On 8/22/2016 8:44 AM, Pavel314 wrote:
On Sunday, August 21, 2016 at 2:12:47 PM UTC-4, George Shirley wrote:
Miz Anne and I picked the pears day before yesterday, she made a LOT of
pear jelly, a rich golden color and very tasty. Today, around lunch, I
put up 7 quarts of pear sauce, the only ingredient besides pear was some
lemon. Tastes almost as good as the jelly but has a sort of red color to
it, must have been from the skins. No skins in anything but the color is
there.

When it gets a little cooler, somewhere around October I suspect, I will
be pruning the fruit trees to take out "rain" limbs, aka those little
limbs that grow off the major limbs and go straight up. Helps to get the
sunshine down into the middle of the tree and stops the rain limbs from
getting the nutrients that the fruit and real limbs need. Has been a
good year for fruit for us, bumper crop of figs led to a lot of jars of
fig jam. The Kumquat tree is covered with fruit and still blossoming.

The canning pantry, aka known as my office closet, to which I added a
lot of shelves, is pretty much full at the moment. Once the kids,
grandkids, etc. start rummaging around jars will be going out full and
coming back empty. Granpa's Rule 1, the jars come home or no more
goodies. It's not that I don't have a lot of jars, there are about 12
cases of various sized jars near me at the moment. Some of which are 50
years old and still working. All sizes from 4 ounce to half a gallon and
I keep watch on them. G I did give the grands all the fruit jars with
handles, don't even remember who gave those to me but they don't fit in
the canner very well so now they're beer/water/soda/etc. jars.

We had nice rains earlier in the week up until this morning, about 4
inches all told if the auto rain gauge is right. Now it's hot and
steamy, thank goodness for air conditioning here in swampy holler.

George

Our seckel pear tree is overflowing with pears this year, probably due to the heavy pruning I did this past winter. Last year I made some seckel pear champagne with them, which turned out to be very good; lots of tiny bubbles and a good pear flavor.

Paul

Seckels don't do well in our climate, we have mostly grown Kiefer pears
for years but the Tennosui is a locally bred tree and works well in this
climate. They're not bad for eating out of hand but need to sit a few
days to soften up. You have to stay after the rain limbs on pears as
they will come right back again.

Never tried to make champagne but have made pear and blackberry wine
that was really good. When we moved from our first home back in the
middle seventies I rain up on a gallon jug of dewberry wine that was
about ten years old. That was some good wine, just enough alcohol to get
you in the mood. G

George