Leave the house during daylight hours at the moment and everywhere there is a hectic flurry of birds. The air filled with the flapping of wings and the chattering of warning calls. The robins and wrens that are slowly pecking their way through the stacked trays of apples we keep under cover in the outside kitchen. The hordes of blackbirds and mistle thrushes combing the turf beneath the crab apples. The jackdaws, crows, pigeons and jays feasting on the remaining cooking apples rotting where they fell in the orchard. While, at the entrance to the garden, dunnocks, tits, wrens and finches compete with mice and voles for the last of the medlars that are still falling to ground. The medlars don’t start start dropping until the leaves have all fallen, which this year was in mid-November. Then the race is on to harvest what we need before the critters get them, although we always leave enough that they can eat their fill. 

Similar to quince, both in the timing of their harvest and in the fact that they are also too hard and astringent to be eaten raw, while quince can be cooked straight off the tree, medlars must be bletted to become edible. Bletting is the process of allowing the fruit to start the process of decomposition, so that the hard white flesh becomes a soft, cinnamon brown paste. This happens naturally when there is a frost or prolonged cold weather, and we are lucky to have the space to leave ours outside under cover in perforated plastic trays. However, this process can be replicated and hastened by putting the medlars in bags in the freezer.