A fragrant treat: rose petal jelly

This year's rose crop was excellent (even the deer thought so :P ); it was a very good year for rose petal jelly.  I took photos this year during jelly making, as the transformation is fairly striking.

The roses I use are primarily 'La Ville de Bruxelles', my favorite of my Damasks:

I remove the petals from the calyces, measure,

soak to rinse and remove rose beetles if there are any (none this year; the beneficial nematodes were a success!),

  and simmer. 

When the color and flavor have been extracted,


 (and how glorious the house smells while this is happening!),







I strain the petals, pressing the marc to extract the flavor.

 

and add lemon juice which revives the roses' color and corrects acidity for jelling.

There is a merest shimmery rainbow of essential oil floating on the surface, I tried to catch it in the photos but my camera (my mp3 player!) couldn't see it.

Then I finish the process with pectin, sugar, lids and rings, water bath and when cool, a pretty topper and label.  This year I found little satin roses to add for a whimsical touch, and to help color code my jams and jellies. 
As I believe gardening, and life really, should be about joy, and this was a great rose jelly year, I kept a couple of jars for my own pantry and for gifts; the rest I'll sell at market.

Autumn Creeping In

Though it's been down to 35F several nights, frost so far has skirted the farm, which is really odd, but then this season is the strangest one, weather-wise, I can remember.  It was cold and wet, up until mid-late July, and then WHAM, hot...then cold and wet again, then hot, and has stayed hot.  Truly, 90's, even 80's are just WRONG for this time of year.  The plants are confused.  I've seen flowers on forsythia recently! 

It's just beginning to be cool enough to do the fall digging, both harvesting and setting in, that needs to be done, and with daylight telescoping down now, the race is on to get as much done as possible.  This week, I hope to get peonies dug and re-set, spaces made for next spring's fruit trees, the last of the lavenders lined out, perennial babies moved up or out, and the snowbirds brought at least to the porch, if not inside.  I've made the mistake in the past of thinking 'nah, it's not going to freeze tonight, it's cloudy' at twilight, only to wake up at 6 to ice on the miserable lemongrass.  So that's getting done first this year. 

With the herb harvest, I've been working on new designs for sachets and cat toys, and will be lurking a bit in fabric stores for certain bits and colorways.  The rose petals I turned almost all into jelly this year, instead of any liqueur, and the garlic-rosemary jelly turned out very nicely, zippy/tangy and not so sweet; I plan to give an armload of lemongrass the same treatment this week.  I found some darling satin roses in different colors late last winter, and have added them to the ties for the jelly toppers; I knew I'd find a reason to have them, if I got them!

The back porch roof needs re-doing, and that is #1 in serious projects, it should only take a few days at most, but I may end up jobbing it out so I can focus on digging; cutting metal is not my favorite thing.

Ooh-er, a new canopy and a new, smaller soaping space

Yet another windstorm at market, and my canopy became a bumbershoot, I will save the top as a replacement, and try to find someone with the patience to fix the frame or reycle it.  For the market though, I need a sturdier one, eeking through windy days was a constant battle.  I did a lot of research, asked a lot of other market/fair vendors, and got a new one that is way sturdier, with some simple tweaks that make me very happy.... it sheds rain rather than collecting it in huge draughts that dump on the unsuspecting (as do the canopies of my neighbors at the fm!), and the latches have levers rather than finger-smashing, biting buttons.  That's tech only a vendor could understand, but............ oh, my, it's a huge improvement.

The soaping space moved from the front porch to the back porch, it's tinier and forces me to streamline things a bit, but it frees up the front porch for living space, which I quite like; sitting there with a cuppa, listening to the hummingbirds at the blackcurrant sage and chastizing the little whitetail buck for eating my petunias in the porch pots (he looked so very doggy, "Why are you telling me no?" :D )........ ah, nice to have the space back.

After the day's transplanting, I hope to get to a batch of cocoa butter soap (unscented) and some goatmilk ones with the fresh goatmilk I traded for at the market yesterday, and tinker more with oatmilk as a substitute for silk, plus the infamous huckleberry soap.

New soaps (and the return of a couple of favorites)

It poured rain and howled a gale all day (again...argh!) so I stayed inside and soaped as I have done so much lately.  I woke up to crashing and banging, darted out at daylight to check on seedling flats (not washed way, thank goodness!), made coffee, and then hauled out my soaping gear.

Curing or freshly made:
I've been tinkering with a blend to mimic Lily of the Valley, and think what I came up with comes pretty close.  It's tinted with green clay and a swirl of white.  Then there was a fresh batch of espresso scrub (a titch less scrubby than previously, ground the coffee beans a bit finer), one of sweet orange (a simple treat: folded orange essential oil and the deeply sweet scented wax from orange peels; the essential oil and wax provide all the color you could want), a batch of calendula-lemongrass (with calendula infused oil and petals), and a layered lavender/chamomile batch, the chamomile part ended up tinted a bit green from the azure blue of the chamomile essential oil.  As it's cured, the flecks from the chamomile flowers have begun to show up a bit more, tiny specks of gold.  I'm liking the layered look and have a citrus one in mind next.

Tomorrow is prep for market day, and please please, weather, no more squalls?  And especially on Saturday, otherwise we will all need gumboots and sandbags.  Peeking at the island in the river next to where our market meets, I was reminded last week of 'dike patrol' when I was tiny, and seeing roads washing out and barns up to their eaves in water.  Though that likely won't happen again, with the dam and all, and I do love ducks and geese........ still, we've had enough wet weather for a week or so, in my opinion.  I've got buds on the rosa primula, and apple trees in flower, and I know the honeybees are getting restless.

Well that was fun. Not. (Email virus).

It's a good thing I run a bunch of different anti-virus and anti-malware software, and that I was lucky enough to see the start of a virus on-screen and able to shut down my net connection.  Last week an email-propagated virus attacked my computer, and the backing hard drive.... chewed its way through the address book and a lot of emails, sent a bunch of spam (including to me! how I found it!  I knew I hadn't just emailed myself).  Several scans later (over 36 hours worth of infection clearing, argh) I was able to access the net again and update my a/v programs and re-scan........seems to be clean now, but I lost a chunk of data, and a swath of my address book, and a pile of emails.  Here in Petticoat Junction, half of everyone I know has the same ISP or email system, and that cursed thing went round and round and round.  So, if you've tried to email me lately, and got no answer, please try again; I didn't dare reply to anyone until today, for fear of spreading the infection.

And a pox on the house of anyone who would write and propagate such a thing, I lost a week of time and reams of communication, and files.

Well that was fun.

We had a two-day windstorm (Saturday and Sunday) with a fair amount of rain on Sunday.  The rain was expected to be huge and go on for days--- I thought I'd get some digging in of a last few woody plants, but that didn't pan out, as the wind just would not stop and the rain was only for a short time.  The market was terribly windy, one of those dirt in the face windy days, with vendors putting out extra canopy weights and casting nervous glances at their tents all day.  At the end, one fellow's display of jams got knocked over and smashed, but luckily there were several of us still there to help clean up.

I noticed a bunch of trees down on Sunday morning, but what are you going to do?  Had to wait it out.... and found not only loads of debris everywhere, more trees down in the farm road, but also limbs falling had taken down one of my fences, snapped off wooden posts and mangled wire.  Which made a couple of does very happy... and then irked at me for chasing them out of the garden.  One hung about all afternoon, dog-like, as I rebuilt the fence, waiting for me to let her back in.  Hm-um, no.

I got the broken posts replaced, the wire flattened out and re-attached, and a few of the wooden ones removed. Cedar posts two feet taller than I am, and nearly as big around, are HEAVY!  I'm glad to be switching to all t-posts, as they won't need replacement as often, and I don't love using a post hole digger, either.  But so not how I envisioned using my Monday!

I found another stretch of fence down last night, though on the road not the garden, and there was other random damage, branches down, plants and pots strewn all over (me chasing an upended box of propagating foam in the windstorm must've been quite the sight for the birds clinging to the trees)... near the greenhouse windows, new tender growth was no match for the wind, but in the middle of the house, all was well except for the holes in the plastic letting rain in (and WHY always down my neck?) Haha very funny, Ms. Nature. 

The hilarity that is the blogger reader/google reader interface

Recently blogger lost all my entries in my blog reader (and there were a LOT, from science to art to news to science fiction and back to science)....... it's blank, empty, nada, nyet.  Which is fine, I had deleted a lot of them via the google interface (a person can't possibly read that many entries per day, Science Daily alone should be called Science Hourly).

And yet, when I post here the things I've deleted from it, that were on my blogger reading list... come back.

Ghost in the machine.