Nice to see my colander so full of berries! All clean and ready to pick over.
I got all the stems (of course, I found one I missed after I took this photo!) and the ones that were damages or whatever. I filled two 9×13 jelly roll pans with berries when I was done.
They are now in the deep freeze, to be transferred to freezer bags when they are frozen solid. After that, they can wait until we decide how we want to use them this year. :-) The freezing will help them release their juices later, too.
So… what shall we make? More chokecherry vinegar? Or try a jam or jelly this year?
While picking chokecherries, I also checked out one of the gooseberry bushes.
This is the biggest of the gooseberry bushes, and the one that got the most water over the summer, since I had the sprinkler going on the raspberry transplants. It has a fair few berries on it, while the others have either no berries at all, or almost none. The really dark berries I am holding are “ripe”, but so small, they’re practically inedible.
Note for future: transplant the gooseberries out from under other trees, and put them somewhere where they will get both sun and rain!
This morning, I grabbed a bucket and checked out the chokecherry trees.
After my last visit with them, I thought I might be too late for the one tree; either they would be over ripe, or the birds would have got them by now.
Happily, there were plenty of perfectly ripe (very dusty!) berries!
I was even able to pull branches down and get lots from the top.
This is how much I got, from just the one tree – minus the many that went flying or rolling out of my hands onto the ground! :-D
That was all what I was able to pick from both trees near the road, last year.
This year, that second tree is not doing as well.
There were very few berries, they were really small, and not consistently ripening.
I left this tree alone.
Then I went for the tree closer to the house. The berries there were much plumper, but the berries were also mostly out of reach. The lower branches don’t get anywhere near as much light, so there were fewer berries and they were redder. My daughter was able to come out and help by pulling the upper branches down so I could reach to pick them.
Check them out!
While there were a fewer berries, they had almost as much volume as the berries from the other tree.
Yes, they are also a lot more red and not as ripe. This is okay, as the less ripe berries have more natural pectin.
As I write this, the chokecherries are sitting in cold water to get rid of any critters that might have come along for the ride, and get the bulk of the dust from the gravel road off. Later, I will give them a thorough wash in cold water, then pick them over to get rid of stems and any messed up berries.
Last year, we made chokecherry vinegar, to use mostly as a drink mix, with our berries. I have not yet decided if we will do the same thing this year. I’ll go through some ideas with my daughters later. I rather like the idea of making a jelly, but that vinegar was really good!
At the very least, we’ll set some aside to freeze and use to make chokecherry mead at some point. :-)
Ah, what a perfect day to work outside! This morning, it was cool enough that I actually wore…
*gasp*
…long sleeves!
:-D
The goal was to move the debris pile from where I’m clearing in the old wood pile to the area behind the outhouse. Which meant I first had to clear around the outhouse.
Today, I stayed in town for my daughter’s short shift. One of the things I ended up doing while there was picking up a magnetic lifter. You know, the kind of thing you would use when you drop a screw and it rolls under a shelf. I wanted to try and see if it would help me find nails in the dirt in the old wood pile.
It kind of worked.
The first challenge involved kittens, who thought it was a springy new toy!
The second was the fact that I wasn’t completely sure if I was feeling a magnetic pull or not. I did find a nail in my test, but I don’t know that the magnet is quite strong enough to find things in that much soil. Sometimes, though, it felt like there was a constant magnetic pull, even though I could find nothing in the ground.
The third problem was… well…
…let me show you.
My attempts to get a photo of the nail it successfully found in the dirt was foiled by Doom Guy, who was absolutely desperate for snuggles!
His claws are incredibly sharp.
He is also having some major respiratory problems. :-(
Which meant I was stuck with a sneezing, snorting, snotty cat that was poking holes in my body while trying to get comfortable in my arms.
And shoulders.
And back.
And head…
Since I was in the area and not working on the area today (I try to keep Sundays as my day of rest, as much as possible), I decided to look beyond were I’d cleared, and get an idea of what I would be working in, next.
I found more of my mother’s flowers. Sort of.
I recognize those plants with the long, slender, pointed leaves. There is a bunch of them in the old kitchen garden. Those have finally started to show flower spikes. I doubt these will bloom at all. They are growing among many dead cherry trees that have new cherry shoots coming up at their bases. My mother had mentioned planting some flowers here, then blaming them for apparently killing some spruce trees I was telling her about. Except these aren’t near the spruce trees I was talking about. Anyhow, I did know she had deliberately planted flowers under the trees somewhere in this area, and now I have found them.
Once this area is cleared and more sunlight gets to the ground, I’m sure we’ll see more flowers, just as we are already seeing more flowers along the edges of the spruce grove that I’d already cleared a bit.
Then I found this.
That’s, my friends, a big patch of poison ivy.
Western Poison Ivy, to be precise.
sigh
We’ve been on the look out for poison ivy since moving here, and while we have seen some similar plants, I was able to confirm that they were NOT poison ivy. I had never seen poison ivy on the property before, even as a child who spent many, many hours roving wild among the trees. I had begun to hope I still wouldn’t.
sigh, again.
The patch doesn’t seem to be very wide, but I also can’t see how deep it extends into the trees – and I won’t be able to until I start clearing back there.
I’ve been looking up how to get rid of it, and not looking forward to the job. At this point, I think I will just leave it for next year. I can avoid the patch when I’m clearing behind the outhouse and moving the debris pile I’ve raked out of the wood pile area. If I have time this year to clear into where those flowering plants that aren’t flowering right now are, I can avoid it on that side, too.
This is what the must looked like this morning, before I did the first stir of the day.
Bubbly bubbly!
I love me some CO2 action!
At the time of this writing, we’ve done the second stir of the day. The instructions we are using as a guide said to stir it twice a day in the first 48 hours, so this was the last one. We now leave it, loosely covered and untouched, for the remainder of 10 days. After that, we siphon it off into the carboy, leaving behind any sediment, set up the airlock, then tuck it away into the basement for a minimum of 4 weeks. After this second fermentation, it should be ready to bottle.
We will, of course, have to taste it first, and see if we’ve got mead. :-)
I was able to swing by the beach after dropping my daughter off at work.
What a glorious morning!
I love these marks the waves left behind, as the tide receded.
Those squiggly whiter lines are tiny ridges of sand, left behind by waves.
The rocky part of the beach is always so much more interesting than the sandy parts!
You never know what you might find, too.
Unfortunately all the pictures I took focused on my dash in the background, instead of this amazing rib bone I found. The size of the fish this belonged to must have been impressive!
Yes, I kept it – for my other daughter’s collection.
These are from this morning, when I brought kibble to the bowls I brought back to the pump shack.
Rosencrantz had already come out and looked to be heading for the house, but hung around when she saw me, then came to eat after I put food in the bowls. She comes to the house for food but, for some reason, Beep Beep and Butterscotch (especially Beep Beep) have been very mean to her and chasing her away. So even though I was mere feet away, I think she was glad to get food here!
Digital zoom, here. My apologies for the poor quality of the image.
She has the strangest dark patches on her cheeks, below each eye!
I had to walk past her to go back to the house, which made her nervous, but not enough to leave the food.
Where those noises I could hear in the pump shack?
Why, yes! Look who’s getting brave!
Since discovering them back in the pump shack, I propped the door open a few inches in such a way that it can neither blow open more, nor close, so it’ll be easier for them to come in and out. I think they like that.
The Re-Farmer 