A Big Jam

For the past couple of days, as I typically do at this time of year, I have been gorging myself on "wild" mulberries. I also managed to restrain myself from devouring all of the berries out of hand, and have a couple of half-gallon bottles full of the sweet, juicy things. I actually refined my harvesting technique- I use the mouth of the bottle to get the berry... place the mouth of the bottle so that the berry lies inside of it, then a quick flick of the wrist will snap the stem of the berry and it will fall into the bottle:





This also allows one to avoid the Tantalus effect- the added inches allowed me to get berries which would have been out of reach of my hand. It goes without saying, every inch counts!

Tonight, I am heading over to visit a friend of mine from high school, and his lovely wife, and we're going to make some mulberry jam. I've got the berries, they have the mason jars and pectin. We will be, so to speak, jamming:





I figure I'll have at least another week to subsist largely on mulberries, there are plenty of additional fruits which have yet to ripen, and the trees are prolific as hell. By next week, the earliest of the wild raspberries should be ripening, so it'll be a jammy couple of weeks.