Day 142 of 365
Well, not all of the elderberries.
I had hoped to write more about apples, but it’s Thursday. This means I am grading essays all evening. This means I cannot write much tonight. No apples tonight, but I have been thinking about them all day.
On the bright side, by some miracle, not all of my elderberries in the refrigerator went bad in the couple of weeks between picking them and finally having time to do something with them. I have been wanting to make elderberry jelly for years but always ended up making syrup. Of course, the last couple of years, there have been no elderberries. The birds ate all of the berries.
Interestingly, this year, I discovered it’s the Robins eating all the berries. I did not know Robins would eat berries, but that’s who was doing it. This year, I managed to make those little birds share with me, but with everything going on, I couldn’t manage to get to those berries. It takes forever and a day to get those tiny berries off to the branches, but it seemed tragic to take the berries from the birds and not do something with them.
Anyway, some of the berries had dried out in the refrigerator, well, about half of them, but I spent several hours getting the rest of the berries off of the branches and researching a good recipe for elderberry jelly. And I did it! And the jelly is beautiful. Because we usually take elderberry syrup for colds and such, the jelly reminds me of medicine, but Ron thinks it’s fantastic. Elderberries are so great for you that I don’t mind the little bit of bitter in the aftertaste.
The only bad thing is that I worked all day and just got these two tiny jars of jelly, plus about a half of one more. Hopefully, now that I know how to make the jelly, I will do better next year. Hopefully, I can make the Robins share again.
Farmer-ish 