Okay so this post is a little late. We sorted our berries and made them into juice last Friday, but I didn't have a chance to post about it until after the Labor Day weekend.
We started with a very full grocery bag of tiny berries, with stems, leaves and an occasional worm or spider thrown in.
So my daughter and I spent a couple hours - literally - sorting berries.
This is about 2/3 of the total berries we had - this bowl is probably 15 inches wide.
It took three saucepans to get them all boiled down. These are each full of berries, with water added to cover the berries.
They started out looking like blueberries. So pretty, don't you think?
Within 10 minutes, we had bubbling purple caldrons. One even boiled over - what a mess!
Isn't this just the prettiest purple? It was about like it would have looked if we were boiling grape juice.
I missed getting a picture of the straining and squeezing out the juice with a cloth. These have about four tiny seeds in each berry, so they had to be completely strained. In the end, we had a full gallon of Oregon Grape juice - not suitable for drinking, but we knew we were going to have to wait to make jelly, and didn't want to take a chance at the berries going bad. We would have had maybe a quart more, but we had the boil over and our straining bowl tipped over once. That was frustrating! But at least it was in my stainless steel sink, so it didn't stain anything. It will probably be Saturday before we can get the jelly made. It's going to be so pretty when we get it done. I love the look of colorful, bright canned goods lined up on a shelf.
We started with a very full grocery bag of tiny berries, with stems, leaves and an occasional worm or spider thrown in.
So my daughter and I spent a couple hours - literally - sorting berries.
This is about 2/3 of the total berries we had - this bowl is probably 15 inches wide.
It took three saucepans to get them all boiled down. These are each full of berries, with water added to cover the berries.
They started out looking like blueberries. So pretty, don't you think?
Within 10 minutes, we had bubbling purple caldrons. One even boiled over - what a mess!
Isn't this just the prettiest purple? It was about like it would have looked if we were boiling grape juice.
I missed getting a picture of the straining and squeezing out the juice with a cloth. These have about four tiny seeds in each berry, so they had to be completely strained. In the end, we had a full gallon of Oregon Grape juice - not suitable for drinking, but we knew we were going to have to wait to make jelly, and didn't want to take a chance at the berries going bad. We would have had maybe a quart more, but we had the boil over and our straining bowl tipped over once. That was frustrating! But at least it was in my stainless steel sink, so it didn't stain anything. It will probably be Saturday before we can get the jelly made. It's going to be so pretty when we get it done. I love the look of colorful, bright canned goods lined up on a shelf.
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