Since then, I have made it my mission to eat as many of these berries and I humanly can before my tongue turns to acid mush...
You see, for me when something is really expensive to eat, I tend to enjoy it less. Raspberries in the store are usually so expensive that I just can't bring myself to enjoy them much. I'm a cheap wine kinda girl...but when they come out of the ground, my ground, well I have found my favorite food for the week.
I did not intend to grow raspberries. It started last year when I was doing a plant swap. Someone in the Seattle Farm Coop traded me 4 Dahlia tubers and 7 raspberry starts for 8 different tomato plants I grew from seed. At the time, I was not particularly interested in either the Dahlias or the Raspberries, but I was excited about finding my tomatoes a new home, so I took them home. (I will write about my Dahlia fascination in a different post.... if I ever get there.)
So the 7 starts with in a year became..... well a whole bunch of starts....
It turns out that Raspberries spread very quickly, and are not shy about invading the neighboring garlic patch. (bastards!) The lucky thing about this is that our neighbors have goats, and goats love raspberry plants, so every time I hack the plants back, I put them in a bucket and become instant hero with the goats.
Here is that same patch, but where there was corn growing, now there are potatoes, and we put in a fence...
As I was studying Raspberry plants, I learned that the berries come on canes that are 2 years old. So, my original 7 plants, and the babies that they had last summer are producing fruit this year. The canes ( raspberry babies) that came up this year will make fruit next summer. The canes that made fruit this year will have to be pruned away after berry season is over.
Here is the question I had, and will answer for you:
How the hell do you know which cane is from last year and which one is from this year? How will I know that I am not pruning the wrong cane??
I tell you, it is easy... Last year's plants have older wiser leaves, and I will be able to see where the berries were. This cane is from last year..It has made friends with the rhubarb. It's veins are deep and it has berries.. well not for long. When I am cleaning up the summer garden, I will clip it at the bottom, and feed it to the goats.
This cane is from this year. It looks like a raspberry teenager to me, how about you?
So, Last night Jessica allowed me to pick berries from her raspberry canes... I was going to make Jam, and I don't quite have enough berries to make the Jam I wanted to. I believe I have June bearing and she has everbering plants, so the berries were different.
She complains that her berries are not sweet enough, but I must say I think that they taste like kick you in the teeth I am definitely a raspberry berries. Jessica is the owner of South Seattle Booty camp, so secretly, I think her berries match her personality, in a good way I mean. Mine are smaller, sweeter and more Oh... there you are. berries. I did not realise that there could be such a difference, but there definitely is.
When I was done with both of our patches, I had roughly 2 quarts. I set some aside to eat and made jam.
Now here is the thing about Jam...sometimes what you are actually making is syrup...you just don't know it yet.
This is my third year canning and here is my recipe for Jam:
You put some fruit in the pot.
You add roughly the same amount of sugar as fruit into that same pot.
Heat it all up until you are happy with your concoction...
and then you put it in jars you sterilized (boiled for 10 minutes)
Put a lid on them and boil those jars for a long time to make sure all the bad shit is dead.
As long as the lids pop, it's all good... if they don't pop, put jam in fridge and eat it soon.
That is how I made this jam, but I was not really prepared to boil it until it was thick because I did not want to boil the life out of the fruit, and I also was not really prepared to add Pectin. ( Pectin is a naturally occurring thing in apples that you can buy in processed form, and it thickens jam up.) So I wound up with a Syrup.
And here is why I am happy with this decision...
I have been reading "Wild Fermentation," you see, and I have been taking some of what Katz has to say to heart. When talking about Sauercraut, he states the following: Some people preserve Kraut by canning and heat processing it. This can be done, but so much of the power of Sauerkraut is its aliveness that I wonder: why kill it? Like a song that you get stuck in your head, I can't get this idea out of mine...
-blessed be.....
m
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