Jam Season

Although my vegetable garden isn't doing fantastically the fruit is starting to ripen on our many trees. A couple of weeks ago I harvested some lovely sour cherries and mulberries which I turned into jam. The sour cherries were also added to various alcoholic spirits and we now have a nice sour cherry vodka and a sour cherry liqueur which is mellowing nicely and should be much better at Christmas time.

Over the last 2 days I've harvested plums and once again made plum jam which is one of our favourites, also made some plum liqueur and finally got round to setting the green walnut liqueur away too. Hopefully they'll all work out well. Hubby is quite impressed with the tiny taste of sour cherry liqueur so I may just have to go pick some more before they start falling from the tree.

Once again the weather here has been strange, sunny this morning, wet and overcast for part of the afternoon then a big thunder storm this evening. As I'm typing this it's just started to rain again too. This is not normal June/July weather for Bulgaria and it's making a huge difference to the crops. Next week is supposed to be warmer and drier and I really hope it is, although it means I'll have to start watering the garden again!

I'm quite sad that there are no more lettuce or radish to be harvested now. Despite the cooler weather they've all bolted and what we hadn't managed to eat was fed to the chickens, nothing gets wasted here! The extra rain has made the grass have another spurt of growth and my weeds are doing wonderfully too, so today I was out with the scythe again for a while, then collected what I'd cut for the pigs to munch on. Charlotte is looking quite pregnant now, although we can't feel any babies moving about yet. We've had to cut her feed down slightly as she was getting a little bit overweight, and the piglets are getting extra feed now as they're so big. I'd love to weigh them all and I'm sure there's a formula out there somewhere on the interweb but I'll look for it another day.