Well, not specifically gin for me actually.
It feels very early to be doing so but even so the trees actually look like it’s time, so this afternoon I have been picking sloes. Some trees were already completely bare of fruit whilst on others the sloes were looking quite wrinkled, so I thought it best to take a harvest now rather than delay and end up missing them altogether. The crop was large which I put down to the blackthorn flowering during one of the warm periods we had in Spring, when there were plenty of insects flying about to pollinate the flowers, but the individual fruits were quite small, probably because we’ve not actually had very much rain over the last few months despite quite overcast skies much of the time.
A quick check on the kitchen scales suggests I managed to pick somewhere near 3.4kg, which are now in the freezer. I shall be making sloe vodka with some, but I also want to try sloe cordial. Depending on what’s left or if I manage to get another harvest I’ll look for other interesting ways to use them.