Drive-by post, that has suddenly grown to include more photos than planned

It's been a weird summer, with a long, cold June followed by some intensely hot days in July and August but, somehow, it's never felt properly like summer. The garden seems to share my ambivalence with the harvest, as of August 27, being pretty light. These aren't the first beans, cucumbers, or tomatoes I've picked, but it's not exactly like we've been overwhelmed by abundance either.

Plum positioned in such a way as to hide the bite either Squirrelicus or Ratticus has taken out of it

Though, on reflection, it has been a phenomenally good year for bees, who have been very happy with the California poppies that have been allowed to range all over the beds intended for vegetables, 

  and there has been clear evidence of leafcutters gathering their cocoon supplies from the neighboring roses. So I guess I just need to shift my perspective a bit. I'll look to that.

Leafcutter house with new residents moving in daily

Note the half circles clipped from the rose leaves
by leafcutters. (And also the flower from the gardenia
we've had for years that is blooming
for the first time ever.)

 

 

We've also been working on this sweet little corner of the backyard this summer:

Apricot Jam, 2022 edition

 

About step 4, I think: second half of apricots added to pots.
(Pay no attention to that finger in the corner of the shot.)

  I confess that I'm writing this post mostly because it was so very helpful to find my plainly titled 2015 post about making apricot preserves a few hours ago; that post mentioned--and pictured--the old envelope on which the apricot preserves recipe lives which I'd forgotten about entirely so when the lab book in which we record some notes about jamming from various years contained some details on quantities but nothing else, I was at a loss as to the actual recipe. But a few minutes on blah de blah and I was reminded of the envelope and all was well.

 Of course, in 2015 we got started at about 8:00 a.m. and it was pushing noon by the time we had our fruit, jars, and cook pots gathered together today. Scott noted that it was 73 degrees F in the shade by then too. It would have been death to attempt to make preserves last weekend when we actually bought the fruit, but after the earlier heatwave, standing over pots of boiling, spitting apricot in an 80-degree kitchen wasn't bad at all. (This year's production run was particularly lively; I don't think I've had it spit onto my feet before. Ow.)

I can't believe that for years we did this without a funnel.

 I've been doing my best to keep the fruit in decent condition by storing it in a cooler in the basement, but even the most assiduous changing out of cold packs could only do so much; some of the fruit had turned pretty spotty and some of it had downright molded. (There's a reason there are no photos of the unprocessed fruit.) Overall, though, it worked out okay and we had a bit more than ten pounds of pitted fruit, with a dozen or so still viable-for-snacking apricots left over. 

I wish I'd snapped a photo after Scott divided the juice into beakers but, sadly, I did not.

 The real issue was the fruit itself. Perfection apricots are just not perfect for making preserves; the flavor is definitely on the meh end of the scale. But it's what we could get at the market and it's what we had today so, bravely, we persevered. And we went to our usual solution: lemon! The recipe always includes lemon juice but this year we added lemon zest as well and the results, I declare, are pretty damned fine. Oh, it's not our most flavorful batch ever, but it's darned pretty in the jars and I'm sure we'll be pleased to have it come the dark days of winter.

 For posterity, total time was about 3.5 hours which includes everything from cleaning, spot-peeling, and stoning the fruit before weighing to removing the jars from their post-canning water bath and getting them ready for their close-up. We also did a cold-plate test this year, since the fruit had mostly cooked down. (Say, I should get that third plate out of the freezer.)

This year's production run yielded 16 full-size jars so we'll have extra!