Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

Raspberries are coming in strong but not sure how many more we'll get, the frost is creeping quickly closer. It's fuschia-time: red wine and from Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking: Indian beet and carrot fermented pickles - the juice of which has singlehandedly kept me healthy, I firmly believe, in this dementedly busy time. Grapes, deeper than fuschia, almost ready too.

The timing of the academic year intends interruption. I'm resenting the intrusion of the school year and my own self-inflicted performance caprices on this solemn and joyous time of harvest. In this particular, strange year when gardens I pass are only now muckily surfacing from the flood-waters. It seems maliciously intentional, how the academic year cuts a slice right into the heart of harvest and demands a new start, a new initiative, a self-important new energy, when all in the field is ripening, slowing, becoming full and golden, and when so much is daily shifting, in the air, in the trees, in the light. I yearn to give it full attention, full energy and languor in turns. I want to have harvest celebrations and invite all my friends and family over, make huge trembling salads and slaughter the extra rooster and slather him in fresh pesto. I want to stomp on the grapes. I want to spend all day at the stove, sweating over canned tomatoes. I want to try rose hip jelly. I want to try mint jelly. I want to try applesauce. I want to use everything, even the wild things!