Today is for jam!

[katexxxxxx]

The other day I wandered up the garden with a couple of friends, and realized that there was bounty!  In a Bun Dance, even!  The apples were ripening on both little trees, and the crab apple is laden...  In a month or so there will be a whole tree-full of cherry coloured cherry-sized crab apples, to make more crable apple jelly and wine than I

Comments

[g8bur]

It looks as if you'll have a pretty good fruit harvest there. I hope your jams come out well.

I picked brambles this afternoon too. Geoff and I have just scoffed a very generous bowlful apiece, and there are plenty more still to come, quietly ripening among the branches of the orchard's trees.

Our Bramley looks like being the best cropper this year; the fruits are quite a bit smaller than usual, but I think that's down to the weather. They should mostly be usable, though.

The other apples (Cox, Charles Ross and Russet) are even tinier, and the pears aren't up to much either. There were no plums or raspberries worth mentioning. The blackberries will make up for it a bit, though.

[katexxxxxx]

It's odd you have so little... Round here they are saying it's the best cropping year for orchard fruit in many years,. The slow start seems to have suited things.

[g8bur]

I think our orchard must be the exception that proves the rule :-(

The Bramley and Charles Ross apples are quite a lot in number, but a fair bit smaller than usual in size. The Cox and the Russet have fewer and much smaller fruit than usual.

The Williams pear has about a dozen small fruits on it, two of which I found as premature windfalls yesterday.

The Comice has very few fruits on it, and those that it has set are about a third to a half of the usual size. The Conference pears are fairly plentiful, but even more skin-and-bone than usual for that variety.

[rebecca817]

Your brambles look like our blackberry bushes.

And I'm trying to add you on Facebook.

[katexxxxxx]

Brambles = blackberries! And FB worked. :)

[virginiadear]

I've arrived late---how did the jam turn out? Are you pleased with it?

[katexxxxxx]

Rather runny... But I shal label it up and store it in the cupboard for a few weeks, and hopefully a bit of healthy neglect will show it the error of its ways. If not, it makes very good sauce for vanilla ice cream!

[seraphinawitch]

It could be worse,we picked a whole shopping basket of brambles from the patch across the road at South Luffenham, and our late lamented Mama attempted to make bramble jelly. What we got was a sort of bramble equivalent of that Dutch Apfelstroop we used to spread on bread, but stickier. It was great drizzled over ice cream and used instead of sugar in windfall apple and pear crumble. Jelly it was not! And there was jars and jars of it, we had just about finished it by the time we went to Malta, but it moved with us to Stamford and then to the quarter in North Luffenham!

[katexxxxxx]

Ah, yes, the infamous bramble treacle! We eventually used the last of it up by eating it in spoonfuls instead of sweeties!

She did later make some excellent jellies, but it was Granny who was the master jam-maker in the family. I remember making jam with her that summer I lived in St Monans. He maxim for soft fruit jams was always 'better unset than over-cooked!'

For the next lot I may indulge in sugar with pectin added.

[undyingking]

Or some of those crab-apples? My dad's house has a crab-apple and large bramble growing conveniently side-by-side, and many is the jelly they've made together (no extra pectin required).

[katexxxxxx]

Yes, but the brambles are ready now, and the crabs aren't! :)