I realise that I haven’t spoken much on the blog about my own wedding planning.  I’m quite a private person when it comes to my own wedding and I seem to change my mind about things so often that it’s hard to say ‘this is what we’re doing’.

But last weekend, with autumn approaching, Mr Rigg and I went to a local farm to pick autumn raspberries to make into jam.  One thing we’re almost certain about is that we want to incorporate an afternoon tea into our wedding day.

This is for a number of reasons:

1) A large part of my childhood was spent at my grandparents house in Devon.  Many of my memories are eating homemade scones, with granny’s jam and clotted cream from a family farm up the road. 

2) I have a friend who makes the best teeny tiny scones and who is prepared to make enough for our guests.

3) I love the Englishness of it and the connections I have with it.

4) And who doesn’t love scones with clotted cream and jam?

Determined to be able to tell people that they are eating our homemade raspberry jam, this is why we headed out into the driving rain to a local farm to pick raspberries.  By some miracle the sun came out as we started to pick, and just as we had filled our tubs it began to rain again.

We had aimed to pick about 2.5kg … we ended up with nearly 4kg!  Thankfully we had bought a tray of 30 jam jars on the internet, so there was plenty to fill and we’ll be kept in jam until next summer.

After picking we spent the afternoon in our kitchen making jam.  I am a carboot addict and always on the look out for old and vintage finds.  So I have two old jam pans that finally got an outing from their dusty cupboard.

We made two batches – for the ‘wedding jam’ we used half ordinary sugar and half jam sugar.  Jam sugar has added pectin in it which helps the jam to set (like shop bought jam).  I favour family recipes for runny jam, but we quickly realised it wouldn’t be nice for our guests to have jam running down their fingers.

So we have picked, cooked and bottled nearly 30 jars of jam – all ready for May 2011!