The ripe stuff

IN THE orchard the trees are groaning with fruit, there’s a huge crop of apples and plums and although the pears are not quite as abundant, there’s still a terrific crop.

We picked our first Beauty of Bath a few weeks ago. This variety, more than any other, reminds me of my childhood. As children, we knew exactly where the best apples were and where to clamber over the wall into our neighbour’s orchard. My first bite of that bittersweet apple with its red and yellow speckled skin brought memories flooding back.

Grenadier is the earliest cooker to ripen. We have already had some grenadier apple sauce with some of our succulent roast pork. The pigs are Saddleback and Tamworth, crossed with red Duroc. The flavour of the meat from these happy, lazy pigs is sublime. The pigs adore snuffling around under the apple trees to find windfalls - we joke that they then come with built-in apple sauce.