Strawberry Vanilla Jam

It's finally summer.   I scored these berries a couple of weeks ago, fresh from the field.  I bought a whole flat figuring on making jam and eating as many fresh as we wanted.  

I spent an hour hulling and slicing the berries - 2 gallons in all.

K2 requested a few batches of her favorite Strawberry Vanilla Jam.  It's an easy recipe and makes a delicious jam.  I made two big batches

Strawberry Vanilla Jam
www.rurification.com

5 cups sliced strawberries
1 cup water
5 tablespoons low sugar pectin
3 cups sugar

Crush the berries and put them in a big pot with the water and pectin.   Stir to dissolve the pectin.  Bring to a hard rolling boil.  Boil 1 minute.   Add sugar and stir well until dissolved.  Return to hard boil.  Boil hard for 1 minute.  Ladle into jars.

Yield:  3.5 pints

I don't think jam could get much easier than that.  

For more recipes as easy as this one, check out my ebook on the sidebar.  A Simple Jar of Jam: 180+ recipes & variations for jam using low sugar pectin.

Barn Across Wheat Field

A lot of farmers here have been growing winter wheat, especially since the big drought last year that left thousands of acres of corn withered and gray in the fields last summer.   The wheat ripens in June and makes a beautiful foil for the old barns. 

UPDATE 10:15am:   A couple of people have mentioned how this photo reminds them of Christina's World - a painting by Andrew Wyeth.   I admit I'd never heard of it, so I looked it up.   Very interesting painting and story.

Carrots

 After last year's attempt at carrots, I swore I was done growing carrots.

Then over the winter, I read The Winter Harvest Handbook, by Eliot Coleman and realized that carrots are a cool weather veg.  As in COOL weather.  Not summer. 

So I picked up some mixed-color carrot seed from Rural King or Menard's or somewhere like that and sowed a row in the hoop house on Valentine's Day.

And look what I grew!    I harvested early this month and was pleasantly surprised at the size of some of them. 

I noticed that the white ones were tiny and not very tasty - but those purple ones!  Mmmm.  

I'll be planting another row of carrots this fall for overwintering.

Potential

A squash start from a couple of weeks ago.  I love this stage of growth.  It's all about potential.

The Old Queen

Both of the queens we got in our packages last year died.  One was a dud layer and I replaced her with this one.  The other one didn't make it through the winter.   They both came from the deep south.  We won't be doing bees that way again if we can help it. 

Here's a pic of the queen in the Tardis hive - red-ish gold and gorgeous.   This is a local queen; we got her from Roger Graham of Graham's Beeworks in Morgantown, Indiana.  This is the queen that survived the winter. 

This is her laying pattern.  Almost solid all over the deep frame.  Calm bees.  Overwinters well.

I split this hive in May and she threw another great calm queen for the other hive.  

This is what we're looking for in queens.

Early Summer Greens

These are some of the greens I planted on Valentine's Day in the hoop house.  When the weather got warm, we took the plastic off the hoop house and set up that trellis to keep shade on the lettuce.

Worked like a charm.  The lettuce has stayed sweet and been a lot slower to bolt.   We're eating a lot of salads and my goal is to eat it up before it gets bitter.

That's a renegade kale plant in the center.   I need to try making kale chips.  I hear they're delicious.

The square metal things are from old political signs that were abandoned after elections.   I put them in to hold up a row cover, but that didn't really work.  They did work brilliantly as a place to grab when I'm leaning over to weed the bed.   I'll use them that way again next year. 

A New Queen!

At the beginning of May, I split our overwintered hive.   I did an equal split, walkaway - which means I divided the hive in half into two new hives [One frame for this, one frame for that - dealing the frames like cards] The Tardis had the old queen, which means the lang had to make a new one.  

The lang started with 3 frames of brood and a lot of field bees.  I checked on things a couple of weeks later and gave them another frame of brood, just in case.

I checked them again last week and lo, and behold, I found a hive with 4 frames of good brood:  eggs and larvae at all stages.  This means a queen!  And then I found her.  Large and very golden. She's in the center of this pic. 

Bonus:  These bees are very calm.  They only got disturbed when I took this frame out of the hive.  The rest of the time they were very calm. 

She's got a good laying pattern for a new queen and here's hoping they make us a lot of honey.

Bagels

K2 decided to try making some bagels for the fun of it.

She used this recipe here.  It's a two day process, but really easy - so if you want to try it plan on an overnight proofing.

She used regular yeast since this was the first time, but now that the weather's hot and the natural yeast start is happy, and she knows how the dough is supposed to feel, we thought we'd try a batch with natural yeast next.  I'll keep you posted.

This batch was especially good with cream cheese and my strawberry vanilla jam.   Recipe for the jam coming soon!

Barn

This lovely barrel vault barn is on one of the back roads near Tulip, Indiana.  It's not often that you see one so thin and tall.  I think it's charming.

Valerian

Another K2 closeup of one of my favorite herbs.  Valeriana officinalis is a lovely old world herb. I think it smells good, but others do not like it at all.  It is said that folks used to cut it and put it in guests' rooms.   After a day or two it starts to smell  'off'  thus encouraging the guests to end their visit.

Ducklings

Our Saxony ducklings are big enough to really enjoy the water. There are 9 of them and they don't like to be separated, so K2 commandeered the wheelbarrow for a pool.

Worked like a charm.   The ducklings adore it.  

It only takes a couple of minutes before they are soaking.  You can see the water really moving in this last pic. 

After bath time, they spend a while preening and when they're all dry again, they're soft and fluffy.

Adorable.

Creeping Charlie

Aside from grass, Creeping Charlie is the most common ground cover around here.  It's also called ground ivy and gill-over-the-ground. 

I have had a love/hate relationship with this plant for a long, long time.  It grows everywhere.   Everywhere.  Every.  Where.

A lot of people want to get rid of it and if you're one of them, then check out this page for ideas.

Generally, I hand pull it out of places I really don't want it - like in the veg gardens.  I just let it be everywhere else because here's the thing - it's not fussy. It tolerates drought and wet.   It blooms from April till November. During the winter, it turns bronzy and is really quite attractive. 

In this part of Indiana, where flowers other than iris and daylilies require a lot of soil amendment, mulch and TLC, it's nice to have a filler that works so hard for so little.   When people ask what it is, just refer to it by the Latin name, Glechoma hederacea, ("Isn't that Glechoma gorgeous!  Just look at how it drapes over that little wall and fills in there!")  and they'll think you've put it there on purpose. 

Peonies

Peonies like it here.

A lot.

Almost every old farmstead has some of these blooming near the house or garage, marching along in a neat line.

It's so southern Indiana. I love it. 

Our house came with a regiment of these pink and white ones.   Palest pink on the outside, white fluff in the center...










...and pink markings in the very center.

They smell strongly - a bit like roses and iris.

The Terrace Gardens

Our lower flower gardens, including this terraced garden, love this time of the year and quite honestly, May is when they look their best.   Things get a bit wild and crazy the rest of the year.   We have a lot of iris, with bunches of the wild daisies [leucanthemum] that volunteered and stayed, plus a few poppies.  I like the dark red Beauty of Livermoor poppies the best.  There are peonies to the left of this shot.  

Later in the year, there will be a cloud of nigella and a lot of daylilies with some monarda.  The past few hot dry summers almost wiped out my monardas.  We'll see how they do this year.  In late summer we'll get some blue asters and black eyed susans.   Things change a bit every year. 

Click the pic to blow it up for a better look.