After watching our chokecherries hanging on their trees every single day and having enough vertigo to not want to go leaning out of the solar powered golf cart to pick them, I’ve been pretty frustrated. (I can’t stand in one place for very long as long ago, I broke my back and a few years ago, both Will and I fell off our storage barn’s roof, both ending up with two compressed vertebrae and, I’m sure, arthritis.)
The vertigo seems to be gone now so today’s the day! Those chokecherries are so fat and bunches just weighing down the branches like grapes. So far, I’ve picked an ice cream bucket full and when I get done here, I’m going back out to pick another bucket. As I have a lot of chokecherry jelly, jam, and juice canned up already, I’m going to add sliced jalapeños to the juice while it boils to make our favorite, Bronco Cherry jelly. It is definitely cherry with just a little kick of hot peppers. So good! Thank God I have the Mehu Liisa friends got me at one of our seminars (thanks Pyro!), which is a steam juicer. I get five times more juice from them than just using a jelly bag like I used to do.
It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so I’ll pick all I can today and make my jelly tomorrow. I can’t wait!
Our gardens are really kicking off. Yesterday I picked some tomatoes to seed out and chopped up what was left afterwards. Then we had them on super-nachos last night. I poured chili over the corn chips, then added nacho cheese, fresh tomato, and sour cream. Pretty darned good! I’ll go out to the Wolf Garden and pick a few more, so we have enough seeded tomatoes to put on a pizza tonight. That’s a win-win situation for sure! And I want to pick some jalapeños for that Bronco Cherry jelly too. No sense in getting wet tomorrow. Thank God for the cooler temperatures and for the rain! I hope all of you experiencing heat and drought get some relief soon.
— Jackie
