Harvesting time continues everywhere as the gardening season is midway now, so today I'd like to show you what we've been doing these days.
Last time I showed you a photo of one raspberry. Yesterday was the harvest day and I got to collect the raspberries for the first time this year.
Raspberry harvest can last for a couple of months as the fruits don't ripen at the same time. Yesterday was able to harvest what you see in that bowl and this morning, maybe a quarter of what you see in the photo above.
This quantity alone is not enough to start making jam and because my storage room is full of jams anyway, we thought it would be nice to make some raspberry liqueur. So here's the jar that I made yesterday. That is raspberry and sugar added.
The sugar melted overnight, so I added 96% alcohol and will stay like that for 7 to 10 days, after which it has to be filtered and it's ready. It's an easy process, the only thing you have to avoid is fermentation.
This is my dad's collection, he says this is natural medicine. Obviously he's joking as he's not drinking either, unless occasionally when he has guests, but this joke is a real one around here. My uncle has a whole cellar full of this kind of "natural medicine", as a preventive measure, in case he gets sick.
These are all homemade, but only part of the raw material is homegrown. I mean the fruits are from the garden, but the alcohol is not. Making alcohol in Romania is against the law, unless you are authorized and have a permit. We're not interested in that, so we're purchasing the alcohol and make these liqueurs just for fun. The majority is always gifted as people love homemade products. I'm putting a couple of bottles aside for myself as well, when I'll have guests and want to serve them something special.
Harvesting did not stop at the raspberry. This is the yellow onion as we call it. These were ripe already and needed to be harvested as leaving them in the ground would lead to rotting.
This is the red one, much less than the yellow but the majority of the red is still in the ground. These onions look awful at this point as are dirty, but they need to dry now, which means after a couple of weeks the outer layer will be completely dry and can be peeled off. That's when you'll get the clean onion.
Candid Camera 😂
Ok, what comes now is not exactly candid camera as everyone saw me taking the photos and also got permission, but these fruits and veggies are not ours. Yesterday when visiting the neighbor, I saw a good occasion to photograph what we don't have.
He has a pear tree, full of cute pears like these one. This year is a good one as there were so many fruits on the tree, he had to pick a part and throw them away as the branches would have broken under so much weight. These are the pears we use to make the pear liqueur. That is a tricky process as you have to tie the bottle to the branch, with the very small pear in it and wait till the pear grows. The take it off and fill it with alcohol. By that time, the pear will be way bigger than the bottleneck and that's the whole point of tying the bottle to the branch with the little pear in it.
Plums will be plenty this year and I suppose we're going to get some, as always.
What you see here is kind of a miracle as even though we also have cherry tomatoes, not like these. Usually there are less on one stem, or shoot or whatever you call that. This is kind of the miracle.
Don't get fooled as this is a cherry tomato close-up and this tomato is the a size of a ping-pong ball 😏 but it looks nice.
