We Be Jammin’

It’s berry pickin’ time in the south. On my trip to New Orleans to visit Holly, we picked blackberries. Tons and tons of them…the only problem was reaching them as they grew on a tall chain link fence which surrounds one of the US Coast Guard stations. So we took a small step ladder and Holly did the honors of climbing and pickin’. Sorry there are no pictures of this event because you would have died laughing at the site of us. Adorned in a scrappy t-shirt, blue jean shorts, pink rubber boots (see photo on my side bar of “Run-Away-Housewife) and latex gloves, we were a pretty funny crew of pickers. Now as you are smart enough to figure out, the latex gloves did not last long because blackberries grow on a thorny vine. But they did keep the purple stains to a minimum on our fingers.
With each move down along the fence the berries got bigger and bigger! We felt like we had struck gold…until I saw the snakes!!  Yes I had walked right past them and made them scurry away into the fence line across where I had just walked. The guys at the CG station said they were most likely cotton mouth moccasins, a very deadly snake. Moccasins live near and in water and we could see the Mississippi River levee not far down the road ahead of us. I still shiver each time I think about them and thank God that I did not step on one of them… So this pretty much ended our picking of the berries and we had a full bucket anyway.

 

Now to make the blackberry jam…

We washed and cooked the berries down to a mush

so that we could sieve out the small crunchy seeds.

This was the big job and rather boring too, but makes for a more delicious jam.

All said and done, we had 22 jars of jam which we split 50/50. It was beautiful.

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Our other project was to finish up the final work on Holly’s junk made hutch/buffet, she and Richard assembled from a kitchen table she had found at the dump on the base. Now when I say dump…I mean it is a place with 2 huge dumpsters and also a place where military families put still good items outside the dumpsters that they do not wish to carry with them on their next move, mostly due to load limits on the moving vans. Holly grabbed up this nice table which Richard cut in half and removed 18” down the center to make it narrower. They slapped it back together and added the top center shelf, which Holly bought years ago at an auction, and added the side shelves and spindles.

After much sanding, filling, priming, and more sanding, we began the painting…

but did not finish before I had to come home to Alabama. Don’t you just love the soft color? It is called Bayfront Palm by Dutch Boy…a mark down at WalMart; yep she got a great price on a whole gallon. It is going to be beautiful in her dining room.

Got a busy week next week, VBS…Vacation Bible School at our church all week. Yours truly is doing the crafts with 3, 4, and 5 year olds.

WoooHooo...gonna be fun, fun.

More to come, so stay tuned.

Have a blessed weekend my friends!