Still not dead

Since our trip, Mrs. True has been recently planning the curriculum that the Truelets will be learning this year in our homeschool, so we are not all that active in our homesteading endeavors.

We did can a bunch of peaches (we got some at a local farmers market for $0.83 a lb, so it seemed like a good idea to can some of them), and we have not had to buy any veggies (with all of the stuff our garden is producing). The kids are getting a little sick of squash, but I have been enjoying all of the weird hybrids that we have made.

We have also been working a lot more on Mrs. True's motorized bike. The problem with the chain falling off at high speeds has not yet been fixed (it seems to be a really tough one), but I did get a new tool on Friday in the mail, so hopefully I can get the chain properly tensioned and that should help it. When we have a working solution I will post it with more pictures so that everyone can benefit.

Chokecherries

On Friday the entire True family picked a bunch of choke-cherries. They are a plentiful source of sour fruit to those interested in them. We plan on making them into jelly.

Choke cherries (at least the ones that we found) grow on small trees which can be easily bent over to the ground, so the first step in picking them was to grab the trunk and bend it over so that the Truelets could pluck all of the berries off of the stems.

The berries grow in bunches sort of like grapes, and they are hardy enough that you can just pinch the stem at the top of the bunch and slide your fingers down the bunch to pop them off (with your other hand under the bunch to catch the falling cherries).

They are super sour, and also sort of make your mouth taste hairy if you eat them when they are not all the way ripe (though I have read that cooking them removes a lot of the sour hairiness). They seem to become black when they are fully ripe (though your local choke cherries may vary from this).

At the same time as we were picking the choke-cherries, we also found some baneberries (which are poisonous), so we didn't pick those ones

We are following a recipe the we found here to make our jelly. We haven't done more than extract the juice since we were busy yesterday, but since we ended up with a little over 2 quarts of juice we are probably going to end up making a 2.5x batch.

We might end up changing the recipe a bit since a lot of people seem to like adding lemon juice or almond extract to the juice prior to making jelly out of it. If we do, we will post the new recipe, but since we don't tend to carry almond extract we might leave it out.

We know of some other chokecherry bushes, so our next foray into picking and eating chokecherries might be making flour out of them. This is, of course assuming that I can convince myself that the cooking process destroys the cyanide in the cherry's pit.