Just in the past week, the autumn has irrevocably arrived with rain and ripe fruit and the sea frothy and rough so that we hear it at night when everything else is quiet. This is the time of year when I am most aware that we live on a farm.

The olives were devastated this summer. We will have none. Some countries around the Mediterranean are now banning the export of olive oil because there just will not be enough. Fortunately for us, in our crazed state last year, we picked so many olives that we still have a dozen quart-sized jars of them in brine here on the shelves of the living room. What we thought we would do with so many olives, I have no idea, but it turns out that we were remarkably fore-sighted. We farmers have to be that way.

The pomegranates are getting ripe on the tree out behind the kitchen and the persimmon tree once again has lots of lovely orange fruits hanging around in its branches tantalizingly just out of reach. I have managed so far to pick exactly one (pictured below), but also feel no shame in just buying them at our fruit and veg store down in town. One must do what one must do when it comes to persimmons. The persimmon season (and, for that matter, life itself) is very short.

The chestnuts, on the other hand, are all too available, covering the grounds around the house with prickly burrs like ten thousand stranded tribbles. We have been making chestnut butter -- vanilla and rum or coffee and chocolate. We have reached that point where we are now only willing to take the trouble to even bend over and pick one up if it is particularly plump and promising. We took a giant shopping bag full of them down to Alice and Daniele at the pub to do something with and it didn't even make the tiniest dent in our own bounty. When Mimmo comes to work in the yard, he uses his leaf blower to blow them into the woods where the wild boar can gorge themselves on them.

And the first of the corbezzoli berries have started to fall. I will make jam later this week. Jonathan is baking bread on a pretty near constant basis to try to keep up with the nut butter and jam production. (Side note: this is not NOT the type of Mediterranean diet that is so insistently touted for weight loss. This is the type of Mediterranean diet that bulks you up to last out the winter sleeping by the fire. I now live in my stretchy leggings and have decided to just go ahead and become jolly.)