it through the one coming tonight. It will be interesting to see what effect a late harvest has on keeping and edibility

With all that to choose from, I'm not sure why this quick documentary shot is my picture for the day. A loaf that took 12 hours to make; some honey retrieved from the store as gifts; MrsM's mince pies - made to use up some pastry I made earlier in the week; paperwork from our trip to the market garden, which was also a trip to the landscaping business, to get deer protection for that baby oak. I think the messy image somewhat echoes the many strands of the day. The opposite of depression is to take a small satisfaction, a brief flash of joy, from these small things. For today, job done