Nom, nom. Yum.

We have gobs of jam and are making more. Besides toast, homemade jam is ridiculously good in plain yogurt. This breakfast contains 5 ingredients - milk, fruit, sugar, pectin and lemon juice. And it is damn good.

 

Neither of these socks has a mate yet, but I love them both. They are Cookie A socks and she is wonderful. The orange yarn is Creatively Dyed, which I got at Hoosier Hills Fiber Arts Festival. It is brilliant and I know I'll be spending a good portion of my Rhinebeck budget at her booth. Yum.

 

 

 

I think that we have a problem...

...fungus?

I don't know if it was all the rain that we had earlier in the springtime or what, but we seem to have a fungus moving through our garden. Started with the peas, hit the snap peas harder than the snow peas. Moved on to the beans, and now it is attacking the tomatoes. I just pulled out 4 plants. That makes me sad.

Contributing factor: heirloom plants? Last year the heirloom tomatoes were so much tastier than the hybrids that we planted, so I only planted heirlooms this year. I fear that this might have been a bad idea....

Much of the garden remains OK - so far no sign of trouble on the squash, pumpkins, watermelons, muskmelons, cucumbers, pole beans, potatoes, onions, lettuce, or corn... but the success of the garden is judged by the tomato crop in my mind. Keeping my fingers crossed. Any suggestions?

Slow progress vs. binging

Tonight we canned one batch of blueberry jam and stacked a little bit of wood. We are experimenting with a different sort of progress - incremental successes instead of all day binges.

A few weeks ago we had an all-day canning effort which resulted in 40 delicious jars of fruity yumminess. Tonight, our half hour of jamming produced 6.5 jars. Instead of felling, cutting and stacking an entire tree, we've been devoting 20 minutes a night to splitting and stacking a tree we dropped this weekend. It is a different sort of work for us. I'm not exhausted, but I do feel a little less accomplished.

I don't have pictures of either of those projects, but I do have some recently accomplished sock knitting to show off. Bill is calling these his Chocolate Peanut Butter socks:

25 jars of jam

We've been making jam for about 3 hours and we have 25 total jars so far of strawberry, strawberry/rhubarb and blackberry. We're hoping to make another batch of strawberry this evening as well as some spiced mulberry. The fruit has been either harvested from our property or purchased at a farmers market.

It took us about an hour to pick two quarts of black caps, which was just shy of what we needed for the recipe so we added in some strawberries.

Jars in waiting:

We've used 10 pounds of sugar so far:

Bill had the brilliant idea of putting the lids and rings on the steamer to make them easier to extract from the boiling water.

Hands of Blue(ish purple)...

In preparation of jam...

 

 

 

Summer shedding.

New hair cuts:

Knitting...

We don't have much house news of late. Our garden and chickens are growing and new plants are flowering. We'll be chopping some more wood soon and canning the mulberries and raspberries that are in abundance on our property.

For now, here is some knitting. We went to the Hoosier Hills Fiber Arts Festival this past weekend. No surprise that I came home with orange sock yarn....


The orange sock in progress: