There are no more pick days this summer. Thank you to everyone who came out to pick berries in our new, old-fashioned way. “Old-fashioned” in the sense that you manually picked into a bucket that you carried and “new” in the sense that these are thornless varieties and are easily accessible on level terraces. We enjoyed meeting everyone and hope you put us on your summer “to-do” list for next year. Berry season starts right about the time school lets out for summer vacation.
Jelly from Frozen Fruit?
Did you know that you can make jelly from frozen fruit? You can, and it turns out great if you have frozen your berries with care. Freezing them in good heavy bags, with little to no air is best. I don’t own a vacuum-sealer that removes the air and seals the food like shrink-wrap. Good heavy freezer bags work fine for me. I remove a lot of the air with a straw while zipping it shut. If you want to be able to measure out your individual berries you need to freeze them in a single layer on a cookie sheet first. Then put them into bags. Cobblers, ice cream and numerous other tasty things can be made from frozen berries including jelly and toppings. To make jelly, once your berries thaw, keep the juice, don’t drain them. Jelly seems to work best with a small amount of under-ripe berries mixed in with the ripe ones. These under-ripe berries help the jelly to gel better and also increase the fruitiness since they are tart even after freezing. Using frozen fruit gives you the convenience of making jelly when you want and allows you to make mixed fruit jellies with things that don’t ripen at the same time. I always wondered how they made things like blueberry/pomegranate jelly.
The Roof Project
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What’s Next?
We will be pruning the blackberries in a few weeks. Until then, we need to catch up on things that got pushed back like harvesting garlic, repairing water lines, fixing our driveway, turning compost… and on and on.
Our bees are busy in the blackberry rows. The blackberries are in full bloom right now, and are beautiful (photo at right). Hopefully we will have a great crop of blackberries like last year. Our blueberries have finished blooming and have set fruit already. You may not recall, but last year, our blueberry crop was very sparse due to something called Mummy Berry. This spore causes the fruit to dry up and fall off the bush. It apparently continues to be a problem year after year by overwintering in the ground around the bush and re-emerging in Spring. The suggested remedy is to spray, spray, spray… but we’re organic!… After much research on what to do, we finally found some organic farms in the Northwest that had success with extremely heavy mulching in February. Why February? The theory is that by mulching overly heavy it creates a barrier and will keep last years spores from surfacing while the plant is blooming. This is supposed to keep the spores from effecting this years crop. Blueberries bloom rather early in March, so February for mulching was exactly right. So far, things are looking good. I took a photo so you could see all the berries! (below, left)
Spring Rain
With all this Spring rain, the roof on the barn decided it had enough and began to leak. We certainly didn’t think we would have to deal with a roof right now, and who has time? The weather forecast says we should have several dry days in a row, four and a half days exactly, so here we are tearing off the old roof. The brown and silver tarps are supposed to catch all the old shingles and nails. It mostly worked… luckily, we have a huge magnet that’s great to find stray nails.