Autumn Harvest in Red

Autumn is my favourite season. Life seems to slow down in certain areas while kicking into high gear in others. The gardens put on a great display of bright colours - mine are mostly in yellows & the birds twittering in the bushes are finding bugs & berries to get them on their way for their winter travels.

I grew up in Ontario where the colours & smells of Autumn were bright & strong. I miss that. Here on the West Coast, we seem to miss all that. A lot of the deciduous trees simply drop their leaves while still green & they turn brown on the ground.

But I've found a way to ease myself through all this by harvesting my own crop of Autumn Red colours! This year is a great year for me. I've got red peppers in the greenhouse that are finally ripening & are wonderfully sweet. The cherry tomatoes are slowly ripening too but are much larger than anticipated - which is great as we can eat them on sandwiches! The raspberries are slowly plumping up & ripening - they are growing much better than the summer canes did & the berries are at least twice as large too. It was a difficult year for raspberries, but I'm grateful for these last few handfuls I'll be picking for another few weeks.

There are also wild 'reds' I'm harvesting too - rose hips! I'm not going to wait for that first frost to harvest them - they are just too perfect right now & I think they contain a bit more pectin while still a bit unripe which should allow me to make rose hip jelly this year instead of rose hips syrup (which I rather enjoy also - great for pancakes or marinades!).

So, I'm going to run out there right now & see what else I can find before the rains return...