Time to Make the Chokecherry Syrup.

    I have a beautiful friend named Amy Lesser.  She is an herbalist, a shepherdess, a farmer, a mother, and well, just a really sweet person.  If you were stuck in the wilderness and told to survive, well, you'd want her along.  She would gather wild food for you, make you soap, and probably tell you stories of your ancestors that warmed your heart (I'm guessing on that last part, but I bet she would).  When Amy says it's going to rain, it rains.  When she says fall weather is on the way, it comes.  And when she says that it's time to start nesting and gathering...you better just do it.

   And so we did!  It's funny how we wait and wait for that first tomato to ripen, like its gold, and then before we know it the entire dining room table is covered in ripe fruit, begging to be canned and processed.  Coco Rosie went to my mom and dad's for the weekend, so Joe and I got down to business and started putting up food.  Between the goodies from our garden, and fillers from Family Circle Centennial Farm down the road, there was just produce everywhere.  We canned tomatoes, made dilly beans, and threw on a big pot of veggie beef stew while we worked.  We made blueberry jam and blueberry syrup (bad year for Michigan maple syrup, but blueberries abound!).  There are peaches waiting to be processed, and more zucchini, squash, peppers, and eggplant than I can think about right now.  And then there were the chokecherries...

   We have a bunch of trees out back that we've always called "ornamental cherries."  We were chatting back there with neighbor Al this week, and he called them chokecherries...then he told sweet stories of fishing in the back woods of Canada as a young boy, and helping all of the older ladies make the chokecherry syrup.  Sold.  I live for stories like that.  If some old Canadian wilderness women can make chokecherry syrup, then so can I.

    The tiny berries have an intense tart cherry flavor with a big pit in the middle.  I stewed them down and mashed out the juice.  I make fruit or other simple syrups all the time (ok, mainly for cocktails or coffee, but I make them none the less).  I make blackberry syrup for gin drinks, ginger syrup for Pimms, gingerbread syrup for coffee in the dead of winter...etc.  So, I followed suit and added some sugar and simmered down the chokecherry juice.  I poured it into a jar...and I'll be damned if it didn't set up like the best cherry jam you've ever had!!  Not syrup, but Success!

The chokecherry syrup.  or jam.  or whatever....it's good though!

Harvest Thursday night...

Rain harvest Friday night...

By Saturday we were just screwed (in a good way).

First batch of blueberry jam. The berries are so concentrated with sugar due to the drought this year, that we used less than a cup of sugar for this whole batch..and it set up just perfectly!

This beauty is from Emily and Nigel's crop...gigantic luscious heirloom!

I canned in some of these huge 3 quart jars which will be nice to pull out for soups and chili!

I could not stop taking pictures of gorgeous heirloom tomatoes in jars.  Pure beauty.

Dilly Beans!  I'm not much of a pickler, but we had beans, and we had dill...so there you have it.

An after-canning snack with my honey and the chickens.  They liked dad's cheese-it's more than mom's pretzels.  Fo'Sho'.

The ducks know that there are treats being handed out...just waiting in the wings for their turn.

The Shiekh.  My beautiful rooster.

Lolita, my oldest kitty who is never around for pictures!

Wrapping up canning weekend with a little Sex (the bubbly that is....get your minds out of the gutter people!).  Stay tuned for Saturday morning peach picking pics!   xoxo, e.