HARVEST time has come for many berries in our woodlands and hedgerows and with it the opportunity to make goodies galore. There is no shortage of stories while out on my walks with my Belfast Dynamos group members about berries that were picked, eaten, made into jam for sandwiches and changed into tipples in years gone by.
The humble blackthorn produces the sloe berry, used to make sloe gin. Plenty were growing on bushes a couple of weeks ago on Carnmoney Hill.
Hedgerow jam or jelly makes the best use of berries such as sloe, bulked up with apples.
How to make sloe gin? I'd call Jim Bradley at the Belfast Hills Partnership on 02890 603466 who has a good recipe, I hear.
Rosehip, from the dog rose bush, is another fascinating little berry, with a great recent history, and makes a beautiful blush pink-to-pale-orange jelly.
My more mature walkers regale me with tales of how the wartime government, faced with shipping blockades, worried about how the general population – including children of the 1940s – would get vitamin C without citrus fruits coming into Britain and the north.
Scientists were tasked to find an alternative and they found rosehip was literally packed with the vitamin. Little armies grew up of children who were dispatched to collect rosehips in the autumn as part of the war effort. They were made to drink the berry in cordial form, mostly. But the harvesting remained into the 1950s when kids would get money for their booty of rosehip.
Nature's medicine grows all around us, which is why it's said that if you've got a cold, use local honey rather than Australian or Mexican. Healing nectar from all the medicinal plants that local bees have collected goes into the honey they make. Northern Ireland honey is hard to come by, but The Nutmeg shop in Belfast stocks it often.
Go to Marksvegplot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/hedgerow-jelly and www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/rose_hip_jelly
