Our apple tree is just bare bones now. The apples are cooked and frozen or made into apple jams and jellies.
Doesn’t stop me looking at other apple trees though!
I spied a gorgeous tree in a village nearby with hundreds of tiny glossy red fruits.
As it was a variety unknown to me I shared all the details of the tree on various Facebook groups such as The UK Wild Food Larder – which identifies and discusses found foods.
I was told it is Malus crab apple called a Red Sentinel.
I took further advice and halved a fruit horizontally to check there was the tell-tale pentagram pattern of seeds.

Words and pics by Jo Green, a former allotmenteer, forager,
amateur herbalist, pickler and jam maker who squeezed her allotment greenery into her tiny garden

The pentagram was evident and also there was a lovely cider apple smell.
The Red Sentinel apples were too tiny to core so I just added them whole to some pumpkin soup I was making with chorizo sausage.
As our sons have now passed the age of getting excited at sculpting pumpkins I felt it fell to me to do something arty with the orange skins.
I remembered seeing a pumpkin sliced into the shape of a turtle so excitedly researched mock turtle soup.
This was a massive food craze in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially after royalty got a taste for it. Green turtles were driven to the edge of extinction and so various offal and seafood were substituted.
Think I ‘ll stick to chorizo sausage in my version of mock turtle soup thank you very much!

Words and pics by Jo Green, a former allotmenteer, forager,
amateur herbalist, pickler and jam maker who squeezed her allotment greenery into her tiny garden