Scottish Multimedia | How to Make Crab Apple and Rosehip Jelly

 

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How to Make Crab Apple and Rosehip Jelly

20 Oct 2015

Environmental art, fuel and food foraging, preserving and preparing for the winter - that's what autumn is all about - being prepared. How to make crab apple and rosehip jelly is a handy skill to have, especially as the recipe can be adapted into foraged or hedgerow jelly.

Mr Ecoarts has been hard at work getting 'The Galloway' reassembled and set into its permanent position at Frugaldom. Now, it takes pride of place, rearing from it's recycled tractor tyre plinth in the middle of the garden area, where we hope to incorporate some seating in the future, as part of our Garden of Gratitude project.

The Galloway is an almost forgotten breed of horse that once roamed the Galloway and Lowther hills. These little horses and ponies became world famous for their surefootedness, speed and endurance and through selective breeding to imported Arabian and Turkish warm-blooded horses, were eventually bred into extinction. However, their bloodline lives on - in almost every racehorse that wins on any race track almost anywhere in the world thanks to the great 'Eclipse'. Likewise with trotters, pacers and polo ponies, by way of the great Hambletonian. In fact, trace back any great horse pedigree and the chances are that you'll find a Lowther or Galloway name somewhere at the root of it, as these fabulous horses were bred to many of the royal mares that visited Britain during the 17th Century.

Keeping with the Galloway theme, we are hoping to plant a small orchard of Galloway Pippin apple trees in the near future - finding a local supplier is proving to be quite a task, so please do get in contact if you know of anyone. In the meantime, we are harvesting a selection of crab apples, including the tiny but bountiful Siberian crabapples - they are smaller than many of the rose hips

HOW TO MAKE ROSE HIP AND APPLE JELLY

I picked a couple of kilos of assorted crab apples and rose hips, which were all topped, tailed and thrown into a big pot with about a litre of water and left to simmer until all the fruit and berries were soft. You can do similar with most foraged fruit and berries for making hedgerow jellies and jams.

Having stewed down the fruit, I strained it through a sieve lined with a piece of muslin - I didn't leave it dripping overnight, I just squeezed through the juices and ended up with 700ml of liquid, which I returned to the pan and added 500g of ordinary granulated sugar, stirred until it all dissolved and then brought it to a rolling boil, keeping it boiling vigorously for 10 minutes.

I prepared 2 jam jars by scalding them in boiling water and tipped the jelly into the hot jars. This was enough for one large and one small jar of jelly from this amount and it set to a lovely consistency, ideal for serving as an accompaniment or even for spreading on toast.

The above has now been added to the stores of blackcurrant and other assorted fruit jams and jellies that have been made whenever fruit or berries are plentiful and sugar is relatively inexpensive. At 39p per kilo at the moment, I would call it downright cheap - a frugaler's dream and time to stock up in plentiful supplies wherever and whenever possible. As all good frugalers know - there is no sell by or best before date on sugar - if it's stored cool and dry, it can last a lifetime.

Hope this helps someone and if anyone is within easy reach of Frugaldom, get in contact - we have plenty of crab apples and berries growing about the place.

Scottish Multimedia | How to Make Crab Apple and Rosehip Jelly

Foraging for Frugal Food

  
Foraging for Frugal Food

Colourful, nutritious, tasty and free!

Foraged fruit and berries are brilliant. I had vowed that I wouldn't do any foraging this year, as I still have a shelf filled with assorted jams and jellies to use, plus tubs of garden-grown fruit in the freezer, but today's walk proved to be too tempting. Read more

 

NYK, Frugaldom

Rosehips aplenty and chilli peppers, too!

Cacophony of Colour - so vibrant, you can almost hear it!

Who said red and green should never be seen? I decided to take a walk down the garden to see how everything had faired after the day of drizzle we had yesterday. The assortment of shrubs that cascade over the south-facing wall mean that it is now awash with colour, transformed from the former pinks and yellows to vibrant reds, greens and deep purple berries. These rosehips are particularly spectacular, huge orbs of glossy red against a background of healthy foliage. There are still a few pink flowers scattered among them, Dog Roses, I think. Thoughts of what I can do to preserve these are on my mind.

Along the way, you come to the more muted, gentler shades of the fragrant sweet peas. I thought I had left these too late in sowing the seeds for us to benefit from such a colourful display, but they have battled on relentlessly and are now producing an array of pastel shades ranging from buttermilk through pink to deep maroon. Some of them appear almost frosted with their two-tone pink and white flowers.

But it's the rosehips that have taken today's vote, as there are just so many of them.

I wonder if these will still be here when the elderberries, haws and blackberries arrive? Hedgerow jelly is one of the favourites in this frugal household. Memories of rosehip syrup are springing to mind, but I haven't ever tried making. I wonder if I should? What else can be done with rosehips?

You can still see quite a few of the pale pink flowers on this particular bush, so I am guessing there are plenty more hips to come. Hopefully, this display is not some sort of forewarning for a treacherous winter!

In one of the little raised beds - made from a discarded chest of drawers - the leeks are beginning to resemble what they should. Despite weeding this bed almost every time I pass it, there are still telltale signs of what has shot up through the soil over the past two days.

Previously, I didin't bother much with leeks but, like the brussel sprouts, we will learn to love them. Autumn and winter evenings need a bowl of warming homemade soup and I have had great success in the past freezing these to use as and when required.

All going well, there should be enough here to see us through to next year's crop with enough surplus to trade with friends and neighbours.

I have never had great success with tomatoes, mainly owing to the fact that I either haven't had the space to grow them, the weather has been awful or else we have been preparing to move house each time tomato season came around.

This year, having yet again moved house, there was no time or space to organise the construction of a greenhouse, so these tomatoes - 6 plants I traded inwards through LETS - are sitting outside with a strip of metre high plastic across the front of their pots. It seems to have done the trick, but that's probably more to do with the fact that we've had such good weather for the past couple of months than anything else. Alongside these, I have some Cape Gooseberries, which are now flowering and beginning to set fruit.

Our latest housemove, which will hopefully be our last, has found us in a street of like-minded people who all take great pride in their gardens. They really are a lovely bunch of neighbours, we couldn't have asked for better.

Surplus produce and plants are happily exchanged and it isn't unusual to see folks walking along the street carrying some form of fruit, vegetable or plant. It's a great little place - very friendly and very welcoming!

Just yesterday, I received a knock on the front door and opened it to find someone bringing me surplus blackcurrants, which I'll probably make into jam or apple and blackcurrant pie filling. In exchange, I hope said neighbour is happy sampling their dozen fresh quail eggs that I was able to offer them.

Indoors, on the kitchen windowsill, I have my three pepper plants - one, a much appreciated gift from friends who were visiting and the others given to me by fellow LETS members.

This is the Jalopeno pepper - a type of chilli - that has started producing quite a few long, green fruits. I daren't taste them, as they're too hot for me, but I will be using them in whatever Tex-Mex meals I make in future. Stir fried with other veg and served with chicken in a warm, homemade tortilla dressed with salsa, mayo and cheese, these are delicious.

This is my Apache chilli pepper, the one that arrived through the post from the friends who had been to visit us last month.

This is a lovely plant, which sits neatly in the middle of the windowsill in it's own little tin bucket. In the brief time that I've had it, the many flowers and tiny peppers have developed quickly and now range through all stages of the growing/ripening process. It is absolutely dripping in fruit.

Again, these will be used in chilli type dishes, added as extra spicy topping to homemade pizza and I'll be drying all the extras for storing. If I'm lucky, I'll save some seeds to sow next year, but will also attempt to over winter the plants in the hope that they see us through a second year. My sweet pepper is just beginning to flower, so I didn't bother photographing that, maybe next time.

The whole house now smells of sweet peas, as I'm clipping a few flowers every other day to keep in small vases in each of the main rooms. They certainly smell much nicer than any chemically manufactured spray, block or gel and I haven't ever found myself sneezing at these.

Who needs air freshener, or even perfume, when the garden can produce such fragrant flowers? It reminds me of the times when we used to soak the rose petals to make homemade prefume many, many years ago. I wonder how easy it would be to dry some of these for pot pourri?

I promised myself that I would try to keep the blog up to date even when there was no significant progress in the Frugaldom microholding, but seeing these photographs reminds me firmly that every day is a day of progress. Afterall, this time last year, we had not the slightest inclination that we'd have moved house again, nor had we even considered the possibility that we'd have bought a place like this. 

Never give up on your dream. In frugaldom, every penny counts and a penny saved is always seen as a penny earned. Visit our frugal living forums HERE and share your frugal exploits with others who are all in pursuit of their own dreams. Being rich doesn't need to mean having money- see you there!

Edited in: I came back to edit this part in - after catching up on a few other blogs, this ties in nicely with today's topic, so I'm going to give it a go. Chocolate Log Blog: We Should Cocoa - the August Challenge.