The Swinging Pendulum of Nature.

 That erratic  pendulum of nature has finally decided to swing back in our favour and this year has been so much kinder to us here on our little farm.

We have had beautiful rain, the tanks are full, the grass green and even needing slashing and the garden and  our orchard producing extremely well and providing an abundance of fruit.

I have not posted for over 12 months and it was a post that came to my attention from a fellow blogger that also hadn't posted for quite a while that spurred me into action.  This post will be mainly a pictorial post of the preserving and food storage that we have done over the last couple of months.

This year we have been in a very fortunate position , one we are very grateful for  in which we have been regularly gifted fruit and vegetables from our next door neighbour who is involved in produce moving and we have been the lucky recipients of left overs and  surplus goods.

When pears came, we had visitors and they jumped straight in to help us.

Another day it was potatoes ,carrots and sweet potatoes, so we canned the potatoes, froze and canned  the carrots and cooked and mashed and froze the sweet potatoes.

We did potato chunks and potato chips .

 

Another day, another lot of preserving, we started bottling so much as our freezers were beyond bursting at the seams.

Brian has been my ever hard working helper assisting me with the prep work wherever possible.

I am grateful for all of this and am  also pleased that I have been able to onwards gift some of this both to our neighbours and others.

Somebody in town donated a couple of boxes of citrus to our local craft shop and unable to find interest from anyone to purchase them they were gifted to me.

We put them through our food processor,

We made batch after batch of  marmalade.

We were gifted apples, so we made apple sauce, apple slices and juiced them  and put  it  in bottles for the pantry.

They gifted us peaches,

So we preserved them in my old Fowlers Vacola bottles.

We were given bags of onions , so we made whole pickled onions,

Sliced sweet pickled onions,

and, also dehydrated onions, along with dehydrated zucchini and capsicums.

 

We also  made pickled beetroot, pickled red cabbage and bread and butter cucumbers from the garden.

It was about at this time the real full on work began, our fruit on the  trees in the orchard  although not perfectly ready for picking, had to be rescued from the parrots, so we picked.......

Apricots and Plumcots.

We made many, many batches of  Apricot  sauce and Apricot Chilli sauce, both look identical but one has a nice Habanero Chilli kick.

 

We also made many batches of Apricot Jam.

A new one for us this year was Plumcot Jam.

Then Brian's brother who also lives next door  offered us the remainder of their plums off their tree as they were going away and wouldn't have time to process them, so over we went and picked them also.

It was at this time our other wonderful neighbours returned from Sydney with 4 boxes of luscious pluots ( a cross between a plum and apricot, but mainly plum)

From all this wonderful; produce, we made  huge amounts of plum sauce and Chilli plum sauce.( once again identical except for the kick).

Our son was visiting and helped with the prep.

 

Vast amounts of plum jam,

There were also enough to do many bottles of plums for the pantry as well.

Our surplus of tomatoes from our garden also saw us bottle tomatoes and  pasta sauce for future use.

Our pear tree also had to be picked early due to the birds,

After letting them sit to further ripen for about 10 days we then bottled them for the pantry.

Along the way we have also been gifted, cauliflowers, green tomatoes and chokos from which we have made many batches of sweet mustard pickles.

The following recipe is for my pickles. I use any or all of the listed base vegetables,(I have also been adding a bag of frozen  mixed homebrand vegies) the next morning after they have soaked in the salty water overnight and have been brought to the boil I place in a colander and rinse them off before adding back to the pot and adding the vinegar and sugar.I don't waterbath, I have boiling hot pickles, hot jars and hot lids, screw the lid on after filling and sit on a board(right way up) until they seal.

It has been a massive few months, there has been a lot going on here at the farm and this is just a bit of it.

We are stuck here at the moment  and have been since the 3rd of December( but that's another story to be shared soon) and are truly in need of a break away.

The preserving has been full on  and we are exhausted, but the opportunity to put all that food away in these uncertain and  unpredictable times  could not be knocked back or refused and we are glad we  did it.

Hopefully I will have time now to update again before too long.

Until we catch up again,

Please take care and stay safe,

Cheers

Jane and Brian.