More tales from 'The Good Life'

Do you see that? The picture above? Those are Victoria plums. Delicious and ripe Victoria plums. They are part of our second bumper harvest this year (and I am not even counting the Greengages, which I have already dealt with). Yesterday alone, D and I harvested around 4 buckets full of apples and 2 buckets of plums (add to that another two buckets, which are already transformed into jam and plum cake):


We are drowning in fruit!

Not that I'm complaining - in fact, we are thrilled - but I am ordering jam jars for the second time in a week now. The 36 glasses that I had ordered initially are not nearly enough.

There will be more plum jam (the Victoria plum jam I made with the first crop is delicious and we have managed to give quite a few glasses away to friends and family), more plum cake, a lot of apple sauce, and a friend of mine who dropped by yesterday suggested slicing some of the apples and freezing them like that for cake and the like.

It's a real shame that we can't store some of the fruit for winter without having to turn it all into preserves etc, but since everything is organic and hasn't been sprayed with anything there are quite a few bugs which made their little homes in the apples and plums - not in all of them, but it's almost impossible to tell before you cut them open, in particular with the plums (browsing a few days ago I found that The Pink Iris had the same problem with her plums HERE. I refuse to discard them, though, so we very laboriously cut each one open and cut the infested bit away. Took ages but was well worth it!!)

There will be pictures once I have bottled all the new jam up, but for now I am moving on and away from The Good Life and towards some good old-fashioned knitting content (trying to get back to the roots of this blog here!). A few days ago, a received a little parcel in the post, for which I have of course already sent a private thank you, but which really needs to be shown:


It's a little bib for bean, made by the lovely Mia of Way Past My Bedtime. Isn't it cute? I absolutely love the colour, a dusty blue, and have you seen the cool button? She also added some KnitPicks sock yarn to dye myself (this is my FIRST EVER Knitpicks yarn - I'm so excited!) and some Koolaid to do the dyeing. Thank you so much Mia!!

Then, yesterday the friend who stopped by brought me a little baby cardigan that she had knitted. Here it is, together with yet another cardigan - this time knitted by me (yes, I do still knit, although I seem to have slowed down rather a bit, due to excessive jam production):


Hers is the white one, mine is the dark blob behind it (true to form dark knitting remains impossible to photograph), so far without buttons and hence not really recognisable as a cardigan.

Right, better get back to work.