Berries, berries, berries, plums...

There's a lot going on here these days, none of it particularly interesting. Sue and I made a boatload of olallieberry jam. If you've never had ollalies, you've missed out. They are a cross between a blackberry, a loganberry and some other berry that I can't remember...maybe raspberry. They are almost as big as blackberries, but with a lot fewer seeds. The juice is reddish-purple, but stains everything blue (go figure...pomegranates do the same thing). Anyway, here is the “before” pic of our lovely berries. No, we did not pick them ourselves, we are much too busy for that (ha!). Actually, they are thorny, stickery bushes and you only save $1/lb that way. We bought 10 lbs: for $10, I'll let someone else get stuck, thankyouverymuch.  This pic makes them look like they have little white spots..it's just the reflection of the flash or something.

Here is the “after” picture. Lots of lovely bottles of jam, and two quart bottles of syrup that were still cooking when I took the picture.

No, we don't eat that much jam. However, since very few people even get to taste olallies (they only grow here and I think in Oregon/Washington....and they are never in the stores), we give a lot away as gifts so that people who don't live here can enjoy them, and maybe want to come visit during berry season. The syrup will be gone quickly...Sue has a “thing” for coconut pancakes with berry syrup.

Someone at work gave Ryan a huge bag of plums. They are already ripe and sometime today will probably be close to the edge of what a good Mormon girl can eat/drink....soooo....more jam is in the forecast for today. Fun. At least it isn't hot here. I remember canning stuff in the summer in Arizona with my mom. We would go out and pick grapes, or plums, or apricots, or whatever, then come home and steam up our house canning, because the 115F that it was outside just wasn't hot enough. In San Jose, I set up a big propane burner on the porch and canned my zillion quarts of tomatoes outside. It was nice because that burner could boil my big canner in about 3 minutes, and it wasn't heating up my already-hot kitchen. Here, in the morning, it's actually kind of chilly, and a big steaming pot of something is no big deal.

Even though canning/preserving is a lot of work, I get a certain satisfaction from knowing exactly what is in my jar of tomatoes, pickles, salsa etc. I especially like it when I preserve what we grow ourselves. Makes me feel like pioneer woman or something, I guess. A throwback to my Arizona/Utah pioneer ancestors. When we were building this house, and had so much room to grow things I was pretty excited. We planted several fruit trees and anticipated the garden we would have.

But, we didn't plant a garden this year. We need to get a better handle on how to keep the “neighbors” (gophers, rabbits, squirrels, deer, snails) out of it, without resorting to poisoning anything. Too many little people around here for that. We put chicken wire under the raised beds for the gophers, put a fence around it for the deer, but the snails, the rabbits and the squirrels ate the last garden to the ground in a week. Everything was growing nicely, we left for a week and came back to nothing. Very discouraging. I love all of God's creatures, but they should leave my zucchini alone. OK, they can have SOME zucchini, but NO PEAS. Or beans. Or corn. Or tomatoes.....

This picture is just because we had a lovely day at the beach last week, and Normie and Zerin got to fly kites.  ;0)