I am definitely a country girl that loves to garden, quilt, preserve, hunt, and read. I love my family more than anything in the world. I live with my husband of fifty years. We have a son, daughter, granddaughter and grandson. We live on a 500+ acre farm in Virginia with about 75 cows & bulls, thirty chickens, and three dogs.
These two trees are red plums and they’ve tried so hard to bloom and keep getting bit back by frost.
All of the peach and cherry trees have budded and killed. Fruit from them this summer will be a miracle.
We have three pear trees fully budded and should have been killed by our 9* and 19* temps Sunday and Monday. We’ll see!!
What’s really weird is the apple orchards, most trees are just started budding and one crabapple in the orchard beside the house is in full bloom and leafing. It’s always the first to come out. The early blooms are great for the honeybees on these unusually warm days in March.
Then this week one of the peach trees rebloomed but I think next weekend, end of the month, cold temperatures are coming back.
Peach tree bloom in March.
Guess we’ll just wait and see what Mother Nature provides!!
As I was cleaning out some ice buildup in our old chest freezer, I found this bag taking up way too much space.
It was full of blackberries, raspberries and cherries that I’ve frozen the last two years. It was mostly full of black raspberries, so I made a decision to make jelly.
First, I let the berries thaw and all of the juice went into this pot with a package of Sure Jell.
Actually, it took five cups of the juice, five cups of sugar and one package of Sure Jell. The Sure Jell was stirred/dissolved into the juice, pot put on the stove on high heat to come to a boil. The all of the sugar was poured into the boiling mixture, stirred and brought to a hard boil for one minute. Then it was poured into 1/2-pint glass jars and lids and rings put on the jars. My pressure canner was adjusted to 10 pounds of pressure, nine jars added to the canner, lid put on and tightened. We wait for the pressure to be acquired and then process for 10 minutes.
Results: After three batches we had 27 of these beautiful jars of raspberry jelly.
After adding these to the cellar, we won’t need any more jelly for the next ten years!!!
Well, maybe some peach preserves and some more apple butter!!!
I had four packages of cherries in the bag which were precisely measured and frozen for cherry pies. There were about 20 bags of blackberries and most of them were fed to the chickens for a treat. I asked hubby not to bring anymore to the house this summer of any berries and he said what he picked would be sold to anyone that wanted to pay for them. Sounds like a plan to me and he loves picking berries and cherries.
Living the Country Life My Way 