Pies taste even better after scrumping

Mike Burks is the MD of The Gardens Group, with garden centres in Sherborne, Yeovil and Poundbury. Mike is a former chairman of the Garden Centre Association and is a passionate advocate of ecofriendly gardening practices.

On holiday in North Yorkshire in July we headed up onto the edge of the moors to pick bilberries. Better known as whortleberries from where I come from in Devon, these tiny blue berries are a close relative of the blueberry but are in fact healthier for you. The downside is they are fiddly to pick and have a very powerful dye which stains everything it comes in contact with.

They were made into a pie with a side dish of gluten free crumble for our daughter-inlaw. The pie was delicious and was followed the next morning by bilberry pancakes – also very good – before my wife and I went back to pick more for her cousin who we were visiting the next day. This was a tradition that went back a generation, when my wife’s uncle’s birthday treat was a bilberry pie cooked by my mother-in-law. More tedious picking but a great result and a delighted cousin.

There are also quite a few patches of wild raspberry here too –probably cultivated varieties that have escaped and although the fruit isn’t large, it’s very tasty. Picking in the wild, especially blackberry picking, was commonplace when I was growing up but has faded in popularity. I love blackberry picking but it was just about to start when we left Dorset but too early in Yorkshire. We had a great time blackberrying last summer and especially in Devon with my mum when we discovered our rescue dog Joey also very daintily picking ripe blackberries from the lowest brambles, causing my mum to chuckle loudly.

Back in Sherborne the plums and damsons will be ripe when we get back and so there will be plenty of fruit to pick. These are old varieties planted on the walls of the Walled Kitchen Garden long before we arrived in 1987 and some are growing from the original rootstocks. This feels like scrumping, to use another Devonshire term, and takes me back to scrumping crab apples whilst waiting for the primary school bus. They were large crab apples and probably the variety John Downie (I wasn’t to know that then). For hungry primary school kids, they tasted good, and I don’t remember any side effects. I love collecting fruit especially in the wild but even better are the pies and crumbles as a result of the scrumping.

Mike Burks thegardensgroup.co.uk

n The Gardens Group slashed its carbon by nearly a third across its three garden centres in Sherborne, Yeovil and Poundbury. The group underwent an annual audit by sustainability certification scheme Planet Mark. During the group’s third year as voluntary members of Planet Mark, which is backed by the Eden Project, it achieved a 29.3% absolute carbon reduction.

The group got all of its 160strong team involved at all stages of the process, starting with establishing key areas for improvement that would need to be measured, including buildings, travel, waste, water, procurement and homeworking. Hundreds of new initiatives led by smaller groups of staff have led to some impressive carbon reductions.

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The rain is here again, just in time to refill the water butts ready for the next dry spell. There is no better water to use in the garden than captured rainwater, and it’s environmentally friendly as well. During the sunny intervals the flowers in the community garden have been buzzing with bumble and honeybees, the butterflies have been in abundance on the buddleias, and we have a flock of goldfinches on the seed heads in the wildflower meadow. The other evening a hedgehog was in the tea garden having a good look around. The young woodpeckers have been feeding on the peanut feeders and the nuthatches have been taking turns with them. A young fox walked across the meadow recently. What a lovely colour it was, we are truly blessed to have such an array of wildlife on the site and each week we seem to see something different. The energies from the buddleias help us to link with our spirit guides. Buddleia represents rebirth, resurrection, and new beginnings. The vegetables we have are doing amazingly well, particularly the butternut