Subj : Pick Your Own To : Dave Drum From : Ruth Haffly Date : Thu Feb 16 2023 13:55:31 Hi Dave, RH> Our strawberries were in open fields. One neighbor had had a horse at RH> one point; the berries from the field where the horse was pastured RH> always had the biggest berries. DD> Inagine that. We didn't have horses ... not even a pony. Just Farmall DD> and Oliver tractors .... where I learned to drive and shift gears. We lived just within the village limits but outside of the village proper. Enough open land that one set of neighbors had I don't know how many acres surrounding us. It had been a working farm at one time, barn burned down some time before I was born. They sold my folks a quarter acre in what had been the barn yard (AFAIK, the foundation is still there) and dad built a house. He broke ground in spring of 1955, last room was finally finished off around 1970. Our neighbors let us have almost free run of their property--certain areas were off limits but not many. DD> several places and transplanted to the berry patch. Then encouraged DD> the rizome-like runners to reach out and root, filling in gaps. Our RH> We never tried transplanting any, just let them spread on their own. DD> I wasn't up for trudging through the woods with a bucket on my arm. It DD> was much easier after we established the strawberry bed. Other than DD> the blackberry briars along the fence at the edge of the strawberry DD> patch DD> we had raspberries and blackberries in the dtiches along the road and DD> among the trees in the orchard. Gooseberries amd May apples were in DD> the woods only. We had blackberry and raspberry patches on some of the land adjoining ours. Neighbors owned it but we had permission to pick all the berries we wanted. Same with the apple trees they had. The property had a really good hill for sledding too--if conditions were right, we could go down the hill, across our back yard and just about to the swamp on the other side of their land. It was a good ride but a long trudge back to the top of the hill. (G) DD> berries were no bigger than the first joint of my thumb (1 1/2" RH> hull DD> to tip). DD> Unlike the huuuuuge hybrid berries I see in some RH> Stupormarkup DD> displays. RH> Berries we found were maybe a third of that size. Took a good number of RH> them just to have a few for all of us in the family (7) some on our RH> cereal. DD> Not all the berries are that big. I found that the smaller the berry DD> the more tart it was. We found ours to be quite sweet. DD> Title: Strawberry Preserves DD> Categories: Five, Fruits DD> Yield: 5 half-pints DD> 2 lb Fresh picked strawberries DD> 3 1/2 ts Lemon juice DD> 1 c Sugar DD> 1/2 oz Butter RH> I go the faster route, using sure jel, the lower sugar recipe. DD> I'm making preserves here - not jam or jelly. Bv)= Pectin is for DD> use in jelly making ... grape, apple, etc. And peach or apricot jam. I make sort of a hybrid jam/preserves--a lot of fruit and sugar, the pectin to set it up faster. DD> Take your strawberries and hull them (use a spoon its DD> RH> faster) In large bowl or pan, mash the strawberries to a DD> release RH> their juices. RH> I picked up a little gadget some years ago--rounded spoon shape with RH> teeth around the bowl of the spoon. Deborah, when working at Taco Bell, RH> used a similar one to de-stem tomatoes; they called it a "shark". She RH> saw mine and christened it a shark also. (G) It really works well. DD> That might have sped things along. But, I got pretty good with the DD> spoon. I imagine so; I've been using this little widget now for probably 30+/- years on both tomatoes and strawberries. It speeds up the job quite a bit, especially when making a big batch of something like salsa. --- Catch you later, Ruth rchaffly{at}earthlink{dot}net FIDO 1:396/45.28 --- PPoint 3.01 * Origin: Sew! That's My Point (1:396/45.28) .