We had a 'sunny interval' today so I rushed out to plant my F2 peas. I got 3 rows in with mesh for them to climb. I have labels ready for them - each individual pea will be numbered - so that if (WHEN) I find a delicious and/or unusual pea I want to proceed with I shall know which to leave pods on for drying. This isn't worth doing until they are a bit higher up the frame but I'll tie the label to each pea stem. The F1 hybrid was rather a good pea and we ate most of them! I can't wait to see what comes out of this. 
Yesterday I took several packs of berries from the freezer. Most were blackberries (brambles) but some were Hildaberries - a hybrid berry - from the allotment. I thawed them, stewed them up with a little water and let them drip overnight in a jelly bag. Last autumn, the freezer was so packed with goodies that I couldn't fit in all the rosy little crab apples a friend gave me, so I cooked them up and dripped them for jelly - which never got made.
This morning I took out the frozen crab apple juice and added it to the bramble juice. The total made 2 pints. I added 2 lb of sugar to this and heated it gently till the sugar had dissolved. Then I boiled it till I got a set and bottled it up. It's made about 4 lb altogether. A very satisfying morning.After lunch I filled my barrow again with the new chicken, chips and veg waste compost - really good stuff - and took it to the allotment. I came back for a second load and for the second time in a few days, it started to rain on me. This time it turned to sleet. I can take a hint!
11 comments:
What a productive day! The jelly looks fantastic. Are those decomposable meshes for the peas? I'm green with envy.
I glanced over the whole post before I settled to read it properly and saw "chicken and chips". I was very confused - always think of you as a veggie!
Am hugely impressed with your numbering of individual pea plants.
Also impressed with the jars of jelly - seems to make more sense for longterm preservation of the bounty to use a method that doesn't require constant electricity, something I will have to get my head round in the future because Himself says two freeezers is already enough ...
The mesh is thick plastic Stef. I've had it for 4 years now. Very useful and tough. I always found the thin stuff sold as pea and bean mesh so difficult to extract the plants from at the end of the season.
Bilbo, explanation of chicken and chips! The chickens are housed on horse bedding called Easibed which is finely chopped wood chippings. The cleanings from the house together with the pickings-up from the run get put in the compost bin. I've heard of comeone selling a product called Chicken and Chips which is composted wood-chip bedding and chicken poo. I like the name - even though mine aso contains veg peelings.
Giggle - I realised it was chicken poo and wood chips but the descrption did make me smile.
What are the parents of you pea cross? I keep collecting more varieties, but haven't had a possible cross jump out at me yet.
The pollen parent was Lancashire Lad, purple flowered and purple podded. The 'mum' was Oregon Sugar Pod - white flowered and green podded. I decided to cross them in that direction because seed saved from a white flowered parent that grew out with purple flowers would be a definte cross. One or two peas grew last year from this batch that had white flowers. They were Oregon Sugar Pods because I had tried to do the cross when the flower was so far advanced that it had already self pollinated. You can cross peas in either direction of course, but as purple tend to be dominant, I knew I'd never tell which were true crosses! The hope is for a coloured sugar pod.
I also intend to cross Goldensweet with Ezetha's. Similar outcome hoped for!
It will be interesting to see how your pea experiment unfolds.
The jelly making sounds like a pleasant way to put odds and ends of fruits and juices to work. We had a low berry production in 2009, so I am really not lucky enough to have any surpluses in the freezer to work with. Hopefully, whatever took out the berry production on my evergreen huckleberries in 2009 will not repeat itself in 2010. I really want to do at least one batch of huckleberry jelly this year.
Yum, B&A Jelly, that's a firm family favourite in our family!
So that's what unfrozen ground looks like.. :-) We have a bunch of berries in the freeze, maybe I should make some preserves too.
Okay, but do you then have to tease the peas out from the mesh to compost? That's why I haven't gone sturdy mesh, but the peas are going crazy, and what I'm doing isn't working well for us. . .
Yes you do, but I find they pull out ok from this stuff. If you leave the vines on till they dry, which I do when I'm saving seed, they come away pretty well. It's the thin mesh I find particularly annoying because it gives when you pull the plants.
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