I came home from Michigan to find 13 gallons of raspberries and blackberries in the freezer, ready to be thawed and made into jam.
I tackled the blackberries first. I love the flavor of blackberry but don't love the seeds, so I mashed the berries and set them out to drip. I ended up with 21 pints of blackberry juice. Some of it I used for my favorite triple-berry jam. I also made a large vat of blackberry syrup. The rest I froze in ice-cube trays to add to limeade. Blackberry limeade is delicious.
All the raspberries left over after 6 batches of triple-berry I let the kids make into raspberry jam to sell at the farmer's market. They made the jam themselves! (I supervised a little.) And they were very successful little entrepreneurs. (They let me watch, but only from the other side of the market.) Their favorite story was about a lady who declined a sample because she only buys expensive fancy French jam. But then she gave in and tried theirs and bought three jars and told everyone at the market to come buy jam from Lucy and Gavin.
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| Gray jam beats snooty French jam any day. |
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| Teeny little bird nest in my tomatoes. |
Despite several weeks of neglect while I was away, my garden did really well this year. The Roma tomatoes I planted turned out to be cherry-size (oops) but luckily, they were super easy to skin. A quick blanch and they popped right out of their skins. I don't know what I would have done otherwise. I could not have peeled thousands of tiny tomatoes and kept my sanity.
Another surprise was the chiles. My neighbor brought me four plants that she said were green peppers. I've never had much luck with peppers, but I heard somewhere that if they're planted in black plastic they do well even in Vermont. Something about warming the soil. It worked! My neighbor's plants and the flat of jalapenos I planted all produced tons of peppers. The real surprise, though was that they didn't turn out to be green peppers. They were green New Mexico chiles. All the better! They went in the salsa in place of peppers, and I'm roasting and freezing the extras. Extra jalapenos were made into jalapeno jelly, a new experiment this year that also turned out great.
I quit at 68 pints of salsa. That's more than plenty to see us through another year, even if we share a lot. We have Austin's favorite "Second Place" Peach Salsa, Garden Salsa, and, thanks to the neighbors and serendipity, some Green Chile Salsa too.
