What a Harvest!
By Esther
At this time of year, when we are enjoying some beautiful misty autumn mornings, golden sunshine and sometimes the sight of a huge harvest moon rising over Crag House Farm, the home of Caring For Life, we are also blessed with absolutely incredible harvest gifts from supporting churches and schools.
Gifts from harvest festivals and collections are literally flooding in at the moment and some supporters travel quite a distance to bring their gift. Our new TFJs, (Time for Jesus volunteers) are kept well occupied, sorting the tinned goods and packets, as well as the fresh produce which has come in.
Before very long at all, we will be making up Christmas food parcels for more than 100 individuals, and this amazing harvest which is flooding in now enables those Christmas gifts to 
happen, in addition to the 10-20 food parcels we give out every week. The harvest gifts also reduce CFL’s food bills throughout the year, and this is a wonderful, very crucial help.
Our own harvest of silage and hay is safely gathered into our barns, together with a very generous harvest of straw, donated by a local farmer and supporter. In our vegetable gardens and polytunnels, other harvests continue. We have had a bumper crop of beetroot and in addition to our second batch of 
beetroot chutney, which is on sale in the Farm Shop, volunteers have pickled sliced beetroot to sell at the Christmas Crafts Sales Day on Saturday 5th December.
A massive crop of chillies left us puzzling as to how to use so many of these hot little items. The result has been quite a few jars of Hot Red Chilli Sauce and Hot Green Chilli Sauce, going on sale in the Farm Shop. This sauce could a “Marmite” experience.. love it or hate it! But it is actually delicious, if you like a spicy sauce to add to casseroles, soups or gravy. It would also make a delicious Chilli Con Carne.. without the addition of any preservatives, which one gets in most ready made sauces.
Then a glut of green tomatoes was turned into an extremely successful and tasty Green Tomato Chutney, which is a lovely accompaniment to the Wensleydale cheeses we have on sale in our shop and Granary Café.
We have also enjoyed a wonderful hedgerow harvest this year. Whilst leaving lots of berries for the wild birds, we have been able to pick a bumper crop of sloes for making our own Sloe Gin Jelly, and a reasonable number of blackberries for Bramble Jelly.. the quintessential taste of a hedgerow harvest.
Wild rosehips, blackberries, sloes and crab apples were combined to make a delicious fruity Hedgerow Harvest Jam and small yellow wild plums have been turned into a Wild Plum Jam, straight from the sensory garden trees into the jam pans.
As far as food miles go, we can boast of doing rather well .. most of the fruit and vegetables we have used in these preserves, all made at Crag House Farm in open pans and small batches, involve minimal food miles.. often less than a few hundred yards!
All these preserves, along with Blackcurrant Fruit Vinegar and Rosemary Vinegar are on sale in the Farm shop at Crag House Farm, traditional tastes, “Steeped in Tradition” as the preserve labels state.
We thank God for such a wonderful harvest and for the generosity of supporters who have brought in harvest gifts, ensuring that we can care adequately for very vulnerable and needy people, for the year ahead.
