The August days are getting shorter, and have a hint of autumn: the grass is drying and turning golden, the sun sets behind the hill while we're still sitting down to dinner, and we're starting to switch on the lights in the evenings. But the soil in the garden and the water in the irrigation tank are at their warmest, having soaked for months the hot sun, and this is prime summertime: after months of hoeing, manuring, sowing, watering, weeding, pruning, training, and protecting from pests and animal invaders, summer is finally yielding its riches. Because while not much is certain when you're relying for your food on the unpredictable rhythms of nature, if the weather has been kind, August is when the shelves are beginning to fill up with good things laid away for winter.
This has been a good year so far (apart from incursions by deer here, here, and here), and our shelves are nicely stacked with a variety of preserves.
So far, we've made the following from our garden, local orchards and forest:
- fruit: canned peaches, and peach and apricot jams (17.5 pounds!)
- wild berries and fruit: cherry, blueberry and elderberry jams (a first, which I'm not sure I'll repeat)
- vegetables: canned tomatoes and tomato sauce
- leaves: lots and lots of pesto from basil
- flowers: dry herbs, which still need to be stripped ... I'll post about this soon!
We also have a jar of my pride and joy: caper buds, which I must confess I'm very excited about!
This year I picked capers for the first time, and had a go at salting them. Capers are the flower buds of a spiny bush, Capparis Spinosa L, which grows wild around the Mediterranean in the sunniest and most improbable places. In our area it grows on stone dry-walls, its long and graceful branches emerging from between the stones, filled with thick, green, round leaves, and with white and purple flowers that are a marvel of nature. 
Capers are widely used in Italian cuisine, but are normally only available pickled in vinegar. The best are grown in Sicily, on the Aeolian Islands, where some years ago I first tried capers preserved in salt. These were a revelation for my taste buds, and since then have been the only capers I've used (available here, from a company that unfortunately only ships within Italy). I haven't sampled my own capers yet - I'm waiting for Tom and the boys to get back so we can try them together. Which seems only fair, since they helped with the picking.
If the boys helped with a lot of the picking - with capers, cherries (here) and apricots alike - Rebecca has been my chief assistant during these last few evenings of intense work in the kitchen, when it's cool enough to work over my boiling pots.
Here's how I'll remember this August: the two of us together, busy preserving our food for the winter, Rebecca taking sips now and then from the peach juice I made her for the occasion.
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Sorry for the long post, but it was really a long process: from planting, to growing, to picking, to preserving - and soon we'll get to just the savoring!
