Autumn Season: Celebrate Local Produce & Le Chameau Wellies

It’s the cold, dark months and early mornings, the hot cups of milky tea and biscuits dunked, sleeves rolled and muddied fingernails. It’s the bedding of seeds through wet soil; tending, watering, feeding and watering again. It’s the time for warm gloves, thick jumpers and trusted Le Chameau wellies midst sheets of rain or under rising suns and always before the chorus sings. 

Within most hamlets, villages and towns, you will find a number of the inhabitants nurturing their gardens and tending to their greenhouses, allotments and windowsills in the early hours of the day, readying themselves for the much-anticipated regional produce shows of the year.

Normally held towards the end of summer to mid-autumn, these shows create a brilliant excuse for the local community to convene in one place and revel in the joys of community spirit, country life and the all-important questions like ‘who has the tastiest jar of seasonal jelly?’

Championing Produce in Le Chameau

Some of the Le Chameau team got involved in their local produce show this autumn, entering into several categories in a hotly contested competition in Overton-on-Dee in North Wales, a picturesque village bordering the River Dee. The categories entered in the show included the ‘longest runner bean’, ‘best five runner beans’, ‘finest trio of cooking apples’, ‘finest bunch of grapes’, ‘best autumnal display’ and ‘finest herb display’.  

Tended throughout the spring and summer and gathered in autumn, wearing our newest collaborative boots with the National Trust, the produce was cut, arranged and taken to the produce show in the morning to then be judged in the early afternoon. Through an agonising wait, the results were in late in the day: 

1st – Finest trio of cooking apples 

3rd – Finest bunch of grapes 

Results aside, we have chosen to celebrate the produce show as an important part of our countryside’s future. Why? Marked on the calendar as one of the dates to remember for many communities, the produce show evokes the best of the countryside and is a true expression of rural life.  

It’s the run up to the show; that solitude which one gets from being outside, wearing your pair of Le Chameau boots and surrounded by growing greens, rich soil and sounds of birdsong. It’s the art of growing your own, knowing the seasons and when to sew, learning as you go or bending the ear of someone in the know.   

Make those early mornings and late evenings that little bit more luxury and comfy as you head out into colder months of autumn and winter and prepare the groundwork for your prize-winning produce in our garden boots.