Yesterday we had to go to Home Depot to get things needed to complete the garage construction, and we also stopped at our favorite orchard to pick up a box of pie cherries and raspberries since our own pie cherry tree didn’t set any fruit this year (being still a tiny baby tree), and our raspberry canes are doing who knows what but not setting any fruit. Maybe next year for those plants.
When we got home I cleaned just enough cherries to make this…
Today we worked on cleaning, pitting, and freezing the remaining cherries from the 20 pound box of the fruit. Since each cherry isn’t huge, this was a lot of work and it took us both more than two hours to finish the task.
I looked at the red currants and they need another day or possibly two to finish ripening.
The black currants were ready, however, such as the harvest is.
Next project was to make raspberry jam. Yesterday after we got home I put the raspberries we bought into a large mixing bowl and added 3/4 cup of sugar for each cup of fruit, and stuck in the refrigerator. This afternoon I put the mixture into a pan and started cooking it down, to reduce the volume and convert it into jam.
Once the raspberries and sugar cooked down I ladled the mixture into hot dried off jars, set the lid down on top and tightened down the ring.
Both jar lids have said peenk! I love that sound; it means everything worked as it was supposed to. So tomorrow I’ll label them and we’ll have some homemade jam.
In the meantime Dan is picking strawberries. Lots and lots of strawberries. I’ll be cleaning and freezing those this afternoon.
Today was definitely a red letter day.