Harvest festival

As the starlings seem quite taken with our hard fruits this year we made the decision to begin gathering in the harvest early. Over the weekend we started by collecting all of the Bramley apples on the lower branches - aided with a fishing net! This is not the sort of net that you see deep sea fishermen using when it extends wide and vast - ours is more humble. Our little fishing net is just a bit larger than those that young children paddle up and down streams and brooks with hoping to catch sticklebacks and minnows. Our net was a special purchase (a just in case necessity) required to scoop out any fish that appears to be unwell to allow treatment before gently lowering them back into their shoal in the pond.

This wonderful, simple piece of equipment allows us to tickle the large apples and gently rock them forwards and backwards and eventually catch them so that they do not fall to the ground and bruise. It is a long job - and entailed separating the apples that had been attacked by the birds and insects and sometimes both, from those that hopefully can be placed in newspaper and stored for a while.

We started placing the undamaged apples onto a table - allowing the breeze to blow around them. After a short while - the cat leisurely strolled over to see what we were doing and took up a guard position immediately below the table. In the days that have followed she has spent much of her time either underneath the table or lying alongside the apples as we have slowly picked the crop. We have only the upper boughs remaining now. Why do all of the larger apples seem to be growing on the boughs out of reach?