Sour grapes...make good jelly

A dear friend of ours, Carol, gave us a grape plant that she had an extra of. We had previously planted grapes but between the deer and possibly too-wet soil, they all died off with nothing to show for our efforts.

This new plant did surprisingly well this year. They were so cute on the vine:

All 3 pounds of it picked:

 The messy juicing process...the is the remainder that we fed to the chickens:

I forgot to take a photo of the juice before popping it into the freezer...to wait until cooler weather to make jelly.

So far this year, I've made many jars of marmalade, one batch of strawberry jam, and one batch of Autumn Olive jelly. I'm waiting until late fall to make grape and blackberry jellies. What is your favorite jam or jelly?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Children of the corn...and tomatoes, and eggplants, and...

It was a good summer for green beans, even with the deer mowing down an entire bed of it. We froze many, many quart bags, and canned 14 quart jars of it so far. And there are more to come! It's exhausting work, even with four of us, but we'll be so happy to have it in the winter.

Canned green beans and tomato sauce

And if you hadn't guessed yet from the photo above, we're having a good year of tomatoes too, which is kind of surprising since it's been a generally cool summer. Yes, the white lids are Tattler lids. Now that hubby has read the directions and used them properly, they work great and no BPA!

More gratuitous photos of canned tomato sauce

We also had a bumper crop of wild blackberries (not wild black raspberries though). I froze a bunch and made my first ever blackberry jelly using Robin Edmundson's A Simple Jar of Jam e-book!

Beautiful blackberry jelly

Not everything from the garden was processed for future use. We ate a ton of stuff too, mostly summer squash and eggplants.

Scrambled eggs from our chickens to go with the squash-eggplant medley 

I'd forgotten we had a great crop of strawberries too this year, but while adding photos for this post, I found a picture I took in the spring of one of our many harvests.

Red and delcious

How did your garden do this year? Was it a good summer for growing where you live?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Marmalade and syrup and knitting, oh my!

(As you can see, my internet connection, and therefore my pictures, are still messed up. They're all vertically challenged. *sigh*)

I am so excited! I made a couple of firsts in the last couple of weeks. First of the firsts, I made orange marmalade:

Not actually a squat jar...

I bought the gorgeous new jam e-book from my friend, Robin. It's called "A Simple Jar of Jam" and it's as much a work of art as it is a how-to-make-jam book. You can get it (PDF) at Robin's Etsy site.

We were buying jars of marmalade that Robin made and got so addicted that I had to make my own (while it's citrus season) just to keep up hubby's demands. Now if I could only figure out how to make Vegemite, he would be the happiest guy on earth.

If you like to make jam, you should add "A Simple Jar of Jam" to your library (or e-library). If you don't want to make your own, Robin will soon be selling her canned jams on Etsy too. Go to her blog to contact her!

I'm very happy with the marmalade I made (a total of 11 8-oz jars, I think); I just wish Mom were still alive for me to share with her because marmalade was one of her favorite things.

My second first (is that oxymoronic?) was strawberry syrup!

I'd canned strawberry jam before but never made syrup. Hubby's been wanting a lower glycemic index sweetener for our waffles and he thinks fruit syrup is the answer. Who knows if he's right about that, but we only have one, spindly sugar maple on our property but we had a ton of strawberries to do something with.

I used the recipe for strawberry syrup from the "Food in Jars" book but didn't can it. I also consulted these three books below when I was making marmalade, but my favorite was Robin's e-book because of the scrumptious photos.

Let me know if you want to know the authors...things are hard to read in this photo.

Now that I'm armed with tons of books and some experience, I hope we get a bumper crop of wild blackberries, wild black raspberries, and blueberries so I can make tons of jams and syrup. If anyone has ever made jam with persimmons, please let me know how it went.

What about you? How do you preserve your fruits? Or do you just eat them all as you get them (the grasshopper method of food preservation)? ;)

EDITED TO ADD:
Well, genius here (*squirrel!*) forgot to talk about knitting. My buddy Michelle sent me a washcloth pattern and some gorgeous yarn so I started making a funky washcloth:

looks like the squashed pic problems are solved...yay!

This has been so much fun, I might make a bunch for gifts!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

What have we been up to?

Oh, a lil' of this, a lil' of that.

I set up the telescope Saturday night and while we couldn't see the Great Red Spot, we did see the 4 largest moons of Jupiter. Our own moon was nearly full and was so bright that we felt like we were staring at the sun. Could see the craters on the southern edge really well though.

Sunday, we picked up lamb from the processors (many thanks to our friend, C!), and then picked tons of apples from C's trees, and some grapes from C's mom's little vineyard. I forgot to take a photo of this year's crop of grapes, but it's not as huge as the one from 2004:And then Ike blew through. We were worried we couldn't get home as we only had one route to get home with the bridge being closed, but luckily no large trees came down on the roads we took, although many trees did come down all over the county. In fact, as of today, there were still thousands without electricity. We were lucky to have lost power for only 20 minutes.

Monday morning, I rescued an oven bird that had crashed into our window. After propping it up in the sunniest spot I could find on a cool morning, it recovered enough in about an hour to fly away.

Monday night, inspired by Gracefruit's jamming, I made grape jelly with the grapes we had picked (and the boys and dh had processed).Not as pretty as I'd like (a bit too cloudy), but I'm pleased that it went smoothly and well, and, boy, do the grapes smell fabulous.

And the rest is pretty much the usual - out most of the day the past several days with homeschool stuff. Whoever thinks that homeschoolers don't get enough "socialization" has never met a homeschooled child. Even with a homebody mom (I have always wanted to be a hermit when I grew up), my kids end up interacting with a lot of people all the time.

"Happiness depends upon ourselves." ~ Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)