Homegrown/Homemade Strawberry Jam

It's been a long time since we've posted, so a lot has been happening around the garden. Everything is in the ground by now, and we're starting some harvesting while the rest of the plants just focus on growing. For the most part, we've planted the same things as we did last year, but there have been a few changes, especially with the perennials. One of the most exciting of these is that our strawberries, in their second year, are producing fruit!

Last year we planted 25 tiny strawberry plants in one of our garden boxes, which produced a handful of small berries. By now, they're another year older, and they've had a good rainy spring instead of last year's drought. As a result, the plants have really, well, perked up.

These are Tribute plants, an everbearing strawberry. That means they first ripen in the late spring or early summer, then continue to ripen in six week intervals throughout the summer. So far, it's been a wonderful harvest. Every few days we head outside and pick a bowlful (or more) of fresh sweet strawberries. We eat many of these right off the plant, but it's also nice to be able to save some to enjoy later. So when we picked about a gallon of ripe berries yesterday morning, we just had to do something with them. Here they are, one morning's harvest.

As you can see, we've chopped the berries into quarters, in preparation of making one of the our favorite strawberry items: fresh strawberry jam. Really, this is a simple thing to make, and it's a great way to experience the delicious flavor of these berries months after the harvest is over. The only other things you need are sugar, fruit pectin, and some canning jars. First, you mash up the berries a little to soften them up for the jam.

Then you bring the berries up to a boil, along with the pectin, mixed into about 1/4 cup of the sugar. Pectin is a totally natural product; it's the substance in plants that holds the cell walls together. It's extracted from fruit, and is readily available in grocery and hardware stores, near the canning supplies. As you might imagine, a substance that binds plants together is useful for setting up the gel that you expect in a jelly or jam. Some fruits have plenty of pectin within them, but strawberries are a little light so you have to add the packaged stuff. Here it is, coming up to a boil.

Once this has boiled, you stir in another 3 3/4 cups of sugar, return it to a boil, and boil for one full minute. At this point, there are ways to test for gel, but in our case it was quite noticeable while stirring that the jam was thickening. From here, the jam is simply ladled into clean warm canning jars, placed into a water batch canner, and processed for 10 minutes. That's it!

Once the jars have been pulled out and cooled, they're ready to enjoy whenever you want. For us, we have plenty of fresh strawberries to eat first before we want to crack one of these open, so we'll plan to store them for a little while before we dip into them. That's really no problem; in the sealed jars, the jam should stay fresh for at least a year and probably more. Of course, we did do a thorough job scraping our jam pot clean and tasting the little bit that didn't make it into the jars. It was delicious! In some ways, we can't wait til we get to open one of the finished jars.

This was such a fun project for us. We've canned fruit and jam several times before, often with purchased fruit, sometimes with fruit we picked ourselves, and once with fruit from Greg's Dad's trees. But this batch of strawberry jam marks the first time we've grown the fruit ourselves, picked it ourselves, and processed it into jam. This is homegrown, homemade, and home-canned. Having that kind of connection to our food is only going to make it taste that much better!

One final note, which we would be remiss in not mentioning. We frequently consult the Ball Blue Book for recipes and instruction on how to can, but our real reference guide is the website www.pickyourown.org. This site is an amazing one stop shop for finding pick-your-own farms and tons of canning recipes for how to preserve what you pick. If you have any interest in canning, we definitely recommend this site.

The first jam of 2013 is in the books. We'll see how many more we end up making before the growing season is over. Once you start canning, you just want to keep going!

Signs of Spring

We'd almost forgotten what it felt like, but we finally had a nice weekend to get out into the garden! As we've mentioned before, we've gotten a good start on seedlings under the growlight, but we've hardly seen the outdoor garden beds since last fall. So today we headed out back to do a little maintenance and just generally see how things were going. And when we got there, we came upon a few surprises.

That's garlic, popping up through the leaf mulch we put down when we planted last October. We planted 25 garlic bulbs and have spotted 17 sprouts so far. Some of them are already showing a lot of growth, so we'll just have to keep an eye on them until July or so when they'll be ready for harvest.

Next we wandered over to the strawberry bed and cleared off the mulch of straw that allowed them to overwinter. Strawberries can handle a bit of a frost, so even if we get a cold snap they should be okay without the straw. Most of the plants from last year look pretty good, but we've also got some new growth like you can see in the picture. This should be where we get our fruit this summer, so it's encouraging to see it doing well already.

While we were clearing straw, we also removed some from around the rosemary (a futile attempt to keep it alive over the winter). And there, we got some even bigger surprises.

It seems our parsley self-seeded when we left it in the ground at the end of last season.

And so did the oregano...

And apparently the chives! This was kind of an accident, since we simply ran out of time to pull all the plants before the winter arrived. So several boxes still had their crops in them by the late fall, when they went to seed. Sometime this spring, it appears those seeds sprouted, and with no work at all on our part, we have a head start on our herb bed. This is about as natural a gardening process as you can have!

Much less of a surprise was this scene: rhubarb starting to poke up out of the ground. This garden is our first time growing rhubarb, but in our zone it's a notoriously robust and hardy plant. Still, it's always a thrill to see that the roots that lay dormant all winter long survived and are starting to send up new growth.

Similarly for this guy - the very start of an asparagus sprout. Our asparagus is a regular green variety, not one of the purple hybrids, but for some reason it's starting off purple. Our recollection is that it did this last year as well before it eventually turned green, so we're not too worried. Last year we had to let all of our asparagus grow out to ferns undisturbed so it was able to store enough energy to last the winter. This year we should be able to harvest for a few weeks before we let it fern out. That makes seeing the first few tips all the more exciting, knowing they should lead to a harvest.

Now it really feels like the gardening season is starting in earnest! Have you started any plants, or seen any overwintered sprouts? This has to be one of the best times of the year.

A Visit to the Berry Patch

It's June in Iowa, and that means one thing: it's strawberry season! You might remember we planted our own strawberry plants earlier this spring, but they likely won't produce any fruit at all in their first year. But we didn't let that deter us from taking advantage of the season so we did the next best thing.

A local pick-your-own berry farm! Berry Patch Farm is another producer that we first met at the downtown Des Moines Farmers Market, and we liked their produce so much that we decided to drive the 45 minutes to their farm north of Des Moines. It was going to reach 90 degrees by the afternoon, so we got out there right when they opened at 8 AM. Apparently we weren't the only people with that idea...

The friendly farmers directed us to a strawberry field that was ripe this weekend, and gave each of us a row to start picking. They also provided containers, ranging from individual pints up to 10 pound flats. As you might imagine, we opted for the latter.

Now, you can't really see any strawberry plants in that picture of the field. That's because strawberries grow very low to the ground, and some opportunistic weeds are towering above them. To get to the berries, you have to bend, stoop, or outright crawl along the rows. It's also a good idea to wear long pants, and maybe even long sleeves. Even though it's hot, wading through the weeds can be irritating to your skin. But it's worth it when you find a clump of strawberries that looks like this:

These locally grown strawberries are almost nothing like the ones you buy at the grocery store. The skin is ruby red, and the flesh is velvety soft and sweet. The berries were so sweet that the whole field gave off a sugary aroma. We picked a few, then tried a small sample, and then really started picking to get as many of these luscious berries as we could.

We spent about an hour in the field, and these were the (literal) fruits of our labor. We pretty well filled the flats, ending up with 18 pounds of red ripe strawberries. After that work, we were ready to head home and enjoy our harvest. Now, we're always up for a challenge, but 9 pounds apiece is a bit much for even us to eat fresh. But one of the key parts to getting produce in season is finding a way to store it to enjoy year-round.

Strawberries can be made into jams or jellies which would be put up in cans for later. We've done that before, but this time we decided we'd rather freeze them whole. We've lately been enjoying homemade smoothies with other frozen fruits, and these delicious strawberries seem like a good fit for that too. Otherwise, frozen berries can still be used for pies, sauces and many other things.

Freezing strawberries is pretty simple. We cut out the hulls (the top center part of the berry where the stem is attached), rinsed the berries under cool water and patted them dry. Then we stood them all up on a lined cookie sheet without letting any of the berries touch. We put that into our chest freezer for 3-4 hours to get them partially frozen.

We then tossed the berries into ziploc bags for long-term storage. We needed that initial freeze to keep the berries from sticking together in the bags; this way we should be able to pull out a handful at a time to make our smoothies. We'll freeze a little more than half of our haul, and find lots of ways to eat the fresh ones over the next few days. Until we have our own plants, there really is no better way to get fresh produce than going to a pick-your-own farm, and Berry Patch sure is a nice one!

This post has been shared with Simple Lives Thursday.

Planting the Perrenials!

One of our favorite things arrived the other day. Greg came home from work, and there it was, leaning against the porch. A brown paper package, tied up with, well, staples. But close enough! This package had Miller Nurseries printed on the outside, which led to even more excitement, because that meant our perrenials had arrived.

Most of the plants we're growing in our garden are annuals; that is, they grow over the course of one year, produce leaves/fruits/roots/whatever over that time, then go to seed to propagate new plants the following year. With the first frosts of winter, these plants typically die off, relying on the seeds to carry on. Perrenials, on the other hand, can survive winters, and keep producing food from the same plant for many years. Like annuals, many perrenials can also be grown from seed, but this takes time. Many of these plants require several years to mature to a harvestable state, so buying plants already started gives you a major head start.

We unwrapped our package to find a giant tangle of roots, consisting of some of the most popular perrenials you can grow in our climate. We'd ordered some of everything, including strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, and raspberries.

The nursery we ordered from (and many others) made a point to ship our plants at the proper time to plant in our hardiness zone, so once we'd opened the bag, we knew we were ready to get them in the ground. They also shipped the plants with damp roots and some moist packing material but even so, it's still a good idea to soak the roots before planting. We filled up a couple old 5-gallon buckets with water, and submerged the roots for up to an hour to get them ready.

From there, there's really not much to it. If you've got a plant, you basically need to dig a hole, put the plant in the hole, and fill in the hole. Most of ours went into raised beds like we've shown before, ones that had been prepped for these plants. We filled our boxes with a mix of topsoil, coconut coir and compost to create a healthy, fluffy soil mixture. That's especially important with perrenials because this is the only opportunity to work up the soil. Once they start growing, they're staying where they are.

The asparagus crowns were planted the deepest (as recommended by the nursery). Here's how they all looked lined up in a trench in the raised bed.

Up close, they look even cooler. A touch reminiscent of the face-hugger from Alien, no?

The only plants that didn't get the raised bed treatment were the raspberries. Raspberries grow rather tall, so they might shade the garden. Also, they like to send out "runners" - shoots that grow from the existing canes, which leads to a dense berry patch that we didn't want to invade the rest of the garden. We situated the berries just beyond the garden itself. First we had to tear out a long narrow patch of sod where we eventually want our berry hedge to grow.

Then it's back to digging holes and putting plants into them. Raspberries are to be buried an inch or two deeper than they were grown at the nursery.

When you're finished, you end up with a row of twigs sticking out of the ground. Trimming these off to a height of 3-4" above the ground is supposed to help stimulate fresh growth. We'll probably also want to put down some mulch between the canes to help discourage weed growth. Cuz as you can see, we have a lot of them back there.

 And that's all there is to it, in a blog post anyway. In real life, this was a pretty solid days work of digging, placing and watering. But with any luck we'll eventually be rewarded with crops of raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb and asparagus. And now that the hard work's been done, these crops should keep coming back, year after year.