A Plum-y Weekend

Oma and Opa came for a visit this weekend.  TerraDactyl spent most of the weekend trying to wear everyone's shoes/slippers.  After a thorough study, she's decided she likes Oma's tiny slippers (above) the best.  They stay on her feet the best and they're lightweight, so they're easier to walk in.

Oma spent a lot of time with TerraDactyl outside so that I could get some much needed time canning our abundant produce.  Opa and I made three batches of jam:  Raspberry, Raspberry-Plum, and Blackberry-Plum.  So now I've got about 15 pints of homemade jam.  There's still a bunch of raspberries in the freezer (and now some blackberries, courtesy of Opa spending a morning picking blackberries), and...  now there's a bunch of plum in there, too.  

Check out the crazy air bubbles that form around the plums when you submerge them in water!  We have a golden plum tree in back yard.  Between DH and I, we harvested about 14 pounds of plums this weekend.  We made a plum pie (SOOOO good) and we used up about 6 pounds in the jams, so we still have about 6 pounds in the freezer.  My plan was to empty out the freezer of produce, but I'm not sure that I made any more room in there.  I think I'm going to need a big chest freezer for this house.  There's just so much fruit to harvest!  And then maybe we can do our canning in the winter when it's not 100°.  

For the most part, the canning process went very smoothly... until the last batch.  I didn't get the tongs on one of the pint jars securely, and I was in a hurry so I didn't notice... so when I picked it up, it just slipped out and fell onto the floor.  Fortunately, the glass didn't break, but I did lose an entire pint's worth of jam.  :(  It was pretty sad.  But (again) fortunately, I managed not to splatter anyone with hot jam.  It was just a mess and even that cleaned up completely.  So really, it was a best-case disaster scenario.  

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