Homesteading During the Quarantine

 My little granddaughter has gotten used to having blueberry sauce on pancakes and waffles when she comes to Nana's house with whipped cream on top.  It's a luscious breakfast and one of our favorites for sure.  When I took her home last week she told her daddy that she wouldn't eat the pancakes without blueberry sauce.  That remark got me in high gear.

I think I still have about 6 gallons of frozen blueberries in the freezer, so I decided to can some blueberry sauce for my gal.  The recipe usually makes just 1 pint so I decided to quadruple it.  When I first began to stir it over the heat I realized that something was wrong.  I had measured out 8 times the amount of orange juice, so I quickly had to add enough of the other ingredients to multiply the recipe by 8.  This is a very aggravating problem, as I'm a math teacher.  I was berating myself and wondering how I could make such a terrible error.  However, the berries cooked up well, the sauce was canned and now my sweet gal can have pancakes for supper with blueberry sauce - even if Nana isn't there!

Our favorite blueberry sauce takes 2 cups of blueberries (either frozen or fresh), 1/2 cup of orange juice, 2.5 Tablespoons of sugar, a Tablespoon of cornstarch and 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon.  Bring to a boil and cook until the sauce is thickened.  It just takes a few minutes for the sauce to turn from cloudy to berry colored.  I've never canned it before, but I'm going to ask Maggie the next time I see her she liked it.


Since I had some blackberry juice that was canned, I decided to also make some blackberry syrup to pour over the waffles or pancakes and got that added into the mix that morning.  I've never tried blackberry syrup over pancakes before, but the recipe was pretty tasty.

Duke Blueberries 5.10.20

Here is a picture of today's view of blueberries.  The berries are growing and gaining a tint of lavender.  It's neat to see how they change as time goes on.  I think this variety is duke - the earliest variety that we grow.

Black Mac

We planted Black Mac, a variety of black raspberries, last year and should be picking these this year.  They have the largest thorns of any plant on our property.  It's a must to wear gloves when trying to prune or trellis them.  We shall see if we end up keeping them.  It's not so fun to press your fingers into thick thorns, but I do love the beautiful little flowers on the plant.

I'll save my pictures of sourdough bread until I have a loaf that looks good.  Sourdough is a nice little experiment but it may take a different cook to get the best results!

Until next time!

May Flowers

Natchez Blackberries 5.4.20 - Row 3

They say that April showers bring May flowers, and May flowers bring June blueberries - but it's even better when those flowers in April turn to little green berries in May.  Now we can see that some of the blackberries made it through the freeze of April 15th and are already forming berries.

Freeze damage on Natchez

Sadly, we can also see the blooms that turned black in the center and were bit by the freeze.You can check the picture to the right and find the ones that the freeze affected.  However,  we definitely didn't lose the whole crop!

Blueray blueberries

The blueberries are beginning to gain some size and though they should have experienced some freeze damage, I'm not seeing it yet.  They look pretty normal  with the normal amount of berries if not more berries than usual. 

This last weekend I saw a bunny bouncing in the patch; it was hard to get a close shot on him as he was busy bouncing away!  It's those sweet little things that bring joy while you're out on the farm - bunnies, roses, sunshine and flourishing fat, green berries moving and ripening in the breeze.

       God is good - all the time!