The countryside still offers many joys even as autumn arrives

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/20/autumn-celebrate-the-most-mellow-moving-seasons

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Autumn can be a grim time of year: a soggy, darkening season in which the languid pleasures of summer, and the celebrations and beauty of winter, seem very far away. It’s the time of year when we realise how far we’ve fallen short of the optimism and resolutions from the start of the year.

And yet, for those of us who live in the midst of nature, it is the most mellow and moving of all the seasons. The light is more nuanced, softer somehow. The uniform green of our community woodland has become a collage of russet and copper. The fringes of the magnificent beech tree in our central clearing go a little more yellow each day. The Virginia creepers blush red.

The leaves of the ash tree are the aristocrats of the woodland – arriving late and leaving early. As their pinnate leaves crisp brown and fall, all that’s left are the darkening “bunches of keys” of so many seeds. For months dense foliage has obscured everything here, and visibility has been down to two or three metres in some places. But now, as the leaves begin to drop, you can see the compost loo again; the poustinia is coming back into view. If you know where to look, you can see the chapel from way up in the orchard. The birds and the squirrels are suddenly visible again.

This is always the time of year when the children finally get interested in the vegetable garden: their minds are turning to Halloween and they’re watching the giant pumpkin grow. It’s about the size of a beachball now, and the colour of a Springbok rugby jersey. The butternut squash, too, intrigue them. The plants are like something from Jack and the Beanstalk: seeds that were chucked around only a few months ago have become invasive creepers, with growth so fast you can almost see it. They now cover not just their own raised beds but those all around them. Underneath the petticoat leaves are dozens of large, yellow teardrops.

The kitchen smells of vinegar as we begin preserving everything we can to get us through the winter: tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, nasturtium capers. Mandy and Claire make a few dozen jars of chutney, chucking in the green tomatoes, beans and the many, many marrows. My old man and I have extracted the honey from the hives: not much, but enough for our community of twelve. Although a lot of the harvest is the result of months of hard graft, for much of the produce we’ve done nowt. We’ve just picked the fruit. I go tree-climbing for plums, and we’re about to do weird things with medlars and quinces and hazelnuts.

But this being Somerset, it’s the apples that are abundant. All our neighbours offer us theirs, too, so earlier last week the flat-bed of the pick-up was full of green and red fruit. I would love to meet the people back in the mists of time who named these varieties: Beauty of Bath, Fill Barrell, Slack Me Girdle and Golden Knob (a variety which we planted as a fertility fruit for our sows over in the ironically named “Pig World”).

Lew and Claire clean off the apple press, a huge, cast-iron thing we’ve borrowed from the Flemings. They halve the apples and mush them through a toothy-shoot into the muslin-lined barrel press. As you then turn the horizontal handle above the barrel, it lowers a wooden disk on to the mush and juice gushes out into the bottom ring and towards its spout. It’s time consuming, but wonderful: a clear, pink juice oozes into the saucepan and we greedily put the communal goblet under the flow and make appreciative noises. The juice is so crisp and clean. It tastes like pure health. Rob, resourceful as ever, makes a square wooden paddle so that the fruit doesn’t dance away from the teeth of the mincer. When the kids get back from school they join in. It’s noticeable how this earthy production line makes them less fussy. When juice comes out of a carton, they’re absurdly fussy, never wanting “bits”. Now, they glug the liquid regardless of the pulp which has made it past the muslin. Little Leo flexes his tiny muscles, trying to twist the handle just a bit further.

Lew empties the barrel between each press, gathering the mush and barrowing it over to the piglets. Polly makes labels for the bottles: a picture of an apple with “made with love” beside it. After a day’s work we only have a dozen, four-pint bottles. We put eight in the freezer, give a couple away, and rinse through the rest within 48 hours.

We’re slowly storing things to keep ourselves and our livestock going through the cold months ahead. It gives you a sense of resilience, or survivalism, to see the hay cut and wrapped, the jams and chutneys jarred, the hams hanging.

But we’re far behind with the logs. We heat our house and water with wood, and need all our five log stores full. Right now, we’re only at two and a bit, so we’ve been eagerly cross-cutting, splitting and stacking. Almost every time we move a pile of timber, a tiny frog – the size of a thumbnail – bounces away, enchanting the children as they try to chase it down. Meanwhile, the men get competitive, trying to win the title of manliest log-splitter in the woods (modesty forbids …). As the temperature drops, we’re already lighting fires. Someone once told me that the one thing which destroys togetherness in a household isn’t TV or cars or phones, but central heating. I can see the point: in the late afternoon, the troops sit round the stove, warming their wet socks and talking about life. Where in July or August you didn’t see people until the evening meal, now we hunker down far earlier. We simply spend more of our time together.

Instead of the long walks of summer, we play games. Play has always been an essential element of our little community, one of the places where children and guests learn rules, fairness, fantasy and – last week – lying. Emma and Leo were playing Perudo – “liar’s dice” – with a couple of streetwise guests, and it was a laugh watching innocent kids, aged eight and five, trying to blag some pretty hardened blaggers.

But perhaps because I was born on All Souls Day – what Italians call I Morti, “the dead” – I’ve always associated autumn with mortality. As Robert Browning wrote: “Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.” It’s a period of memories and melancholy. This autumn we’re accompanying a very close family member through her dying. It would be easy to be smug at this time of year – admiring our stores of food and fuel – whereas actually we’re bereft at the thought of the person who won’t be here come winter or spring to share those stores. And so, as the evenings draw in, we’re lighting candles again on the huge chestnut table we made years back, aware of how fragile those flames are.

Tobias Jones’s book about his woodland community, A Place of Refuge, is published by Quercus