Watermelon Jelly (Part 2) and Other Stories....

The water bath is heating up and the lids are sterilizing
in a sauce pan. I'm stirring watermelon juice, vinegar,
sugar, grated ginger, and pectin.

First, some storytelling: "The Unnatural History of Brown's Island" was the featured story at Fiction365.com on Saturday. I hesistate to call my Brown's Island story 'new', since I wrote it in January 2010 and have been sitting on it, like it's an egg, ever since. The story itself, although fictional, is based largely on local legend and some fact, since there was indeed a deadly explosion there just before Christmas in 1972.

In other news, food preservation continues! I started watermelon jelly on Monday and finished it on Tuesday afternoon. In fact, I was

washing dishes just as Michael came home from work, and that left our evening free to attack the other things that needed to be taken care of, namely, carrots. Michael got a fannyload of them on Sunday by digging them up with the potato fork. Last night, we washed, trimmed, scraped and re-washed the carrots before raw packing them and getting them into the pressure canner....pictures of the productivity follow, just below: 

Just out of the canner! Watermelon-ginger jelly.



Rainbow carrots, being peeled and chopped.



The smaller carrots got their own jar.

We chopped the larger ones.



Fresh out of the pressure canner!



A long view of Tuesday's productivity...is that a
ghost in the image, or is our jar just steaming?