Thanksgiving weekend has been and gone, but the sweet taste of harvest still lingers.

We enjoyed a thanksgiving salmon – grateful for the sockeye run this year – and baked it swiftly with garnishes of Black Krim tomato, sprigs of lovage, sliced ginger and lemon and a dollop of my brother’s white wine.

And it was good.

My neighbour passed a little acorn squash over the fence, and I found a trio of thanksgiving blackberries: tasting a bit Octoberish, but still, a glorious gift.

My carrots got a bit stunted but went well with the last of this fall’s epic yield of runner beans. Some organic beets and broccoli from Haliburton, salad of my cucumbers – still producing sweetly – and tomatoes,

a pie of local pumpkin,

and a few postprandial squares of quince paste rounded things out in a quasi-traditional manner.

The preserving marathon continues unabated. A salmon canning frenzy led me to divvy a whole salmon into ten luscious jars yesterday

while I was making quince & apple sauce and more quince jelly, which offset any fishy aromas that might have sullied my kitchen.

Things are wrapping up in gardens everywhere. At Haliburton Farm, the harvest was running full-tilt late last week, bringing lots of colour to the farm stand.

Some late raspberries

a giant turnip;

a couple of farmers bring it in from the fields.

Thanks to time, money, patience and the hard work of volunteers, the greenhouse that was destroyed on Easter weekend has finally been repaired and covered:

Tomorrow is the final vegetable basket of the year, with next year’s CSA program already oversubscribed:

It all started innocently enough, with a basket of quince, foraged from my dogsitter (in exchange for a share of the products) and a relatively free day. My ambitions were to make quince paste and quince jelly.

I peeled and trimmed the quince until I had 4 pounds of peels and trimmings, and 3 pounds of quince chunks. I put them in separate pots and started cooking.

After a short while, the discolouration disappears and the kitchen becomes fragrant with the incomparable scent of cooking quince. It’s a perfume you don’t forget.

When the quince chunks cooks down and become soft, in about 40 minutes, pass them through a sieve, add sugar, and cook – stirring all the while – for another hour or so until they deepenin colour and become thick. After a point, it gets so thick it starts spitting molten fruit/sugar, which adds a certain frisson to the enterprise. Add the juice of a lemon and spread on oiled parchment paper (actually a teflex sheet in this case) to dry for a couple of days. Once it’s firm enough you can turn it to get air on the other side.

Cube it and roll the cubes in sugar. You can store them for months and months in airtight containers in the fridge.

Meanwhile, the peels and trimmings are cooking and colouring as well. After a couple of hours, they’re darker and ready to strain – never pressing them lest you cloud the liquid – in jelly bags for around 4 hours.

Once the liquid has stopped dripping, return it to the pot with some lemon juice. The sugar, according to my recipe, is measured out (1 pound sugar per imperial pint) and warmed in the oven before adding to the liquid. You then boil it merrily, skimming the foam, until it’s dark and fragrant, and you get a good set. Then jar it up and process as you will.

Hey presto. How pretty!

LifeCycles in Victoria has been running the Fruit Tree Project for many years now. A kind of gleaning project, it offers a valuable service to fruit tree owners, volunteer pickers and community groups by bringing them together to arrange picks of urban fruit that would otherwise go to waste. In a town that is thick with aging fruit trees – many unpruned and diseased – this is a boon, for the group also offers advice to the tree owners on care and pruning.

Today’s pick brought in some volunteers from the Garth Homer Society, who picked for an hour and then the remaining pickers finished off the job. Two trees were moderately laden with apples and pears.

The trees hadn’t been particularly well managed so much of the fruit was very high, on unpruned branches, requiring the use of LifeCycles’ 12 foot orchard ladders and the extending arm of fruit baskets.

The day’s haul was pretty good: from the two trees, we got about 48kg of pears and 165 kg of apples. The owner got some, the pickers got some and the rest goes to LifeCycles, which distributes the fruit to community groups and local food processors.