Life in my World

The blackberries were huge for wild berries and
there were so many!!

Life in my house has been a lot crazy lately.  Since I last posted my husband's brother from Peru brought his family for a visit and I have had a ton of produce to put up.

This year the blackberries were absolutely amazing!  To start with they ripened two weeks early, and we had a bumper crop.  I have been picking berries for most of my life and I don't remember ever seeing a crop this good.  There were so many berries on the canes that they could not stand up like they usually do.  Not only were there lots of berries but, for wild berries they were huge.  Normally wild berries are very small, these were more like the cultivated berries that you see in the store size wise.  I LOVE blackberries!!!  And I could not bear to see them dry up so I spent hours picking berries and then processing them.  I now have more than 5 quarts of blackberries in the freezer and more than 24 pints of either blackberry jelly or syrup.

We have also made over 15 pints of sweet relish.  This is one of my hubby's favorites.  So our postage stamp garden was mainly planted for relish; i.e. cucumbers and peppers.  We do have tomatoes as well but, they are only just starting to come in.  Mind you this was three batches of relish and we have had to fight with our dog for the cucumbers.  No kidding, she seemed to think that they were the perfect plaything and would go into the garden pick them and chew them to pieces.  We would come driving into the driveway only to see her carrying a cucumber around the yard in her mouth.

Now the elderberries are getting ripe, a month early.  We have been picking them in spite of being so busy because I was not willing to let the birds have them.  So I will be making jelly as well as making elderberry syrup (medicinal) for my family.  As it stand now I have lots of jelly made one one gallon batch of elderberry syrup to share with the family and still have over 2 gallons of juice to make into jelly or syrup.  And there are still loads of berries in the patch.

On top everything else my husband and I were trying to make a desision about school for our children.  We have now desided to homeschool them.  This is a big desision for us.  It will mean that any work I do will be sporatic and will come after we have finished with school and any housework.  So please bear with us as we change gears in our house.  I will be posting the projects that I have already completed.  Sorry there are not more pictures in this post, but I have barely gotten the camera out the last month or so.

Thank you for your patience and for coming back.