Yes, they all sealed (according to Tom). You will notice that there is a lot of syrup at the bottom and the fruit is at the top. I filled the jars like it said. Then it said “cover with syrup. Failure to cover fruit completely could cause failure to seal.” Hmmm. Sounds like a lot of failure. So I took out fruit thinking that I could cover the rest. Um, nope. I just ended up with less and less floating fruit. Finally I quit, and this is the result! Yum.
Yup, I canned. And froze. It took about 3 1/2 hours, but I got 7 quart jars canned and another 3 in the freezer, vac-packed. Pretty impressive right? Now if the seals would just “ping” for me. Haven’t heard any and that is worrisome.
Yup. Three whole blueberries. Each one from a different bush. Mine was kind of dry and bitter. Tom said his was good. Ursula said hers was delicious. Now we wait until next year. Maybe the other 3 bushes will give us something too.
This is the Square foot garden which is now ALL planted! The back row has two grape vines and a clematis. The front row is marigolds, behind that are 4 of the broccoli from the “broccoli experiment”, they are doing better than the ones with the blueberries, but not nearly as well as the ones in the SWC’s. Other than the chive you see, which I just divided into 4 other clumps, the blank spaces are filled with cutting flower. To the right is the potato bag row (an upcoming post on this will explain!)
On the far right is a blackberry bush in a cut up barrel. Beyond that is a lasagna bed with 5 blackberry and five raspberry canes, some lillies, and a cabbage. To the left is a rain barrel and a yet unplanted lasagna bed.
These SWC are made from one, two and three liter bottles. I had nine plants and decided to see how they would grow in containers. My goal is to see how much nutrition I can get from as little space and effort as possible. The one on the left is by far the biggest, the ones in the ground are about half this size. Will they catch up? Who will win? We shall see…
(PS the gray thing on the right is a solar light. We wanted something that could charge by day and be easily portable into the house in case of power failure. These are great! The base is granite, and the light is very bright. More than enough to read or play games by. We’ll see how durable they are.)
Bo was over the other night and bravely offered to follow the Dog Lady’s advice. Daisy was all offended that he was back. She clearly thought that she had scared him away for good. (The dog lady thinks that I am letting my nervousness spill over onto the scene and that Daisy picks up my vibes).
So I sucked up my courage and Bo stood his ground, Daisy went ballistic, Bo stuck out his fist and said “hi, Daisy” in his best I-am-not-scared-but-I-really-am voice. And she immediately stopped barking, sniffed, wagged har tail and moved on to something else more interesting. He wasn’t here long, so I can’t say we are out of the woods yet, but this is way more encouraging!
We want to be like these guys www.pathtofreedom.com . They have taken a 1/5 of an acre in Southern CA and turned it into a very “green” paradise. The are closing in on 10k pounds of food produced on their property per year.
Even though we moved into our current home with the idea that we would outgrow it and move eventually, it has now dawned on us that we could do so much more with the land and house. To that end, we are planting fruit trees, a more diverse crop of things that we will actually eat, and want to learn stuff like cheesemaking.
Are we going “Little House on the Prairie?” Maybe. Tom wants chickens too. We’ll see on that. It just makes sense to grow as much as we can, store as much as we can, etc. We will reduce the mileage to our door (and tummies). I am looking into worms. Yes, worms. It seems that they eat garbage and provide great fertilizer.
We have so many great ideas, I hope we can pull some of this off and the weather cooperates.
