February at Stanton is hot with drying winds coming from the North West. The ground is dry and brown though the black faced sheep standing in the field on every early morn appreciate the dewey coolness. later they seem to sit and talk under the low Macrocarpa boughs blending in with the shadows- Stantons silent sentinels.

Sam is under the potato vine doing the same thing. he lost his eye to sun cancer and he is not a silly pooch. Pete must be having a day off but I seem to hear him telling me to go to the orchard and pick up the fallen fruit so the orchard is hygenic. he would probably tell me to water the trees deeply, if he were here so I will do the right thing. The apple trees flourish as a green belt in an ocean of khaki and it is easy to be drawn towards the trees as a sort of curious fruit squeezer(nectarines beware)

Stanton has a goodly variety of apples by the way. the problem is no one here knows much about the subject so a bucket of assorteds went to the coffee shop for some local opinions. We at Stanton have been Baristas at the local coffee shop for years now and do we know our beans… but not our apples it seems.

The great apple ID exercise went on for days and ended in an unsatisfactory confusion of nomenclature. Was it a Cox’s Orange Pippin or a Gravenstein, a White Lady or a Golden Delicious? One thing is known for certain, we do not have Sturmer cider apples as our friend Ashley the brewer from Two Metre Tall Company tells us.

February at Stanton is the month for blackberries, the breakfast delight so looked forward to by guests (they like quince as well). Under one such blackberry bush a ruinous shed sat for years before it was disturbed recently giving up its stories of adventures undertaken therein by small boys and huntsman spiders. The shed now sits partly completed in its new location in the apple orchard and will soon be home to Stanton’s newest occupants- Barnevelder chickens collectively called Stanton Ovation. The remaining timbers are to be winter warmers in the main room fireplace.

Autumn is coming now. You can see the light changing in the late afternoon, from haze to sharp colour, clouds thinning outtravelling high and fast.

February is the trigger for the new year at Stanton so we are getting ready… where are the slippers.