After the superb elderberry harvest and juicing last Tuesday… No, not that last Tuesday. The last Tuesday before that last Tuesday… We had a whole bunch of elderberry juice, and nowhere to put it.
But first, dark and early Wednesday morning (Aug 12) planted out another tray of cabbages.
They each have their own cozy little home surrounded by thick hay mulch. Planted another round of seeds, the final round for the year. Sunlight is getting too short for us to have reliable heads on them before winter comes. Any cabbage we plant from here on out will be meant to overwinter and be harvested in the spring.
Getting back home, Mommy and Ellie boiled up the elderberry juice using the jelly recipe from an older version of the Ball book.
There was a good deal of foam that had to be scraped off, but that is as good as candy for the kids (and Daddy) and they ate it all up. Mommy boiled the syrup until it started to jell on the spoon, at about 217 degrees. They she put in all in jars and water-bathed it.
Meanwhile, we had gotten some new cabbages from Dude, so Daddy made some sauerkraut.
This time we put some dill, mustard seed and garlic in one batch, and dill and carraway in another batch.
Nine half-pint jars of elderberry… sauce? Syrup?
Not sure, the stuff would not jell.
Two quarts of sauerkraut and a quart of sauer ruben sticks, set to ferment on the countertop.
In the meanwhile, we chopped up the crabapples we harvest yesterday, along with some rhubarb leftover from our last blackberry rhubarb crumble, and boiled that for about 30 minutes.
Then hung it up to drip. After an hour of dripping it was just shy of a full four cups, so I may have given it a little squishy-squish, just to get it up to a full 4 cups. We are told you shouldn’t do that because it will make your jelly cloudy, but… I don’t care.
This is added sugar, pectin, and lemon and boiled to 220 degrees.
Documented, 220 degrees.
This yielded 5 half pint jars of crabapple-rhubarb jelly. But that elderberry jelly still wasn’t jelling. We’ll have to do something about that, some other time.
Little Farm in the Big City 