Making Plum Jam

 Last week I bought two boxes of fresh plums from the farmers market.  The original intent was to use them all for plum wine, but after halving and pitting thirty pounds of them, my hands were too sore and tired to use them all.  The unused plums remained in their box for another week before I could get to them again.  At this point they had reached their peak of ripeness and I picked through them to get rid of any that were past their prime.  I still didn't have the time to properly can them yet though, so I made quick work of pitting and halving what was left and they went into the freezer until I could find enough time to make jam.

Today was their lucky day.  I pulled the bag of frozen plums out of the freezer and set them in a hot water bath to thaw for a while.  From here they went into my largest stainless steel sauce pan where they simmered while I set up the canner.  They were nice and juicy plums and they smelled so sweet as they cooked on the stove.  I measured them out to be about nine cups of plums which is 1 1 1/2 times called for in the recipe, so I adjusted the amount of pectin and sugar that I added to make sure that my final product would gel properly.

I stirred them constantly as they heated on the stove to make sure that I dissolved all of the sugar.  This recipe calls for a ton - twelve cups for the nine cups of plums that I had.  I think I am making plum candy instead of jam!  After the mixture came to a hard boil I kept stirring it quickly for another couple of minutes, then turned off the heat.  I skimmed off as much foam as I could and then filled the jars from the canner one by one.  The result was fourteen half pints of this beautiful plum jam that I will be enjoying all winter long.

Onion Harvest : Round Two

It has been about a month since I harvested the first bed of onions.  The second bed I left until I could find a large block of time to devote to the project.  The bed was thick with weeds and the rains have stopped over the past couple of weeks so the soil was very dried out.  Some of the onions had begun to cure where they were.  I started at one end of the bed and worked my way to the other end row by row.  I made one pile of onions and one pile of weeds next to the bed and was again impressed by the size of many of the yellow onions.  Some were larger than my palm!

This bed also contained my first attempt at growing shallots.  They seemed to thrive in my garden this year and I was rewarded with a nice harvest from a 2 x 3 foot area on the end of this bed.

Both of these harvests were brought indoors to finishing curing on shelves in my kitchen.  Once the leaves dry up I will trim them all back and store the onions in a cool dark room.  The onions that were harvested a month ago were at the point in the curing process where they needed to be trimmed for storage.  Once they are all cleaned up I like to keep them in onion bags that I have saved from the store.  There was an impressive amount when I was done and I hope they will last until next spring.

The reds don't keep as well as the yellows so I will be cooking my way through that bag first.  I also kept out some onions that looked like they would go bad soon, so those will go to the front of the line when I pick them out for a recipe.  Chances are they will end up in a batch of salsa once the tomatoes start ripening. In a month I will add a few more bags of cured onions to my stores and I will be one step closer to being ready for winter.

Wine Making 101: Sweet Plum Wine

Summer is peaking here in western Colorado and the local farmers have been bringing loads of fruit to market every weekend.  I had been waiting patiently for the arrival of the first crop of plums and was rewarded last weekend with forty pounds of fresh picked plums for $50.  I was hoping that there would be a good crop of large plums, but at this point I will take whatever I can find that I can afford.  These plums were pretty small so pitting and chopping them became a labor of love.

They were at the peak of ripeness and the insides were a rich maroon color and the sweet smell that filled the air as I chopped was divine.   One by one each plum was scrubbed, pitted and coarsely chopped.  It took many hours and I think I got through thirty pounds of them before I decided that I had enough.  I wanted thirty six pounds of them, but I was so tired that I will be happy to get five gallons of wine out of them instead of the desired six.  If I can get the cherry wine bottled before the plums go out of season I may try a third batch of wine this summer if I can find the time.

Once I had enough plums chopped and in the primary fermenter I poured a couple of gallons of boiling water over them to bring the volume up to a full five gallons.  Once it cooled down I mixed in half the sugar from the total recipe and measured out small volumes of some additives to help the yeast grow and be happy.  I let that mixture sit overnight in the bucket before I added the most important ingredient: wine yeast.

The whole mixture sat in the primary for seven days and I needed to mix things up in there once a day while it was fermenting.  Once this first stage was over I strained the whole thing through cheesecloth, mixed in half of the remaining sugar from the recipe and then it went into the secondary fermenter which is a glass carboy.  Here the wine will bubble away for a month until the alcohol level is high enough that the yeast die off and fermentation stops.  I will rack the wine at this point and add the remaining sugar and give it another month or two to clear completely.  Once clear it will be ready for bottling and drinking (the best part!).

Morning Harvests

I have started my late summer routine of going through the garden every morning and picking what has grown to a good picking size.  I take a small basket with me and walk the rows with it, digging through the jungle of plants looking for treasure.  Every morning I am rewarded with baskets of goodies.

At first the baskets only had a handful of each crop, but as the summer wears on, the baskets fill quickly and I need to make several trips to the kitchen to deposit my prizes to make room for more.  The variety of crops I gather changes slightly from day to day depending on how fast certain crops are ripening.


Right now the summer squash are at full production and I am getting so many that I have been giving them away by the bag.  The cucumbers are just getting started and it takes a few days to fill a gallon bag.  In a few weeks I fear I will be filling a gallon bag a day and I will be spending hours in my kitchen canning pickles when I am not at work.  The green beans are just starting to come in finally, and I hope that even though they got a late start I will still get a decent harvest of them for the freezer.  My peppers are loaded with fruit, but they are slow to ripen yet, so I am just picking them for fresh eating right now.  Once they ripen and change color I will have a rainbow selection of peppers for my salsa recipes and for the freezer.  The tomatoes are also being slow to ripen.  I have only found a grand total of five ripe tomatoes so far, though the plants are heavy with green ones.  I am doing my best to clear out the freezer so I have room for the mountains of veggies that are growing to fill it.

The Pullet's First Eggs

I hatched a round of chicks at the end of February.  When they first hatched there were a total of eight chicks, but while they were growing in the yard half of them were stolen by a fox in the night.  The four remaining chicks got a reinforced run and managed to make their way to adult hood over the next few months unscathed.  They were finally big enough to hold their own with the older chickens so they were mixed together about a month ago.  Things got off to a rough start, but they now seem to be tolerating each other well.

The older chickens are a stage in their lives where they are going through a molt so they look pretty awful and they haven't been laying consistently for a few weeks.  With my egg production being down I was really starting to wonder if any of my new additions to the flock were hens.  I had heard roosters crowing for the last few weeks so I knew that I had at least two of those, but I still wondered how much longer it would be until I got my first egg from the hens.

This week I got my answer.  Both of my new pullets laid their first egg on the same day!  Even better, they both laid in the nest boxes so they already seem to get what those are for.  It will be nice to have a little boost in egg production with a couple of new layers in the flock.

The smallest eggs on the top belong to the new pullets.  I am happy to see that they have smooth, uniform, well shaped eggs.  Some of my other hens lay some pretty wonky looking eggs sometimes and it isn't necessarily a trait that I want in my flock.  Weird shaped eggs with thick or thin shells don't hatch very well so I prefer to raise chicks that can lay healthy strong eggs.  From the looks of things so far these new pullets are keepers.

Harvesting Onions Round One

I can't believe it was only a few months ago that I was tucking onion sets into the soil.  I believe I planted them in late March and it took very little time to get growing.

 In only a matter of weeks they sent up strong healthy growth and proceeded to fill in the bed.

They were so happy here that they grew like this for another couple of months before they finally fell over.  This was my signal that they were about ready to harvest.

I pulled the irrigation lines out of the bed in an attempt to let them dry out a bit before harvest.  Monsoon season had other plans however and proceeded to dump buckets of rain on my garden for several weeks.  It never did quite dry out, but I did chance upon a nice clear sunny morning so I took the opportunity to get some harvesting done.

As I pulled them from the bed I laid them out in the sunshine to dry out a bit and begin the curing process.  I also did my best to clean them up as much as possible since I was pulling them from fairly sticky mud and didn't want them to rot.  I had to toss many into the compost that were mushy from sitting in the wet soil for too long already.

Once I finished digging them out I let them sit in the sun for a few hours, but had to rush to bring them indoors in the afternoon because another monsoon storm was heading my way. They will finishing curing on wire shelves in my kitchen.  Once the leaves dry up I will cut them off and store the cured bulbs in the pantry.

Dehydrated Zucchini Chips

I am in the midst of a glut of summer squash and have been totally unable to keep up with them despite eating them every day in various dishes.  I have been giving them away by the bag at work and feeding the giant ones to the chickens to supplement their diet.  I decided that since I had so many it wouldn't hurt to use a few in an flavor experiment with my dehydrator, so I sliced them up and laid them out on the trays, making each tray a slightly different flavor.  One tray I left plain for comparison.  One tray I sprinkled with Old Bay Seasoning.  One tray I just sprinkled with salt and one tray I sprinkled with white vinegar and sea salt.  If it turns out to be a tasty snack then I will make several batches of chips over the next few weeks and hopefully have a healthy treat for myself this winter when fresh summer squash is well out of season.

And the Pickling Begins

I was only able to keep up with eating my fresh cucumbers for a week or two once they starting coming on.  Each day the number of cucumbers that I pull off the vine increases and soon I will be filling baskets with them every morning.  It only took a few days to fill a gallon bag with my fresh harvests so I decided that it was time to get started on the first batch of dill pickles for the year.  This year I planned a bit better and should have no shortage of dill for my pickling needs.  I only planted one row with dill, but the plants are huge and heavy with flower heads.  I also used the garlic that I harvested last month to flavor my home grown pickles.

The morning that I filled the gallon bag with pickling cucumbers I made quick work of washing all of them and trimming the flower ends off the fruit.  I try to pick them when they are about three to four inches long, but some get away for too long and they get sliced into spears so they fit into the jars better.  The washed and trimmed cucumbers go into a brine solution to soak for about twelve hours before they move on to the next stage of canning.

The next stage involves draining the brine from the cucumbers and packing them into hot jars along with a head of dill, a clove of garlic and a couple teaspoons of mustard seed.  I then top the jars off with my pickling solution mixture leaving head space for canning and into the boiling water bath they go.  I process my quart jars for twenty five minutes at this elevation and let them cool down for ten minutes before I remove them from the water bath.  I allow the jars to cool overnight and then remove the rings for storage.

Here are the first four jars of dill pickles for the season with many more in the works outside on the vine.

Garden Harvests: Summer Squash is in the Lead!

The summer crops are coming on fast right now and the summer squash are leading the charge.  They went from tiny seedlings to full blown bushes in just a few weeks and shortly after I saw the first flower I began to harvest my first zucchini and yellow squash of the year.  The yellow squash has been by far the most productive, but I have already discovered a couple of baseball bat sized zucchini hiding under huge leaves.  Those of course immediately went to the chickens since I have no desire to save them for my own use.  I have also been giving away my extra squash to friends and coworkers in an effort to keep up with the harvest.  I may dehydrate a few this summer, but I still have so much left from last year that it doesn't make sense to dehydrate more.

The cucumbers have begun to trickle in and so far I have been able to keep up with them, eating them every day with my lunch or dinner.  I have a feeling it will only be another few days before pickling season goes into full swing around here and I will be inundated with cucumbers as well.  The plants look plenty healthy right now, so I am expecting another bumper crop year in the cucumber department.

I have also harvested a handful of sweet banana peppers and sweet green chili peppers, as well as my first ripe tomatoes of the season.  These plants are also doing quite well, and when everything starts to ripen all at once I will become very busy in the kitchen canning salsa and sauces with the garden bounty.

Canning Peach Slices

When I stopped in at the local farmer's market this week I found that the local farms were carrying some delicious fresh ripe peaches.  I wasn't planning on getting any more than I could eat for the next week, but I came across a flat of peaches that were so large and beautiful that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to save some of this warm summer flavor for the cold evenings of winter so I took it home.

I decided to save enough to eat fresh all week, so I picked out some that could stand to ripen a few more days, then got to work on preparing the rest for canning.  These peaches were the first freestone peaches of the season and that made them ideal for canning.  Free stone just means that the flesh of the peach doesn't stick to the pit very well so they tend to be easier to cut apart for canning.  One by one I blanched and peeled the peaches and then sliced them up into a lemon juice solution to prevent browning.  I decided to hot process this batch of peaches so once I got the syrup solution up to a boil I added peach slices to the syrup to let them warm up for a few minutes before I added them to the jars.  Each jar was topped off with the syrup and then sealed and put back into the water bath canner.

After boiling in the water bath for 35 minutes I let the canner cool down, then removed the jars one by one to cool on the table.  I ended up with seven pints of peach slices to add to my winter stores.  I will probably do another flat of peaches before the summer is over, but right now I am just trying to enjoy them as much as I can while they are still fresh.

The New Arrivals

Just over three weeks ago I lost the friendliest rooster I have ever had.  He was a rarity among roosters in that he would never run from me and always let me pick him up with no fussing, struggling or aggression.  He also liked to follow me around when he was able and I became fond of him in the short time that he lived here.  I was hoping that he would be my main flock rooster for awhile, but there was a tragic accident and he is gone, but I still had hope for his sweet demeanor to live on.  For a couple days after he passed I collected the eggs from the hens he shared a pen with and set them in my incubator.  I started with a total of 9 eggs, only four of which proved to be viable.  Of the four only three ended up hatching.  These guys are currently resting after their long day of coming into the world and will spend the next few weeks learning the ins and outs of being a chicken in the brooder in my back room.

The plan is to handle them a lot and get them used to human contact and so far they seem to be doing well.  As hard as I try to not get attached to these guys, I think I will always love watching baby chicks doing their thing as they grow up.  I am hoping that at least one of them is as sweet as the rooster that sired them so that his good name may live on.