Wet Weekend With The Last of the Garden

This last Sunday Paul and I were busy harvesting and putting up produce. Check it out below!

Here is a bit of the garden bounty! The grapes in the basket were a surprise - we didn't even know we had seedless grapes out there! (I put some of them in the dehydrator and am hoping we end up with raisins...)

Here is the last of the Roma tomatoes. We had a bumper crop this year, and I have done a lot of drying....Tiko and I both LOVE dried tomatoes.

Here they are getting put on the drying trays.

12 hours later they are dried!

The final product!

We have some crazy grapevines that have climbed all over the place this year, including up a whole row of apple trees! It was a challenge to harvest these, but look how many we got!

There were more green grapes than purple, and since we wanted to make purple grape jelly, we were a little unsure about what to do with the green ones. In the end we decided to combine them and hope the purple skins stained the whole thing so it would come out nice and dark.

Here is a picture of Paul getting started removing the grapes from the bunches. The Seahawks were on so we stayed entertained.

After they were all removed, we washed them and then cooked them. Then we strained them through cheesecloth until we just had juice.

Then we combined the juice with sugar and pectin, cooking that together; putting it in jars, and using the water-bath canner, canned them all in batches of seven.

Here is the final product - 33 jars of grape jelly! And it is wonderful and very purple, so the addition of the green grapes didn't matter!

I should have taken some pictures of the kitchen while we were actually doing the canning as it was a total disaster area.

So that is what we did last weekend!