A Full Sunday

We had a warm, yet foggy start to our day.  Charles helped us get some garden work done while Sidney worked with her show Silkie.   We then made an ambitious plan for what we would do until mid afternoon when the storms descended upon us.  B went to the farm supply store to get a few things we needed to put our ideas into action.  I went about chicken duties and some weeding all while listening to the thunder slowly roll toward me, first as a very distant low growl, then as a much more present threat as the sky darkened to evening (at noon). 

So now, inside the house watching the steady rain that seems to have dominated our week,  we are doing our first processing of the season.  Our mutant rhubarb plant supplied the perfect muse to spend our afternoon.  I would be surprised if farm box families didn't see a little jar of Rhubarb Ginger Jam.

We had such great surprise this afternoon as we were ladling the jam into hot jars.  A friend of ours came bearing 2 week old chicks to share.  We split the hens between us and now have six new babies!  Since we only netted two hens out of our egg hatching experiment, this was great news.  We now have two additional Rhode Island Reds, two Wyondottes, a Burr Orphington, and a Barred Rock.  So exciting!

If you would like to see hear a little bit about this weeks planting I talked about it here and if you would like some food for thought on honeybees and the colony collapse syndrome, I talked about it here.  Now I'm off to have some of B's wonderful Asparagus soup!
 

Rhubarb Ginger Jam

20 C Rhubarb cut into 1 inch pieces
6 C Sugar
3 pkgs. 8 oz Strawberry Jello
1 12.6 oz Jar Candied Ginger, chopped into fine dice

Place sugar and rhubarb in a stockpot over medium heat and cook until softened.  Using an immersion blender, process rhubarb until desired consistency.  Stir in jello packages and diced ginger and cook until dissolved and smooth (the jello adds the color to the otherwise dull cooked rhubarb).  Process into jars and/or refrigerate.

This yielded 23~ 4 oz.  jars & 6~ 8oz.  jars

***I sifted through tons of recipes and this was one we made up of several.  The original proportion was 10 C of Rhubarb to 6 C of sugar which was WAY too sweet & before the jello.  So we cooked up additional rhubarb without sweetening and it came out the perfect balance of sweet and tart.  Unless you too have a mutant rhubarb (this recipe barely made a dent in this plant~yes a single plant), please reduce the ingredients proportionally.