Thursday, August 1, 2013

Raspberry season begins

The raspberries are now ripe and we spent the day picking and jamming. While we have a small patch (and growing) here, we usually go out to Roy's Raspberries on the west side of town to get a big haul for the winter.


We had a lovely morning for it. It started a bit cool and then the sun really came up.


Jess went from a light jacket on her arms to a jacket on her head to keep the sun off over the course of about 90 minutes. We managed about 12 litres before we decided to call it (and ran out of pails!).


The berries were enormous. And, while resting my back and knees, it struck me that the view was also wonderful. Below we're looking west from the east fields. We were by no means all the way to the eastern boundary and the field extends a long way to the south (left in the photo). There are also southern fields and western fields (those were still in bloom after a beating last year in a hail storm).


We then came home and made 14 jars of raspberry jam (happy to be sitting down now!). Below you can see the first batch done and the second batch in the water bath. There are still plenty of berries so I'll try some raspberry-saskatoon jam tomorrow and perhaps a small batch of cranberry-raspberry jam from a Christmas cookbook I was reading last week (should be tart!). Tonight is raspberries and ice cream.


The rest of the garden is coming right along. We made a vat of zucchini salsa early in the week (very tasty) as well as soup. The carrots are doing very well and I wish I had planted more.

2 comments:

  1. My all time favourite is raspberries with soft ice cream.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh yes, very nice! Made some raspberry-saskatoon jam tonight--a more complex flavour than straight raspberry jam. Tomorrow I'll use some frozen cranberries to do some more jamming. I'll be glad to move onto cherries and apples though!

    ReplyDelete