No crab apples

Every year, a few weeks earlier than this, I am required to collect crab apples for the Old Bat to turn into crab apple jelly.  This is used both as a spread on toast and as an ingredient, together with balsamic vinegar, in a tangy sauce that goes well with, for example, tuna steaks.  There are a number of crab apple trees growing in grass verges around Patcham and I set off with a plastic bag to pick up the windfalls from around these trees.  This does make me feel a little like a bag lady, but it's all in a good cause.  Nobody else seems to want the fruit anyway and if I don't collect it, it will just lie there and rot.  In fact, some of it is usually well on the way to rotting by the time I collect it.  But not this year.  There was not a crab apple to be found.  I don't think somebody beat me to them, I think they just didn't grow.  Like the apples in my garden.  The bees didn't get out to pollinate the blossom because of the rain.  (I did hear of one lady who pollinated her apple tree using a feather duster.  The mind boggles.)  So, as our stock of home-made jelly is getting very low, I searched the web.  I found just three manufacturers in England, two being small companies with no national distribution except through their web sites.  The third was a large jam manufacturing company whose products are sold in numerous places, including at least one supermarket chain.  However, that supermarket does not stock crab apple jelly.  So I have had to order a jar over the web at enormous expense.  But it's worth it just to keep Herself happy.

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Ploughing on the Downs yesterday afternoon, accompanied, as usual, by a flock of gulls.