Jelly Time!

lead image: jars of jelly being sealed in a canning pot

We harvested grapes this year instead of letting the birds have them. The birds got some but we got more.

Faced with a choice between fermenting for juice, fermenting for wine, or making jelly, I chose jelly!

Two of our grapevines produced this year. One, the oldest vine, has been here since Keith's grandmother was still alive and making jelly. Over 20 years ago!

I think it's a concord grape. A purple variety with seeds.

Grandma's Vine is hard to see with all the green behind it and leaves from the mulberry tree surrounding it. Keith thinks this vine might've been here as early as 1979.

There's still some dispute over the grapevine in the garden.

When we first moved here, in 2010, we had cousins of growing table grapes and growing pasture raised chickens for sale.

We had over 100 chickens!

We had 25 grape vine seedlings.

What we city kids didn't know was chickens will eat and scratch at every and any thing. If there's lose dirt, they'll scratch it. If there's wet dirt, they'll scratch it. If there's dry dirt they'll make holes and take a dirt bath in them.

If a tiny leaf pokes out of a stem, they'll peck it. Even if they don't eat it, they peck it. We also had about 25 tomato plants planted that year. After the chickens got finished, we had some lovely tomato sticks! They were still alive but they never put on leaves or flowers and certainty no fruit. The grape vine seedlings were scratched up and pecked. Sometimes we didn't even have sticks left. Just holes in the ground.

We gave up on the idea of growing table grapes for a while. Wet focused on growing chickens for meat and eggs and fencing off our garden area.

I learned how to kill, clean, and dress a chicken.

I learned how to package out for the freezer and how to butcher it for the getting pan or the soup pot.

The first few times, I cried really hard. After that, I just cried on the inside.

My mother-in-law and I had some fun while she was teaching me.

Ultimately we discovered people around here don't want to buy pasture raised chickens. They are too small, too tough (from running around eating bugs, grape vines, and tomato plants!), and too expensive. In the big cities, a pasture raised chicken would sell for between 10 and 15 dollars. They could get ginormous chickens for relatively cheap. They didn't care how or where they were raised. They didn't care what chemicals and artificial crap was injected into their fast growing, barn or cage raised chickens!

We gave up on selling pasture raised meat chickens.

I focused instead on selling pasture raised eggs. Even then, people didn't like to pay 7 to 10 dollars a dozen. That's what we would get in a city like Austin or Los Angeles. Not around here!

I got $3/dozen at first, but bumped it up to $4/ dozen and $5/18 pack.

I had a few loyal customers, but ultimately it didn't pay for the feed the chickens needed. As they slowly died off or disappeared because of predators I just didn't replace them.

For several years I was down to a much more manageable 30 chickens, then 20, then 12, until finally I only had one old hen.

There's a funny story here. For a few weeks my husband and I have been hearing a rooster crow in the back. I kept looking at my pullets trying to figure out which one was actually a cockerel. This morning I finally saw the chicken that was crowing like a rooster. It was my old laying hen! I guess she's trying to tell the youngsters who is the boss.

I bought 10 replacement pullets, one of which died recently. I'm not sure what it does from. I think maybe a lack of some B vitamins. It couldn't stand. But it had been fine for a few months before!

Currently I have one old hen who lays an egg maybe once or twice a week. And 9 pullets who aren't yet laying. And 1 turkey hen who is sitting on a clutch of eggs. There's no boy turkey any more, so those eggs won't be fertilized. But PomPom is still trying to make them hatch!

Ok. Back to the grape vines. The one in the garden is of unkown type.

Keith bought several more grape vines and planted them. One in the garden. A few out front along our front yard fence. None of them made it.

He bought more and planted one in the garden and one in the yard. He was buying the seedless table grape varieties.

The vine in the yard has put on lots of plant and leaves but has never truly fruited.

At some point during this grapevine buying and planting and not growing, he took a cutting from Grandma's old grapevine and planted it in the garden.

I can't remember if that is the vine that's growing or if it was one of the purchased seedless "table" varieties that's growing there.

They look like exactly the same kind of grape to me, so I think it's from the cutting. Keith insists it is not. Rather, it is a vine seedlings he purchased.

So. The garden grapevine type is in dispute.

And my jelly recipe calls for certain specific types of grape, such as Concord, among others. That's the kind of grape Welch's uses for their grape juice and grape jelly.

After harvesting the grapes, we had to pull them off the stems, rinse them, smash them, and boil then down into juice. It was pretty hot that day and I didn't fancy boiling anything. It would beat up the house and make us all miserable.

I put the grapes into a crock pot and added just a little water. I put the pot on low temperature and mashed them up a lot. I continued mashing then throughout the day. When all the color was leached out of the skins, the juice was ready to be stained.

I strained the juice and put it in a glass container in the refrigerator to allow the sediment to fall to the bottom over the next 24 hours.

I set a huge canning pot full of water to boil on the stove.

After the sediment fell to the bottom of the jar I measured out 5 cups of juice and added it to a pot. I sprinkled 1 package of pectin into the juice and brought it to a roiling boil.

While the juice and pectin were heating up, I measured 7 cups of sugar into a big bowl.

After the juice reached a rolling boil, I added the sugar slowly, stirring it so it would dissolve.

I brought that to a rolling boil and let it boil for exactly 1 minute.

Finally, I ladled the hot juice into the jelly jars.

I used a two piece lid, called lid and ring, to close the jars of hot jelly juice. I only tightened them "finger tip tight." One per more of the rings must've come loose in the roiling, boiling water.

The jars stayed in the canning pot under 2 inches of boiling water for 5 minutes. After that, it was time to take the jars out, wipe them off, and let them cool. Even had one of the rings not loosened, I would still wipe the jars. We have a lot of hard scale in our water. Maybe calcium, maybe lime. We have a well and our water is chlorine and flouride free. And delicious!

It definitely leaves a white residue on the outside of the lids and jars. So, I wipe them down.

The jelly is made. The jars are coming on the counter. My stomach is growling and my mouth is drooling. I am looking forward to some biscuits with butter and jelly.

I love hot, fresh, homemade biscuits with butter and jelly on top.

I made delicious sourdough biscuits last year.

I don't currently have a sourdough starter, but this jelly would make it worth it to start a batch.

I'm using this story as a PromptlyJonica submission. Fruits of Labor

Please see my profile for that prompt and others you might be interested in, including a complete list of all the prompts linked in order.