Most of my flowers and perennials these days are generally low water users, at least once they became established, however the same is not true of all my edible plants. When the state officials announced the need for even deeper cuts to our water use early this year, I decided what my most prized or hard to replace plants were, mainly the fruit trees and camellias, and then I diverted the limited grey water from our front load washer machine…
Once a jar of homemade jelly or jam is opened, reusing the same metal lid and ring that was used to can it can be difficult and messy. When my neighbor first starting teaching me to can a couple of summers ago, she asked if I had any storage caps or lids, and when I told her “no” she mentioned where I could buy the reusable lids at the best price locally, along with some of the other canning stuff…
This past growing season, despite the fact we only had a half dozen male flowers on the Kiwi vines, we still had a bountiful crop of Vincent Kiwis, way more than the previous year when we only had two male flowers for cross pollination. Since we are limited on our cold storage space here at Hanbury House, rather than completely harvest all the fruit at once this year, I decided to let the fruit continue to hang on the vines,…
Short answer: Just use an electric citrus juicer. My overly detailed, way too long response to the same dilemma: Although we have a young “Sweet” Pomegranate tree, sadly it is still too small to produce much fruit. However, my husband has a friend at work with an established “Wonderful” pomegranate tree that had a giant bumper crop this year. We often share our organic bantam eggs and homemade jelly with his friend, and recently he has been giving us lots…
People usually either love Pickled Beets or hate them. My daughter and I love Pickled Beets. This summer B decided to plant beets just for pickling. She planted Detroit Dark Red, mainly because we had three packets of them on hand, but also because it is a good variety for pickling and canning, plus they are really sweet. They took about 60 days from sowing to harvest since they weren’t in full sun and we also forgot them for an…
Yesterday, my neighbor, G, and I processed 1/2 of the frozen concord grape juice we made at the end of summer into jam. As I mentioned in my previous post about the first half of the grape project, Learning to Can: Concord Grape Jelly- part 1, G has been teaching me what she knows about canning, how to can grape jelly to be specific. She was mentored by an older friend, whose mom passed down the knowledge and skills to…
For many years, my family has been blessed with dozens of cans of homemade jelly from our concord grapevine. However, I can not take credit for anything other than the simple acts of planting, pruning, and infrequently watering. My next-door neighbor has been doing the time-consuming and messy part for us, in exchange for a share of the grapes’ bounty. Most years, she even does the harvesting. I felt like we were definitely getting the better end of the deal,…