Month: May 2022

It’s that time of year again. The strawberries are going nuts. Ken and Jana are hauling in a half gallon a day. They’ve been cleaning and hulling the berries and putting into the freezer. The discards go directly to my chickens. They’re loving the additional treats.

Today I made my first batch of strawberry jam, using the sure-gel standard recipe.

Last year we had a bumper harvest of both strawberries and blackberries. I ended up putting 3 gallon bags of each berry in the freezer. This spring I needed to clear out the freezer to make way for this year’s harvest. We gave 1 bag each to our neighbor, the other 4 bags I tasked my sister with juicing them.

I purchased a Euro Cuisine Steam Juicer last year and this tool is a total game changer for making any type of juice or broth. I especially like this for blackberries since I don’t care for all the seeds in my jellies. The juicer has 3 sections. The lowest section holds the water for steaming. The middle section holds the juice and has a spigot for pouring out the juice, the top section holds the items juiced.

The top section holds 2 gallon of fruit. The overall processing time took a little over 4 hours to juice all the berries. We ended up doing 2 batches, 1 for all the strawberries and 1 for blackberries.

We ended up with 2 1/2 quarts of juice from the strawberries and 1 1/2 quarts of blackberry juice.

I water bath canned a total of 9 pints of juice, 6 strawberry and 3 blackberry. The remaining juice went into our kombucha 2nd ferment.