The Life of the Individual

Partially inspired by Green Bean Dreams' Bookworm Challenge, I've had a great time reading books about families who made the move from one way of life--one that only taxed their brains--to a more sustainable one that put their beliefs into practice.

There are a lot of open paths. Path to Freedom, the granddaddy of homesteading blogs, shows how to do it in an urban setting. Crunchy and Melinda do it in Seattle. Colin and his family are at it in a high-rise in Manhattan. Madeline shows us how when you live in the boonies outside a big city. Sharon and Greenpa teach us what to do in the country. You can do it in the suburbs. You can even do it in the desert. And there are so many more ways!

But for those who want to curl up with a good book rather than a laptop, I have a few to recommend:

Logan Ward's See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America was a surprisingly wonderful read. I had not heard of the book before I randomly stumbled across it, and it is published by a relatively little-known press. Logan and his wife and young child move from New York City to a farm in a rural area of Virgina. They decide to spend one year living with only the tools available to a person one hundred years ago. While they are a very modern family with very modern issues sometimes, they go through daily life growing their own food, putting it up for the winter, learning to travel by horse and bicycle, living without electricity, mass-market toothpaste, and running water. What they make themselves comes to the fore--including the community they find themselves creating in their rural town. One of the most interesting sections of the book is how they deal with the tragedy of 9/11, which occurs during their 1900 year. Highly recommended as thoughtful but light reading. Perfect for an afternoon in the shade.

A less appealing but equally interesting book is A Reasonable Life: Toward a Simpler, Secure, More Humane Existence by Ferenc Mate. The author, in a very edgy funny-if-you-are-not-too-sensitive attack on modernity and all of us who make any compromises with it, engages some fascinating issues but offers answers that sound awfully off-putting. For example, I am probably as anti-television as he is (sorry, Carrie!), but being bombarded with writing like "Open an upstairs window...and throw the heinous sonovabitch as far as your arms let you!" makes me want to rebel and go buy one. Mate has a lot of interesting insights--and if you handle this style better than I do, let me know what you think. I know I am not really being fair to him, given that I've heard others say that this book has transformed their lives.

I was similarly unimpressed with Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City. Although the authors' tone is respectful throughout, they wind up sounding a bit self-important and preachy. I don't exactly blame them: their task writing this book is a really difficult one. When authors set out to show you how to do better, it is often difficult to take. On the other hand, when authors detail their own path--especially if it is a pretty bumpy path--toward trying to make a more authentic life, it can be utterly charming. This book, much to my disappointment, comes across as an example of the first kind of book. But it is filled with a lot of very interesting ideas to transform your life without moving to a farm or something. The choices open to them in southern California are radically different from what I have in the DC area, but many ideas are applicable nonetheless. Glad I read it, but don't plan your vacation reading around this one.

We also reread parts--the "spring planting" chapters--of Barbara Kingsolver's fabulous Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life last month, too--always a joy and an inspiration. Kingsolver is an elegant writer with a wickedly funny edge sometimes, and even when she is talking about how amazing her life is, she sounds real and down-to-earth. Her partner writes short political essays scattered throughout, and her daughter writes up recipes and reminiscences. This book is absolutely a must-read, and a must-read-again.

Another lovely book I briefly revisited this season is Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. The authors (from British Columbia) are much stricter in their eat-local rules than Kingsolver is. Where she uses eating local as an entree (sorry) into the connection between culture and agriculture, they explore more precisely what the consequences as well as the joys of a local economy are. Well written and very funny.

Up soon on my nightstand: Michael Pollan's pre-Omnivore book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. Has anyone read it? Any reviews? Or does anyone have any other book recommendations for me?

Local, but Not From Here

There has been a very interesting discussion among the participants of One Local Summer about what defines a diet as local. Joy has a lovely post outlining some of the most central issues. For example, she discusses the conflict between buying nonlocal organic versus local nonorganic, nonlocal grassfed versus local grainfed, locally milled or packaged but not locally grown grains and beans, etc. I recommend her totally non-preachy exploration of these issues.

We are lucky enough to have access to several different all-local farmers markets, organic-style (meaning not always certified) produce from our CSA and several booths, and an organic-style pasture-fed farm source for meat and dairy products. We even can get maple sugar, maple syrup, honey, candles, and soap at our local farmers market.

Grain has not been nearly so easy. This year we bought some non-local bulk grain and a small hand-cranked grain mill--and what we produce from that we count in our local diet--but this is not necessarily something everybody else would allow.

We've also allowed ourselves--no, encouraged ourselves--to buy local foods in the places we travel. We've brought home rice and tea from South Carolina, grits and chow-chow from North Carolina, peanuts from Virginia, maple syrup and cheese from Vermont, current cordial from Quebec, and wine from the state of Washington. Are these local? They were when we bought them... Does that count? Well, it does for us.

* * *

Buying local foods supports one's local economy and helps it further develop. If the local food is from the places we are visiting, it still supports the local economy there. If our major issue is creating food security where we live, channeling money into other localities does not help at all--but obviously it is important to help others create food security where they are. So we feel pretty good about our purchases--in addition to enjoying one of the most tangible expressions of the culture of these other places: food.

Eating local also reduces the amount of petroleum products that have to be used up to bring us food from around the world which is out of season for us or that cannot be (or just isn't) grown here. When we bring home food from vacation or buy grain in bulk from a non-local source, we're adding in that petroleum, although perhaps there is an argument that the oil is not as high as it might be otherwise. I'm not sure about that, though.

One of the things I'm most drawn to is the goal of making my purchases from non-corporate sources, whether they are local or not. Although there are a few very large food companies that are located in our area, we typically don't count their food as truly local.

* * *

All these issues swim around in my head when I contemplate ordering online tepary beans. The beans, deeply local to the place from which I order, will be trucked and trained across the United States to my doorway. This is not in our local diet rules--but in a way much more profound than are the greenhouse tomatoes that show up in early June in Maryland, these beans are indeed local.



Tepary beans, once a staple in the Sonoran Desert and throughout Mesoamerica, are one of North America's oldest native crops and are now members of Slow Food USA's Ark of Taste. They have been cultivated for more than 8,000 years. You can read more about the history of this crop in Gary Paul Nabhan's wonderful Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods and also his Gathering the Desert.

Tepary beans are considered by many to be the most drought-tolerant annual legume in the world. They are capable of producing a harvest of beans with a single rain in the harshest conditions. When irrigated, they produce higher yields only up to a certain point, after which excess moisture becomes a detriment and leads to overproduction of foliage and low bean production. In fact, it appears that moisture stress is necessary to trigger fruiting. As water shortages become a reality in many parts of the U.S. and around the world, teparies can play an important role in dryland agriculture. In fact, tepary cultivation is now taking place in dry areas of Africa and is being revived in southern Arizona where it was quite common as recently as seventy years ago.

The tepary bean has a higher protein content (23–30%) than common beans such as pinto, kidney, navy, and even soy. It also has higher levels of calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, and potassium. While higher in all of these desired nutrients, tepary beans are lower in polyunsaturated fat and in the anti-enzymatic compounds which make common beans hard to digest.

Many native people in the Sonora Desert once depended on teparies along with other high fiber and mucilaginous foods, such as cactus and mesquite, as dietary staples. As these native people gradually abandoned their native foods and embraced a highly-processed "Western" diet, type-2 diabetes diagnoses soared. In some native populations, diabetes is fifteen times the national average. Tepary beans seem to be an ideal food for people prone to diabetes (or living with diabetes) since tepary bean sugars are released slowly and steadily. Many reservations in southern Arizona have re-embraced the tepary bean and now cultivate the beans for their own use, as well as for sale to support the community.

The teparies we have are from a community- based organization dedicated to creating cultural revitalization, community health and sustainable development within the Tohono O'odham Nation. The Tohono O'odham (formerly known as Papago) Nation sits in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, sixty miles west of Tucson, Arizona. Approximately 18,000 of the tribe's 24,000 members live on this main section of the Tohono O'odham Reservation.

Check out Heritage Foods USA for the sale of this product and other community-supporting foods.

Apron Strings

--picture from the lovely Fresh Figs



David’s parents are visiting right now, a few days in to an eight-day trip. The weather is miserably hot and humid here (high 90s on both fronts)--doing nothing to prevent tensions from being higher than they ought to be.

Grandma and Grandpa are wonderful people. They not only humor but support us in all the crazy things we do, and they care passionately about our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our child.

But we have our conflicts, as it seems all families do. We live pretty different lives and feel connected to pretty different things—although honestly, the differences are often really small once you look to the big picture. (I like every vegetable and spice I have tried or haven’t tried, while they like stuff they know and stuff that isn’t green. They like Clinton and I like Obama. Can’t we all just get along?!)

I think many of my own issues are related in culture clash. Having grown up in the South with one set of manners quite at odds with their New York set of manners (and don’t say this is an oxymoron as it will only encourage me), I often feel that they’ve deliberately been rude to me or to someone else they care about or even to a stranger--when they had no such motivation.

The other big issue for me is personality. I want to think about ideas and discuss complexity absolutely to death. I grew up with a family that worked in precisely this way. David, at least usually, is also fed by that kind of discussion. But not everybody loves it. Some people are much more content without big issues and complex ideas constantly on the table.

*

David, Son, and I watched the first season of the Waltons recently. As a child raised basically without television, I managed to see an awful lot of Mr. Rogers, Little House on the Prairie, the Watergate Hearings, and the Waltons—that wonderfully gentle series about a young writer growing up in Depression-era Appalachia with his large family.

John-boy’s grandparents lived with the rest of his family. Mother Olivia lived every day with her mother-in-law--a kind but very strong-willed no-nonsense woman named Esther--in the same house.



Clearly Olivia is, in addition to being a child’s fictionalized memory of perfection, a much better person than I. She is calm and kind in the face of great adversity, self-reliant during the era of the Depression, and thin and beautiful and not even gray-haired. All after giving birth to seven children, rearing them, and surviving polio on top of it. I am none of these. (I think I identify with Esther more than I do with Olivia.)

But I think there is something else about the relationship between Olivia and Esther. They lived a life where the two of them worked together—HAD to work together—to assure the survival of their family. They gardened together, picked together, cooked from scratch together, and put up food for the winter. They washed and ironed, mended, quilted, made clothes, etc. together. They had a common purpose--one that meant they not only had the same experiences but knew it was only by working together in harmony that they could sustain the whole clan. This sense of shared purpose seems to make an enormous difference. I'm struck by how much their days are defined by pulling on their aprons, tying the strings, and getting to work--together.

I don't want to romanticize what they did. It was incredibly hard work, work that must have been anything but rewarding much of the time. (You spend thirty minutes washing the dishes and they immediately seem to get dirty again. Then you do it again, and again--pausing long enough to do the same with the clothes in the other washtub.) It was a time and place of firm gender roles that did not allow Olivia or Esther to make any significant choices about what work they did.

But it did foster connection, and it is for that that I hunger.

*

Right now, David and Son are with Grandma and Grandpa at the movies. I sit in Borders' air conditioning (which we don’t have at home) finishing Son’s homeschool review.

I picked up a lovely apron (although not nearly as lovely as the one I linked to above!) to put on my café table while I write. I am not planning to purchase it, but looking at it reminds me to have more patience.

To keep quiet and calm. To be a lot more grateful for all this extended family is.

To learn to work together—even if it doesn’t mean the same thing that it meant for Olivia and Esther.

To put this cloth over my head, wrap it around my self, and tie the strings as we go forward.

Growing Local

Today, in honor of the first week of One Local Summer which asks participants to document a meal a week made with local ingredients, I present:



Ground beef patties (from our farm source)
stuffed with onions and flavored with horseradish (both from the farmer's market)
Roasted radishes (from our garden)
Stir-fried radish tops (pretty tasty!)
Whole wheat bread, homemade with wheat we ground ourselves

A simple meal--but the novelty of cooking radishes (which I have only had raw) and also eating their greens definitely made it seem a bit adventurous.

I can't want to read about other people's local meals. What are you cooking and/or growing?

A New Eden

I dreamed of Richard Heinberg.

(Doesn't everyone? The guy is a genius.)



Yes, he's sexy, but it was not that kind of dream....

I sit in the audience at a talk. He says brilliant thing after brilliant thing.

I am following, only a step and a half behind him.

I ask a question. I almost understand.

He pauses.

He says, after the pause, "OH!"

He pauses again.

He says:

"Well--what you are wondering about is just XYZ, obviously...

...but your question made me UNDERSTAND

how to UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
AND SOLVE ITS PROBLEMS
IN THE PAST,
PRESENT,
AND FUTURE!"

I awaken,
wondering
what it is I want
to be
in this life
I am dreaming about.

Knitting Together

Both Son and David have the washcloth bug too! They are knitting from the same big ball of cotton yarn--Son from the inside and David from the outside.

Here, while Son works on a garter stitch square, David tries out Mason-Dixon's ball-band dishcloth. (I linked to the free pattern, but check out these 2600-plus examples, too, if you are on Ravelry.)

Here is David's finished cloth (about an hour later) being used by Son as a hot mitt so he could pour our evening chai:

Yes, We Can!

After seeing this beautiful homemade sign for Obama, the message resonated so deeply that I had to go home and prove it to myself.

Yes, we can! On to Victory!

He can. I can. In fact, here are the seven half-pints of Strawberry Rhubarb Jam that I canned just this weekend:



And yes, the tomatoes are still sitting on the table behind the jam. I remind myself: "YES WE CAN!"

The New 'It' Girl.

Yup. I've been tagged.

Quite often when I am tagged for blog memes, I postpone writing the answer until I just eventually forget about it. I would really try to forget this one too-- but each time I do, yet another person tags me for the same game.

So here are some answers for you:


1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

1. Trying to decide whether to try to get pregnant at the end of the summer. (I did.)
2. Trying to finish my dissertation before getting pregnant. (I did not.)
3. Trying to read the entire oeuvre of Amanda Cross, author of mystery novels about that great academic sleuth Kate Fansler. (I did read them all--and perhaps that is related to why I failed that year to finish my dissertation. Of course, all-day morning sickness also contributed.)




2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?

#1 – Knit yet another dishcloth, my current obsession (which started Saturday evening). Convince myself to sew in ends. (Something inside must be screaming for simplicity.)
#2 – Try to come to terms with all those "used" (ie, seconds) tomatoes rotting next to the canning jars on the kitchen table.
#3 – Wash my hair before tonight's all important social engagement: knitting group!
#4 – Water the wee corn spears struggling to survive in their fight against the very hungry neighborhood squirrels.
#5 – Read all three long books due back to the library this evening.


3) Snacks I enjoy:

Anything with alcohol. Gin and Tonics. French 75s. Dirty Martinis. Sidecars with good brandy.
Anything with fat and salt. Yummm. Example: the eggplant fries I often get at Adega, the wine bar where my knitting group meets tonight... Yummm...


4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Parent. Write. Read. Knit. Spin. Garden. Cook. Try to live simply and sustainably.
Then, create a space of my own where I can escape from parenting to write, read, knit, and spin. Have more space for both cooking and gardening. And keep chickens in the outdoor space I don't need for digging.

5) Places I have lived:

Born in North Carolina, then moved to my parents' hometown in South Carolina for high school. (My parents still tease me about being a Yankee since I was born a few miles over the border of SC in NC.) Went to college in Massachusetts. (Lost most of my accent after the first three and a half years. Only got to enjoy not being told to "say it again!" for one semester.) Went to graduate school in Pennsylvania. Got a job in Washington, DC where I lived for two years before moving to an old hippie inner suburb in Maryland. (I can walk to DC in ten minutes.)

6) Jobs I have had:

1. 1976: Fortune Teller at elementary school Halloween fair. I read palms and also performed scrying in a bowl of water. (Unfortunately, I lost the touch before I learned how to make this talent pay.)
2. 1978: Babysitter--long enough to save up for a very fancy bright blue bicycle with a basket on the front and a squeeze horn. (It was stolen the day after I bought it.)
3. 1980: Princess Leia at a picture booth at an amusement park. (Check out your vacation shots from your summer at the beach in 1980. That girl with the spiral braids pinned to her ears? Me. And it was my real hair, too.)
4. 1982: Iced Tea girl at a chain steakhouse during the summers.
5. 1984: Afterschool all-purpose flunkie for a tiny real estate agency. I learned how to type for the two young men who ran the company, and got propositioned for the first time. And the second time.
6. 1986: Housing coordinator for visiting applicants at my college. Whenever I was stuck with too many prefrosh wanting housing, I would call on the volunteer who filled out the form as "Jamie!"--complete with the exclamation point. Still don't know if it was a male or a female, but s/he never turned me down.
7. Teacher (and writer) for all of my semi-adult and adult life--at places as diverse as a summer camp for the heinously gifted, a university for deaf students, and a class with only one pupil. The latter continues. It is the job I have most enjoyed out of all of them--and also the easiest, since the pupil (my 9yo son) does most of the teaching himself.


Out of respect for the fact that everybody I read seems to have been tagged already, I'll just let things die over in this corner....

All in a Homeschool Afternoon

or, The Fire Next Time

Son finished his afternoon quiet-time reading before I finished my afternoon's writing project (reviewing an article for an academic journal). As I stared at the computer in my study, he stuck his head in and asked if it would be OK for him to try to start a fire in the front yard with a magnifying glass.

"Uh huh," I responded blankly. "Sure." I'm not absolutely sure that my brain perceived what the question was, but even if it did, I think I would have said yes. (I mean, that magnifying glass trick doesn't actually WORK, does it?) "I'll be with you soon," I mumbled.



I go back to my work and loose track of time. Suddenly:

"I did it! FIRE! FIRE!"





Quick--get the camera: Science! Our county homeschool review is next week!

* * *

P.S.

I realize now that some of you may be confused by my choice of subtitle for this post. Others may find it, um, incendiary.

The Fire Next Time is a phenomenal book by James Baldwin, published in the early 1960s. It is a call to "end the racial nightmare" that he saw in the United States. My reference to the book is really for two reasons:

1. Baldwin points out how much power the "powerless" actually have to destroy this country if they continue to be oppressed: "The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and bring down the curtain on the American dream." While ignoring a child for an hour or two is in no way meant to be compared to racial oppression, I like the literalness of the "powerless" one's expression today.

2. One of Baldwin's other points is that until whites end domination and discrimination, they will be intellectually enslaved themselves. It is only through efforts to create a multi-racial society based on full equality and connection that America can become a great nation. I believe the same is true of parenting and homeschooling: it is only through recognizing the
integral worth of children, and recognizing the importance of their abilities to make decisions, that adults can be free--and families and communities made whole.

Eating at Home

Preparing ourselves for the annual return of One Local Summer,
we had a fabulous local meal--actually, another one that went a little beyond just "local".



On the menu:

Salad all grown in our garden, with a dressing made from rice vinegar marinated with our own chive blossoms and a bit of non-local olive oil.

Potatoes from the farmer's market, dressed with sour cream from our dairy supplier.

Hamburgers made with local beef, flavored with some of the last of our home-dried tomatoes mixed in before cooking.

We served the hamburgers on homemade whole-wheat buns--from wheat we ground ourselves.



This was an intensely satisfying meal--one that fed us well in both body and spirit.

In the Sun

The weather this Memorial Day weekend has been glorious! We've spent almost all of it outside in the backyard, gardening and reading and celebrating.

On Saturday morning before we got to work finally putting in the tomato seedlings and the like, we heated up the solar oven...



...harvested some rapini...



and mixed up a crustless rapini quiche to have for lunch a couple of hours later. Using our own veggies as well as local eggs, milk, and cheese made this an exceptionally local lunch--one we cooked with only the sun's energy, and ate while basking in that same sun ourselves.




* * *

This is the first time I've ever grown potatoes--this time, just red new potatoes and yellow finn--and they are doing very well, at least on top of the ground:



We're also starting the grand experiment of a "three sisters" garden of corn, beans, and squash. We've chose to plant really interesting varieties: Mandan Bride corn which is edible fresh or dried and also makes a beautiful fall decoration, Delicata squash, and gorgeous Tiger's Eye beans meant for drying. I've never tried drying varieties of anything, and never grown corn at all. David created the mounds as part of his Mother's Day present (or at least he made them that day, which I took as a present). We planted the corn seeds a week or so later and now they are as high as a ... well, about as high as a squirrel's eye. By next week we should be able to plant the squash and beans.



* * *

Some garden treats don't require as much waiting as those crops do. We harvested a few radishes:



I love their color!

* * *

Although we've had sweet woodruff in a garden since we moved to this house ten years ago, we've never made May Wine until this year. We picked a few sprigs of the woodruff...



...and let it dry. We then soaked it in white wine overnight.

On Sunday evening, we lit the citronella candles and had our Earth Evening, and enjoyed our first taste. A strawberry crushed in a little sugar made a beautiful addition to the glass.



Even Son got to have a bit--his drink being May Tea instead of May Wine:



* * *

Today: off for a picnic at the farm of some friends!

Grinding our Own

Son asked for a rather unusual birthday present:



a grain grinder!

We've had a wonderful time grinding a wide variety of grains using the book Flour Power: A Guide To Modern Home Grain Milling as a guide. I've learned so much about how different kinds of flours work--and highly recommend this book to all bread bakers, whether or not they grind their own flour. Very cool.

We've tried our hands at corn, oats, rye, amaranth, millet, barley, rice, lentils, split peas, and of course a couple of kinds of wheat.

There is another attachment that you can use for rolling grains for oatmeal and the like--as well as an electric base for those not looking for the mild upper-body workout. I believe there are also another two attachments that allow you to grind meat, nuts, cheese and vegetables. This machine, the German-made Family Grain Mill is extremely easy to crank--even for Son's young friends. With corn, we had to send the grain through twice (the first time at a coarser setting)--but everything else is quite fine after just one time through.

The bread we've made so far is amazing. There is a freshness that I've rarely tasted in whole wheat bread--absolutely delectable.

And best of all, as long as we keep the hopper full of grains, visitors are so intrigued that they'll do all our grinding for us!

Now I just need to start growing my own grains...

Drying Up

or, Growing Your Own for back-to-basics food independence.


In what is already the beginning of our preparations for winter, we picked lemon balm, peppermint, and spearmint from our back yard and stuck the springs in the dehydrator for about twelve hours:



When the sprigs were dry, I pulled the leaves off the stems and piled them in an clean glass honey jar. It is about half full. After we fill it with another drying session, I'll put the jar in the basement until winter--a time when we will no longer have fresh herbs for our tea available just by opening the door.



Although the plant is very tiny at this point and not ready for any significant picking, we've just acquired stevia and look forward to using a few leaves to sweeten our fresh and dried herbal tea. Has anyone tried growing stevia? Any tips?

Dandy Lions

Last weekend, we had a lovely time celebrating the beginning of our CSA season. Red Wiggler sponsored a potluck muffin breakfast at the farm, allowing all the members to meet each other, get to know the growers (developmentally-disabled adults), and go on a tour of the farm.

One of the things I was most pleased to see is the enormous number of dandelions growing in fallow fields!

"Um..." you ask, tentatively. "Happy about dandelions?"



Thinking about food independence and going back to basics lately, I've been planning to make dandelion jelly. When the flowers were blooming in profusion around our neighborhood, I was busy with academic stuff, Passover, and an in-law visit--so I never got around to picking anything. On top of that, all the places with great profusions of dandelions seemed to be right along busy roads. I was hesitant to make jelly with that much car exhaust. Then--long before I expected them to, the dandelions disappeared and were replaced with new blooms of some other wild edible.

Well--when we saw the abundance in the organic fields at Red Wiggler, David reminded me that we had our marketing bags in the trunk of our car--and in the bags we had a couple of plastic quart containers (usually used for bulk grains or beans, or for small produce like strawberries) that could be useful in transporting the flowers.

With son's help, we filled up two quarts.

Then, basically following directions we found on the web, we removed all bits of green--or at least as much as we could--from the yellow petals. David is a pro at this job:



The job was a lot more time-consuming than we had imagined, so we alternated who did the picking and who did the entertaining. The one without yellow hands read aloud from a great book we just found: See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America, about a family who decide to leave New York to live on a Virginia farm as if they were in 1900. What a perfect read for those moments when you're doing projects like this together.

We poured boiling water over the blossoms and went to bed. The next morning, I strained the petals, added sugar and pectin and lemon juice, and boiled the mixture up while I sterilized the jelly jars. After they were filled, I stuck them in a hot-water cannerfor about ten minutes.

The jelly is a deep honey color--a little lighter than the picture shows but not by a whole lot. And the jelly tastes like a combination of honey and orange marmalade. Absolutely fantastic--and sweet enough to send you into a diabetic shock....