A bumper sloe season is a good sign for the countryside

This year's crop of sloe berries are sweeter due to the late September sunshine

It's a bumper year for sloes and our hedgerows are absolutely groaning with them. Good news for wildlife and for those of us who like sloe gin at Christmas.

I don't actually remember sloes from the my childhood. I think in the autumn I was more focused on picking as many blackberries as possible for my mum's delicious crumbles. So I passed over the small black sloes sharing a hedge with the brambles.

Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn and they are a really vital part of the ecology of our countryside and a year like 2015 shows them at their very best.

"False spring"

We started the year with quite a mild "false spring" and the early flowering blackthorn took full advantage, producing plenty of flowers at the end of February. It's one of our earliest flowering plants and so if it does well so do all the insects that are emerging after winter. These pollinators gorge themselves on the blackthorn and in a good year that means when other trees start to blossom you find plenty of insects to pollinate them.

Sloe berries are generally quite sour, but they can be pickled or preserved

And that's what happened this year. With pollinators given a booming blackthorn blossom boost you find many of our fruit farms are having a very good year too. Herefordshire cider maker Westons are looking at 30,000 tonnes of apples a record amount.

But blackthorn isn't just good for insects. Come the autumn those blossoms have become the black sloe fruits. If you look closely they have a dusty bloom on them which reflects ultraviolet light and attracts birds who are sensitive to uv wavelengths.

Larger birds will swallow the sloes whole and the stone in the centre will pass through them. Once on the ground wood mice often nibble though the outside of the stone to extract the tasty kernel. Keep your eyes peeled for sloe stones with neat little holes scattered on the ground.

Adventurous cooking

Meanwhile for humans could we put this bumper sloe crop to good use? Cooking with sloes is for the more adventurous, they are very astringent even bitter. Chef Alex Claridge from Birmingham restaurant Nomad created an entire sloe-based menu. His advice is to pickle or preserve them, get them into alcohol or vinegar, and think of them perhaps as an alternative to using lemons.

Chef Alex Claridge from Birmingham's created a whole menu based around sloe berries

The easiest option is to use them to make plenty of sloe gin for Christmas. It's still not too late to give it a go. Plenty of recipes online. And while you do see sloe gins in the shops these days they really can't match the real thing you make at home. Nik Koster from Birmingham gin maker Langley's explained that the flavour of sloes varies hugely year to year. So this year sloes are sweeter because there was lots of lovely sunshine in September.

Interestingly when you make sloe gin it's actually a liqueur and legally no longer a gin. Since the sloe gin loses alcohol as it steeps in the months up to Christmas, it ends up a good ten per cent less alcoholic than the legal requirement for a gin.

What that means in reality is that if you use sloe gin in a cocktail add a good glug of ordinary gin too.

The sloes and the blackthorn bush will provide wildlife and humans with a mellow taste of autumn right into the darkest and coldest of winter days to come.