A good day's foraging

We had a great day foraging today in the New Forest.  We went specifically to find sloes for our annual sloe gin making.  Sloes are one of those fruits that no one ever wants to eat but they produce a wonderful flavour when steeped in gin for a few months, not to mention a lovely red colour.

When we got to our secret foraging site we found a huge number of very ripe cherry plums.

 

We kept on picking for quite a while and eventually picked 17lb of the plums!

 

 

We did find a good load of sloes as well, luckily, eventually picking 8lb of sloes, enough for several bottles of sloe gin.

 

 

Of course we also found the wonderful blackberry although we got a smaller amount of them as many were still red.

 

 

We were also told of some apples we could legally scrump and got some apples to add to our haul.

 

Luckily tomorrow is a bank holiday so we can attempt to process some of this bounty.  Other than sloe gin we are hoping to make plum jam and maybe even some plum wine.