September: Apples, Purple Plums and Green Grapes

Even in the midst of this German city, allotment gardens are yielding harvests of orchard fruit.

Apple with wormhole from a late August 2022 harvest in Berlin.
Photograph by the author. Public domain.

I brought home this apple a week ago. As I was cycling through the gardens, a gardener in a Breton stripe shirt had been working away in her plot behind the English garden style foliage. I didn't see her, but she saw me.

She came to lean on the wooden fence. Then she inquired if I'd like to have nicer apples than the rotten ones (defeated by weather and time) that were left in the crate beside the pathway. I did!

Like another gardener, she warned me that there might be worms and other creatures in the apples, as this is organic, unsprayed fruit. While I am not too worried about pesticides, it was a relief to learn that the gardeners weren't soaking their harvest in DDT.

*

IN ONE GARDEN that I photographed today, pink roses were still blossoming, and pale green pears were hanging from a tree behind them.

Quince boughs, Virginia creepers, rose hip sprays, tomatoes and grapes bristled and throve elsewhere.

A purple plum had landed on a gravel path; I felt it was fair game, tucking it into my bag beside a paper pouch of green grapes that someone had thoughtfully left for people to take outside their garden.

When I ate the plum at home, it had the mellow flavour that hinted that the season might not last much longer. The green grapes were also very ripe.

*

I ALSO PHOTOGRAPHED A PLOT that had bright red apples, which contrasted classically with the greens of the grasses and tree leaves. It must be a purple hibiscus bush and not a rhododendron that's straggling along behind, while I've forgotten what the dandelion-yellow and magenta flowers are. Yet the stork, I can reveal, is a sculpture and not the genuine article.

Allotment garden in Berlin, with stork and red apple tree.
Photographed by the author in September 2022.
Public domain.

***

APPLES WERE POPULAR EATING during the world wars. The BBC series Wartime Farm shows how women from the Women's Institute gathered and canned them to preserve the vitamin-laden food for winter. 

But lately I've been eating them raw, feeling happy that even without vehicular transport and packaging, I can still get apples that are safe to eat on the kitchen table. The fragrance when I open the cloth bag in the pantry is intoxicating and thoroughly autumnal.

****

Illustration of fruit from Isabella Beeton's
Book of Household Management (edition from 1899)
Found in the Internet Archive