Seeds to Shelves

In the previous picture with the strawberry jam you will also see jars of blackberry jam. I was walking our dog around the property and spotted wild blackberries growing. We also noticed right next to the garden along the fence line that there were more and they had tons of berries. So excited! they just showed up out of nowhere. I guess that blackberries can grow kind of wild like weeds. My guess is that birds ate them somewhere and then they were "deposited" onto our fence line property! Either way we were pretty excited. You can pick a pretty good handful or small bowl each day. Wash them ( wild blackberries have little black beetle type bugs on them), freeze them, and make jam later when you have enough for a full batch. I wish I had taken a picture of them in bloom. They are pretty overgrown right now as the berries are finished.  But, there is jam to remind us.

We also have a blackberry bush in the front yard given to BDWoo by Danielle on father's day one year. It really didn't produce much fruit but we didn't really tend to it very well either.  cut it down to about 8 inches from the ground in spring and it took off! It is a thornless variety and the berries are unbelievably HUGE. And delicious! Those are the berries that rarely made it into the house. Anyone who came by that knew they were there grabbed them and ate them straight from the bush, myself included. I am hoping to propagate this plant and fingers crossed it will do well and produce even more berries. We thought about moving it to the back yard but thought we might as well leave it where it seems to be thriving.

Crazy, right?

We also planted blueberry bushes this year. Two plants of 2 different kinds. They need to have another variety to help them grow bigger and produce more fruit.  We were pretty excited to see berry buds on all of them pretty quickly and even got netting to cover them so the birds didn't eat them. But then I read that you should remove the fruit early and let them grow for a couple of years. The energy goes to the bush, not the fruit. So...sadly no blue berries this year. Oh well. Hopefully the bushes will grow quickly and we will be rewarded for waiting! There is always so much to learn with each plant. You have to do a lot of research to get it right unless you are lucky, which I am not.

Blueberry bushes from back and side views of the garden. I will be planting hyacinth bulbs in the beds with them and they will bloom n the spring here.  Upon research, I learned that they are companions!

Aylah's pumpkins made their way and grew nicely along the blueberry bed fence too!

We also have a lot of walnut trees in our yard and some we get an abundance of them in the fall. I have collected, peeled, rinsed, dried and shelled walnuts before. It is quite a job. Some things are worth the time to do and I have decided this is not worth it to me so I don't do it anymore. 

They trip me, ruin the lawn mower, my dog chews on them, and are just a nuisance.  If you have time and energy, let me know. They are free lol.  You can't even use the leaves as mulch in your garden because they are toxic there.  One of the trees was a great source

of shade, but it was toooo big. Probably 60 to 70 feet tall. It also dropped tons of leaves into the pool. Nightmare in the fall getting ready to close it up. So, we finally had someone take it down. BDWoo has spent a good part of the summer trying to do the cleanup, which was part of the price negotiation. See the pool on the lower right? Guess which is the walnut tree?

       
                                               Um, WAS the walnut tree........

Like I said before, I am a bit of a scavenger. Brad brought peaches from his yard, so I canned them.

Then he brought white peaches and grapes from our mutual nephew's house. So I made peach jam.

And grape jam. A tiny batch.

I also made something new to me that I found on my canning fb group. It is called monkey butter. It is simply dee-lish. It is a jam made with bananas and pineapples and other ingredients. Yummy on toast or breads. You can find the recipe on pinterest. It is not approved for safe canning though so make some and eat it fresh and store the rest in the freezer.