After January's marmalade frenzy you would be forgiven for expecting a quiet month in February - not so!

The problem with harvesting wild fruit is that, like busses, after a prolonged drought you get a glut. All the summer fruits come ripe together and no matter how hard you try you just cant keep up. The answer is freezers - three of them. At the end of last winter one of them died and we rather niavely thought we could manage with two. This plan hit the buffers as soon as the harvest started and in no time at all we were back up to three and by the end of October they were all bulging with Damsons, Blackberries, Black Currants, Quince and Medlars, plus a large stock of chillies, peppers and ginger for chutneys. 

So in February we turn our attention to the chilly depths of the freezers, marrying our reserves of last years harvest to the making list we have developed based on what we sold during the trading season.

Having procured a large supply of blackcurrants we added Sloe Gin and produced lots of this ever popular combination.

We also pick blackberries in near commercial quantities, mostly by employing our extra inches (we are both 6ft tall) to harvest an 18 inch strip at the top of the bushes which the more vertically challenged foragers are unable to reach. Kilo after kilo are frozen down and now, as the winter storms howl around the house, the kitchen is filled with the heady perfume of simmering blackberries. Neither of is is very keen on red wine so most of the bottles we are given during the year are set aside to be added to the Blackberry Jam, enhancing what is already a lovely product.

As an add on to the blackberry theme there is the Cider Blackberry Jam, a product which uses both our  foaraged blackberries and the output of my cider making sideline. I get the feeling that there is a bit of a boozy theme emerging here.

We continue on to the extensive damson crop which was harvested from a  friend's garden back in September. This nicely flavoured member of the plum family is enhanced with an infusion root ginger and green tea. That may sound a slightly odd combination but the end result is amazing, and it is another of our best sellers.

Then there is the Rhubarb Ginger and Elderflower Jam, with a bottle of our Elderflower Cordial added to introduce that amazing scent of early summer. If may be wet and windy out there but the aroma hints at things to come and the bulbs in the garden are regularly examined closely for progress.

As you can see, February is anything but quiet on the jam front and gradually, week by week, the shelves in the store room fill up to capacity and when every space is loaded we will know we have a butty load ready for the coming season.