Crab Apple Jelly

It's that time of year again when we are having to harvest and preserve all our crops to see us through the winter. Crab apples are often left on trees and not used as they are small and very sharp tasting but it is very easy to turn them into a delicious jelly, jam or wine. We love their taste so much my husband bought me some trees as a gift a few years ago, so we can now harvest our own from the garden.

After harvesting, I usually wash and chop the apples in half to check they are good and not full of insects or rotten inside. Place all your apples into a large pan and add enough water to just reach the top of the apples, the juice of a lemon can be added to help prevent browning of the apples although it's not compulsory, then boil until the apples turn to a pulp.

I leave the cooked apple pulp mixture to cook slightly as it's much easier to get cooled apple into a jelly bag or muslin bag to strain and you are far less likely to burn yourself in the process.

The straining may take some time, maybe even a few hours and I usually tie my jelly bag onto the handle of the kitchen cupboard so that I can leave it and come back to it later. It is important not to squeeze the jelly bag if you would like clear jelly.

You may notice that I haven't given you exact weights and measurements so far... that's because the measurement that matters most is the ratio of sugar to strained liquid. Learning the basic rules like this mean you can make a little or as much jelly as you want, depending on your quantities of apples available.

Once your apple liquid has finished straining measure it and return it to the cooking pan, use a like for like ratio when you add your sugar. For example if you have a litre of liquid add 1 kilogram of sugar. Notice I've used both metric measurements here, if you are using imperial it would be the same ratio but in pints/pounds.

Apples have a high pectin content so it's not necessary to add any further pectin, bring your liquid and sugar to the boil stirring constantly. To check if your jelly will set a plate which has been in the freezer for a little while should help, spoon a little jelly onto the cold plate a leave it for a minute or two to cool. Once cooled, slide your finger through the jelly, it should wrinkle up if it's ready to jar up. If not boil a little longer until you have reached the wrinkle stage.

Pour into sterilised jars and leave to cool, I always find this jelly has a very firm set even though it looks like it will never set. This is one of my favourite jellies and tastes amazing on toast or scones.

Glass Ball and Wire Cane Tops

Our garden backs onto the countryside with a small river running past, every summer beautiful dragonflies and damselflies fill every available space and when the seasons change we start to miss them. So we came up with the idea of making a small piece of sculpture to brighten the garden during the cold winter months using some of the parts from a broken mobile.

This is the broken mobile... I kept the parts as we have a passion for recycling and reusing things but the cane tops can just as easily be made with garden wire and glass balls or marbles if you fancy making some yourself.

The first thing we did was make the body of the dragonfly, my husband used a bar with a hole in to hold the wire still, but a cane works just as well. Put the end of the wire into the hole and keep winding the wire round until it starts to resemble a large spring and could fit the required amount of marbles in. We have used six marbles in total.

With the marbles pushed into the spring it automatically starts to look like the body of a dragonfly, you can then use pliers to spiral the wire at the end to finish it off nicely, leaving a little excess wire at the head end to attach to the cane. We have used a larger marble for the head.

We have made the wings with a slightly thinner garden wire because it is so much easier to shape and can be bought very cheaply. Once you have your wing shape twist the wire together to hold it in place remembering to leave enough spare wire on the underside of the wings to fix onto the body of your dragonfly.

A little detail was added using very thin wire and beads, this was wound around the edges of the wings to fix them in place and create a representation of the veining on the dragonflies wings.

Then all that's left to do is fix the wings to the body by wrapping the long piece of wire around the body. A glass bead can be fixed to the insects thorax to cover the knotted wire using hot glue or resin. In the photograph above you can see some of the other things we have made using the glass balls and wire from the broken mobile.

These garden cane tops have been made in a similar way to the dragonfly using a simple spiral to hold the glass balls and adding a few beads as a finishing touch. I have left the bottom end of the wire straight to slide into the end of a bamboo cane but they can also be spiralled to slip over the top of the cane.

Here is the finished dragonfly in the garden, the wire at the front of it's head was straightened and slid into the top of a bamboo cane, which is hidden by the bush. As the body has been made using a spring shape and it is only fixed to the cane at the front it has given the sculpture a subtle movement which has enchanted the children.

These are some of the cane tops which remind us of little moons orbiting planets and definitely liven up a dull looking cane. A small magical touch to add a little cheer to the gardens in the winter.

As there have been a few reports of fires caused by people having glass on sunny window ledges we will be using these to brighten pots in shady corners.

Crocus experiments

We recently bought a couple of new science experiment books for the children, one containing nature experiments and the other was just a general science experiment book, covering many different topics. As the sun was out today we thought we would venture out into the garden to perform one of the easy nature experiments but things did not go quite as planned! First we chose what we were going to do, gathered what the book said we needed and discussed what outcome we expected to achieve, all good so far.

The children had just chosen the perfect crocus for the experiment, then something extraordinary happened, the crocus had an encounter with our very grumpy cat who just strolled up and sat on it and then promptly tried to chase us out of the garden. So we were off to a bad start, that should have been a sign.

Another crocus was chosen and the book told us to cover the open flower with a shoe box, hence blocking out the sun and set a timer for 5 minutes, which we did. Unfortunately, the crocus did not understand the experiment and it just opened wider, so we repeated it with a different crocus and the same happened again.

As you can see in the above photograph it opened as much as it could, the book states that the flower should close, so we thought for a moment, discussed this conclusion and wondered whether the fact we had used a black shoe box had any effect. Black absorbs more heat, so we changed to a white box hoping it would now work but alas, still no joy. We had changed all variables that we could think of different flowers, different colour boxes all had the same result... the opposite to what the book said, by this time the children had got a little fed up and went off to explore the garden. The only thing left is the time, maybe 5 minutes just is not long enough to reach the desired result, so the next time the sun comes out we will test this theory out.

In the mean time the children checked the garden to see if our vegetables had started to grow, helped with some weeding and found a stash of snail shells by a rock. We assume this was left by a thrush, but it gave the children the opportunity to examine the empty shells more closely, especially the inside spirals.

So we had quite a busy day, my son was concerned that the experiment failed but it really didn't, experiments don't fail at all they give you opportunities to learn, to re-think your expectations, to test out many different theories and even if you don't get what you were expecting the journey has probably taught you a lot.