I made another batch of peach leather, this time not as a side project to canning peaches. Yield: one big mesh orange bag of windfalls makes five trays of peach leather. Remember to line the trays with the drying mesh and the parchment. The mesh orange bag is for selling ten pounds of oranges, but peaches are much denser than oranges because of ( Read more... )

Let's see. Canned plums, check: plum jelly, check. Chinese plum sauce, check: dried plums, check. Plum wine: in primary fermentation. Nice fellow will move to under apple tree tomorrow. I think there are enough good plums still on the tree for me to make more of the plum sauce (it's really good, though it's a color that would frighten you if ( Read more... )

I was thinking that what's going on with my trees is plum pox.  There is only one treatment: eradication.  Which means sanitary removal of the trees as soon as the plum is stripped.  But according to everything I've read there is no plum pox in California and nobody expects it any time soon.

Then what I thought was that what both the apricot and the ( Read more... )

I think my plum and apricot hybridized this year. The apricots and plums were both milder in flavor. The apricots never got to the melt-in-your mouth stage. The plums mostly have a dapply, pluot-looking skin. They're right next to each other. Most years they overlap in bloom time, but this year they overlapped a lot more. I keep hurting my head ( Read more... )

Well, that was fast. I'm up to the last chapter again. I've added maybe as much as 3.5K, removed no more than 1K (it's looking like it will come in just under 85K, which I think is good for this kind of fluff. And yes, it's fluff). I'm stopping before I get to the part that I was having trouble with, because I want to be fresh when I do it. ( Read more... )

The nice fellow turned off the water to work on the loud noise the pipes make when the toilet is flushed (I don't say "hammering" because it doesn't fit the description the do it yourself people use for that syndrome). But he didn't manage to fix the problem and the water stayed off ( Read more... )

1. The Namenda (anti-dementia drug) is working for Gloria. She's much more with-it that she was a week ago. However, this is not a magic cure, and the inevitable direction of things is the same ( Read more... )