Four pots of jam, three lemonade, two orange curd, and some pureed loquats in the freezer!

I ignored the fruit for a day or two, other than collecting fallen lemons. Not too many, thankfully, so today when I needed ten to make some more lemonade, I only had fourteen. As soon as I get ten 'spare', so to speak, I'll freeze some more.

However the seville orange tree evidently decided to shed its fruit in the recent wind - this morning there were about twenty of them. We don't eat marmalade so I haven't used any of these bitter oranges this year. Some of them were rather soft, so they went straight on the compost heap. But I did use a couple to make some orange curd, which is almost nicer than lemon curd.

And the loquats/mespila.... there are SO many of those ripening, and many more to come too. I picked a carrier bag full this morning. I washed and stoned until I had a kilogram of fruit, then made some jam. I did think about my preserving pan, which is still in our UK house (I think) but am not sure I'd want to go back to making large quantities of jam. I've adapted all my jam recipes so they take a kilogram of sugar, as that's the size of the bags sold here, and it saves having to weigh it.

By this afternoon all the other loquats I'd picked had become a bit brown - they start to look bruised within hours of being picked, which is a bit of a nuisance. Anyway, rather than freezing them in halves as I did before, I stewed another kilogram and a half until soft, then turned into puree for freezing.

I dread to think how much sugar I've used in all today. I should think it must have been at least three kilograms!!

Out of interest I weighed the loquat stones I'd removed. I had thought they were probably as heavy as the fruit, but found they were less so. For a kilo of fruit, there was about 500g of stones. Which is still quite a bit. They all get thrown on the compost heap and seem to decompose satisfactorily.

With all this preserving and freezing of fruit, I'm very thankful the daytime weather is still pleasantly cool (for the time of year) in the low 20s Celcius, with a fair amount of wind.