This is the second day in a row when my PaD has made me grin.

I’m not quite sure why we have found ourselves being able to do some tidying up jobs this weekend but we have. Yesterday we cut two of our lawns and although it’s obvious that they have not been well cared for this year, they do look tidy. We’re hoping that that’s it now before winter and then they’ll get time to recover from the neglect they’ve suffered this year. We’ve weeded paths too, the combination of these jobs has made about half of the garden look moderately presentable.

Today we have started to tackle the greenhouse, also suffering from the combined attack of rampant weeds, weather ingress because the panes of polycarbonate that blew out last winter never got replaced all summer and tragic human neglect due to the imminence of my finals when I should have been sowing seed and potting up plants. We’ve cut back a massively overgrown jasmine that had been preventing us from accessing the greenhouse’s door this year…it’s a good job that we’ve been able to get in via the missing side panels! The jasmine has been relocated to cover up the holey fence that our neighbours refuse to contribute to fixing despite their shared legal and moral responsibility for said fence. This means that now their silly yappy dog can’t see through and taunt Lola and JD any more. We broke another pane of glass while extricating the jasmine but we have some more polycarbonate in the garage that we can cut a new panel from. DM is going to replace the missing panels and get the greenhouse back into functioning order over the next few days while I’m out at Uni. He declared that next year we would be eating our own tomatoes again and that filled my heart with joy.

The other great garden adventure today was to harvest two crops that have been doing their growing stuff quietly, despite our neglect. We’ve picked a big bucket full of apples and this bowl of grapes. Nothing remarkable in that you may think but you’d be wrong. The grapevine was planted about six years ago and has never fruited before. It’s put on plenty of growth each year and sometimes we’ve had grapes but they’ve never ripened before. In the week, en route to the compost heap, I noticed something shiny and black peeping out from between the leaves. A bit of investigation, amounting to little more than a poke around between the leaves and a treasure trove, of lots of bunches of beautiful grapes was discovered. The apples and grapes have subsequently been boiled up on the stove in order to release their juices and once strained, the juice will be stored until I have time to make some jelly.

You see, you can’t hurry the straining process, it has to happen slowly and with no human intervention or the juice goes cloudy. I’ve been a jam maker for years but rarely eat it myself because of a squeamishness for sweet foods, especially cooked fruit which just seems basically wrong to me. I’m going to experiment by bunging in a load of ginger to see if a fiery, poky, apple, grape and ginger jelly will float my boat more than “normal” jam. Did you know BTW that the stuff that Americans call “grape jelly” is not made from grapes but from Mahonia berries? Yes, folks, you heard it here first!

I suppose if I’m being picky this still life is a bit crap because you can see loads of squished and/or half-eaten fruit, not to mention leaves starting to curl up and die for winter and even a scratched, tatty, dishwasher clouded glass bowl. However, it’s a real harvest from a real productive home grapevine and therefore I’m going to describe it as a “real life” instead of a “still life”.