It looks like this MIGHT not be such a hectic week, but one never knows.
Last Monday (I think it was) I started out in a jam! I’m getting ready for the Farmer’s Market which will start this Friday, so I harvested some rhubarb and checked the freezers for frozen fruit & berries.
We grow some very red rhubarb and of course I don’t add any colouring to the preserves. Here are the first batches of rhubarb jelly and jam. After that I made a large batch of strawberry-rhubarb jam sweetened with honey and set with citrus pectin from the health food store.
In one of the freezers I had several pounds of yellow plums which I had pitted and put away last summer. They looked lovely and bright (fresh looking) while frozen, but when I thawed them, they looked unappetizing and discoloured. I knew that they were still wonderful food, so I mixed them with 2 pounds of blueberries, for Plum Blueberry Jam, set with natural pectins and with reduced sugar. The jam tastes heavenly, and is an appealing rosy violet.
In a freezer I also rediscovered some hot peppers, red and yellow, and some jalapenos. I made pepper jellies out of those and white grape juice (with sugar and Certo); these are served with cream cheese and crackers as hors d’oeuvres or as a glaze on ham, for instance. These are quite popular at the Markets and among our friends.
Our beloved iMac computer is on its way back from Edmonton! I’m glad to have this Dell laptop, but feel constrained when it comes to handling pictures, or really doing anything very creative. I’m sure some of the other Farmer’s Market participants are wondering when I’ll finally get around to putting up little posters for this “institution”… I was about to make these when the iMac needed fixing. Heaven forbid I should have to create something by “hand”… my printing sucks and I’d have to paste some pictures the old fashioned way, and I’ve been putting that off. I also need the iMac to make little labels for my preserves, to adjust photos from the camera, and to make little picture cards for my garden business and the Market. I bought a laminator so that I can make posters and tags that will withstand the watering in the gardens and greenhouse.
In our area we have a huge outbreak of mosquitoes! It is miserable to work outside, and so I’m not getting the weeding done that I should be. There are swarms of the nasty things. I’ve been chastising myself because I stored the transformer for my “mosquito eater” somewhere safe and now can’t find it. I bought a new propane tank just to dedicate to that machine, and I keep hoping that the transformer will turn up, or that I will magically remember where I put the damned thing. I’m frustrated and hard on myself when I do this sort of thing.
I had lots of dogs to groom last week, and not too many on the appointment book for this week. That, of course, could change. On Saturday I had a little dog who is only groomed once per year, named “Buddy”. I had thought that Buddy was a boy dog, and of course it took just a few minutes to discover that this is a “she”. The owners had warned that I would need a muzzle; I gave the old girl the benefit of the doubt and didn’t put one on, and she didn’t even TRY to bite me. In the case of little Buddy, I tried to convince the owners to have her groomed more often (without pointing out that a dog dislikes being matted with urine and feces). Her owner replied, “Oh, she don’t (sic) come inside the house at all and we don’t want her to be cold later in the year.”. Poor wee thing.
This was the sky one evening, photo taken from our front door:
That’s all for now, gang. Take care everyone, and thank you for checking my weblog. ~ Ann
