Merry Mabon (preserving log)

Dressed the altar for Mabon today, a day or two early. I’ll continue to add to it as the season progresses. I bought these Japanese lanterns from a nearby farm stand, but they also had the live plants, and I bought a few and planted them in my garden. Hopefully next year I can harvest some of my own. I also want to add more seasonal plants - I like the red amaranth and yellow tansy at this time of year. 

It was an “on” year for the Italian plum tree. There are still hundreds of plums on it - falling fast - but I think I am done with plums for the year. In addition to eating them fresh until I was sick them, I dehydrated a gallon sized ziploc bag full and made twelve half-pints of plum jam. 

Actually, my mom and I made the jam together and it was really nice. She’s amazing, she doesn’t use pectin and her jam always turns out perfectly. She uses her own system for eyeballing when the sugar syrup is ready - she says it will jell when it looks like “King Farouk on a barstool,” which is to say when there are two side by side drips coming off the spoon instead of only one. 

I also canned six pints of salsa ranchera and six pints of regular tomato sauce, and smoked two sockeye salmon. The main harvest left is the pears, but it wasn’t a very good year for pears and there arent a ton of them, for once.