"Genetically engineered products are an abomination of God's creation"

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

51. Do you can?

We lay down ever more black raspberry jam, and just started adding strawberry jam to our canning period as well. The slugs end up getting about a third of the strawberries, but that's still leaving us with about 50 jars a harvest of each type of jam.

The black raspberry is a good producer, especially given that the initial seeds were from wild canes I found growing out in the woods.

Sadly, I'm not on facebook, I know enough of my own foibles to know that if I got sucked into that, I'd never get anything done offline.

I've been trying to figure out how climate change is shifting my zone. I actually got a halfway decent crop of schronce's blackskin peanuts last year, and SW Ohio is not your typical peanut area. But the brutal winter aced about half of my garlic crop, killing everything in the raised bed, and about a third of those directly in the ground. My latest experimentation has been with hugelkultur. We had sheer winds take down a cherry tree a decade or so back, and I kept all the wood. We'd been using it for firewood, but a lot of it got exposed and started to get fungused up, so I buried it, and it's decomposing nicely back into the soil. Mustard grew very well on it, but the tomatoes I tried on that mound were pretty stunted. The funky weather this spring also meant that neither of my cherry trees bloomed this year, and only one of the two apples, and I'm not even seeing any swelling buds on that one yet. So no cherries and very few if any apples this year. I'm going to try and get more of the mulberries in this year, and not just eat them all right off the tree.