LAST autumn we planted new fruit trees. Our old orchard had become unproductive and overgrown and so we had decided to have a fresh start and plant new varieties of plum, apple and cherry trees.

As the sum total of our first harvest has been two plums, and the wasps have eaten those, I have been delighted, nay overwhelmed, by the offers of fruit from friends and neighbours.

Even though it is not yet autumn and the apple harvest is not really mature, I have already made an apple store in the big barn as I do not have enough room in my freezers to store any more fruit.

Last year, with a friend, we made several gallons of cider with surplus apples. That has all gone and so with a couple of empty demi johns calling out to be filled, I have already made blackberry whisky, a delicious and proven winner, and now, hopefully, this afternoon, a sort of plum slivovitz. At the moment I can pronounce the drink, but I am hoping that if it is successful, the only sound you will hear will be a succession of slurred sss’s and zzz’s.

The slivovitz is not actually to any conventional recipe. Instead, I have raided the drinks cabinet and tipped onto the plums a mixture of prickly pear liqueur from a trip to Malta, schnapps, cherry kirsch, sloe gin and three liqueurs: blueberry, cherry and orange.

It tasted good even before it hit the plums. Tidied up the drinks cupboard a treat too. If anyone walks into my kitchen in the next few minutes, they will think I have been on a real bender.

At least I had a few dregs to comfort John on his return from visiting his beehives. Although a goodly supply of honey is assured for the winter, and I am already thinking of looking up recipes to make mead, wasps have done for one of our hives and assassinated the queen and killed all the workers.

John had thought that by moving this particular hive away from where it was being attacked in its previous position, it would be safe. But the wasps have found the hive again and robbed it of all the honey.

So the job this winter is making wasp traps for the hives to lure the killers in and make sure they do not rob and kill any more of our bees. There are a wide variety of wasp traps on the market, but as brother-in-law Geoff is a joiner, and we have a plan for a foolproof, killer wasp trap, production will commence shortly. As long as none of us are suffering from hangovers.