Gardening in Alaska : Fall bounty

Talk Dirt To Me

Do you love to make mud pies, grow a houseplant, eat veggies, or stop to smell the bouquet on your co-workers desk? Everyone enjoys a bit of green growing around him or her and then there are those that are passionate and needy when it comes to dabbling in the dirt. With this blog, we'll try to satisfy those needs and tell you about what's going on with the Anchorage gardening scene. You know, as I finally learned, it's all about the dirt.

Photographer and gardener Fran Durner (fdurner@adn.com) writes the blog.

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Fall bounty

Posted by talkdirt

Posted: September 7, 2008 - 5:01 pm

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Plump blueberries and two-handed pickin' on Peak 2 below Flattop. Photo by Fran DurnerI couldn't contain myself from bolting up the mountain in south east Anchorage as soon as possible on Saturday to try and get in some blueberries before it was too late. Surprisingly, it didn't look like I was getting in on the tail end of the harvest as I easily found a patch that afforded two-hand picking of the best kind. Lots of ripe, plump berries hung low on the bushes and soon my fingers were stained purple-red.

Racing home as soon as the container was filled, I shoved the blueberries into the fridge to clean in the morning and turned my attention to the raspberries I had been picking and preparing to make into jam.

Three cups of raspberry puree and three cups of rinsed berries were combined with three cups of sugar, simmered for thirty minutes and then a package of semi-sweet chocolate chips and a pinch of salt were stirred in til melted, ladled into sterilized jars and processed in a water bath for seven minutes.

This morning I spread a little of the leftover raspberry-chocolate jam onto a buttered English muffin - not bad!

Now - how do you think a blueberry chocolate jam would taste? Hmmmm.

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1 September 8, 2008 - 6:53am | rosmarinus

jams

I'd vote for your marmalades that you made with those fruits last year.

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September 10, 2008 - 2:05pm | tagalak

Ditto

I vote for the marmalade from last year, too.

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September 10, 2008 - 7:39pm | talkdirt