Garden Blogging.

It seems I have managed to go through the summer without writing about gardening. Not even once. How embarrassing. It may not seem like I have been gardening but I have! I swear I have!

In fact, I have been spending my time not writing about gardening actually gardening. Gardening, feeding friends, preserving, drying, and baking. All the while, learning more and more. I don't feel so bad. I feel a little bad but not hardly bad at all, actually.

Free food has been the theme this summer! We ravaged a pals cherry tree in early summer getting more than 40lbs of cherries. We froze and canned them all after spending hours pitting.

A few days ago I cleaned our backyard concord grape vine of all it's delicious purple orbs! This morning I transformed them into a spiced jam. It tastes like the weather. A comfortable combination of fall and summer.

I flew north at the end of August for family visits and spent much of my time foraging, picking and processing our bounty. We made a kalyna-apple jelly, hawthorn berry apple butter and a sweet and tangy beet relish. I also inherited a few large bags of wild blueberries to restock our freezer. I wasn't able to pick myself since the season ended early this year due to warmer weather.

The hawthorn berries were a bit of an accident. My m

om thought they were high-bush cranberries. When we got back my dad was disgusted! "Tamara! You've lived here your whole life and you don't know what a high-bush cranberry is!" The silly thing is we also accidentally picked high-bush cranberries thinking they were choke cherries. OOPS! At least we had our kalyna for the planned jelly.

My mom passed me down this very cool strainer that was my grandpa's. It's called a chinois. I used it for my grape jam today and can imagine myself using it for years to come. It is so simple and obvious and much easier to clean than a food processor or the complicated attachments for my stand mixer. It's also OLD. Old is sometimes good.

So I guess I've managed to avoid blogging about gardening again.