The Grapes of Wrath ............

We harvested the grapes this afternoon and chopped down the vines.  The garden looks quite bare now but I am so pleased to get rid of the vines finally, they were becoming so bedraggled and forlorn as autumn sapped the colour from the leaves.  We harvested quite a lot of grapes (and baby snails and ladybirds too) and I was not too sure what to do with them all ....... jam, jelly, juice or a cake?  Well, to be honest there were so many and they are so tiny with pips in them that the thought of taking the pips out of all of them to make jam or jelly filled me with dread. 

So, tonight, we washed them, liberated the living creatures, set aside one pound of them and juiced the rest.

What a palaver.  We painstakingly took each of the grapes off of the stalks, weighed out those I want for a cake and set about juicing the rest of them.  I washed and sterilised four bottles, wondering if I would have enough bottles for all the juice I was expecting ................. I needn't have worried.

This was all the juice we managed to extract - it'll all be gone tomorrow.

And here's the lovely mess I had to clear up.


We also chopped down all the tomato plants.  And these are the last of them.

And I had to throw in this picture of a pretty box of eggs I found in Sainsburys last week - I've never seen them before.  They're not organic, but the box is pretty!   My daughter who bakes loved them and was aproned up and baking more fairy cakes last night for a table party at school lunchtime today - the girls hold table parties for their birthday.  Then there she was again tonight, baking some for us because she had missed out on a cake at lunchtime today - there were thirteen girls at the party and only twelve fairy cakes.