Back to Blogging - Harvest

Some of the jars of fruit.  From left, red plums, nectarines and peaches.

Fruits of My Labour

I spent the summer in France, where I did not knit, crochet, sew, garden or blog.  The first three because I just was not in the mood to do these creative things, probably because I was tired after all the exertions of the winter and spring. And even though I took several projects with me, I could not be enticed to get them out of their bags. The last because it was slightly difficult to do.  In order to blog, I had to take my laptop to a nearby town in the afternoon, when the IT shop was open.  I am a morning person and by late afternoon, I am thinking of having a nice drink, a few nibbles and then an evening meal. I do not want to be in the car on my way to doing a purposeful activity.  To be honest, there are so many lovely things to do in France, like visit beautiful towns and eat lovely meals that doing something purposeful just doesn't appeal.

A box of red plums from the market.

However, I did do lots of canning. I canned 14 jars of fruit.  These will keep us going on dreary winter days when we need a taste of cheery summer fruit. I canned peaches, nectarines and red plums.  I even made the canning easier by a taking a few short cuts.  We will see whether these were successful when we open the jars.  For example, I did not stone the plums.  They were too small and too juicy.  I did not peel the peaches.  I have always done that in the past, but it is so time consuming that I decided to leave that step out this time.  I did, however, sterilise the jars and process them with the hot bath method.  And this year, I tried to get the fruit right up to the top so there were no air gaps at the top to turn the fruit dark. 

We picked apples in France - a few from our very young trees - and at home where they clearly liked the wet summer followed by dry weather.

I will freeze some, make sauce with some and use some in crumbles (mixed with other fruit) and cobblers.

They will make excellent sauce, cobblers and crumbles.

And finally, I primed the lavender in our garden.  It also had a prolific year and the bees loved it.  I have put it in pillow cases and will make lavender sachets out of pretty scraps of fabric soon.

Some lavender from my garden.