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:

100% un-fooled-around with

Bill took these photos two nights ago as a storm approached near sunset. The entire world turned orange.

I cowered in the living room with the storm radio. Gotta love the midwest in the spring.

13,000 words

Ready for some pictures?

Our coop (Coop d'etat) has been beautifully painted thanks to help from the family.

The chickens quiet enjoy it.




The bathroom has also been painted. Before:


After:


Growing in the garden...
Onions:

Potatoes amongst many weeds:


Dessert:


Beans, which we hope do better than last year.


Flowering peas:

The condemed

Last weekend was rather productive for one that included a planned half-day tequila-recovery couch session.

All of our cornish cross meat birds are now in the freezer. They had gotten pretty big and...well we wanted the space for our barred rocks. We processed nine birds in about 4 hours. They were 7 weeks old and already huge.

While we'll be keeping the barred rocks for a while, we don't intend to raise meat birds again. Hybrid chickens are just a bit too unnatural for us. We started with 15 birds seven weeks ago. One wasn't growing well at all (we named him Colin Creevey) and started acting pretty sick. He was actually growing a lot in his rear, but not anywhere else. Odd genetics for poor little Colin. He was euthanized a few weeks ago. We also lost two birds to, we assume, heart failure. Corish x's, as a result of their breeding, have a tendency to eat themselves to death. While the barred rocks can be trusted to ration their own food, we learned we could only let the cornish crosses have access to food for 12 hours a day.

But now they are gone and our life is lot easier. They were unintelligent, high-maintenance birds. This will be the last you see of them, but expect lots of adorable barred rock photos to come.

And some socks!