Berry hunting can be real sloe going

The reason I find them untrustworthy is because they have another bad habit. They tend to be available in enormous numbers one year and then prove desperately hard to find the next. Like all members of the plum family they have a distinct tendency to give you feast or famine.

Despite being one of our few genuinely native plants, sloes are seriously temperamental.

The problem stems from how early they flower. They get going a touch too soon in the year. This is fine if the weather happens to be good when the glorious white flowers are out.

In a successful season you can walk along the hedgerows, see the bees happily collecting some nice easy pickings, and contemplate a bumper harvest late in the year. But if the wind decides to drive down from the Arctic just as the blossom appears then no bee is going to risk freezing to death or being blown off course.

A couple of years ago we had a warm spring and the bees got out at the right time to pollinate the crop. The only difficulty was knowing what to do with all the sloes before us.

I kept being tempted to lean a little too far over the river bank to reach the juiciest and be fully sure of my safety. I wasn’t entirely impressed by my wife’s offer to step back from the job so she could take a photograph if I did.

But then she wasn’t entirely impressed by my insistence that only the largest and tastiest specimens and the risk of a trip to A&E would do. In the end I did as I was told and started collecting more modestly sized ones.

Eventually we got them home. They were a touch small but when we combined them with a suitable quantity of gin and vodka and flavoured them with just enough sugar and almonds to add a bit of sweetness, and a wonderfully interesting edge to the bitterness, the job was a good ‘un. After a hard morning’s work we had laid down an adequate supply to satisfy the needs of half the village. Then we ran out of empty bottles and cheap booze. So we bunged the remainder of the berries in the freezer.

It had been one of those summers where all my fruit seemed to do well and I had also frozen a large number of rather nice fat blackcurrants. I used them to make a crumble which I served up to several friends at a dinner party.

I like to follow the good Yorkshire tradition of making sure everyone has so much food when they come round that even the trenchermen go away wondering whether they should join a gym. So I was an early adopter of our village’s policy of always making sure there is more than one pudding available.

I was happily digging into my choice of pudding when I noticed that those who had gone for the traditional crumble weren’t entirely as appreciative of my efforts as I might have liked.

It turned out that small frozen sloes look a lot like nice fat blackcurrants and laziness over labelling is not the wisest of approaches to freezer management. One of my guests professed to enjoying his sloe crumble so much that he actually finished the serving. I think he was either being very polite or suffers from problems with his taste buds. The rest were grateful to abandon the accidental experiment with remarkable alacrity and expressed the view that no amount of custard was going to make it remotely sweet enough to eat.

I still put my sloes in the freezer. It is the best way to break up their skins before you drop them into the gin and saves a lot of rather fiddly work pricking each one individually. But I now label them a little more carefully.