Bumblebees and Jam-making

It's been a bumper year for fruit. A mild March meant that bumblebee queen's came out of hibernation early, made nests and began their colonies. The queen is the only bumblebee that survives the Winter, she has a sac of stored sperm from males that died last Autumn and when the warmth of Spring arrives she begins a new brood, determining the sex of each of her offspring. The new workers, mostly females, emerge to collect nectar from the blossoming plants, pollinating them too. Our good early Spring was followed by a long, warm Summer and hedgerows and trees became filled with ripe fruit. The bees had done their work well.

Early in September, T and I picked ten pounds of blackberries in around an hour and left many more still ripening. Back home we combined our spoils with the same quantity of apples from my garden (another good crop despite the heavy pruning I gave the tree in January) and made jam. The recipe called for the same weight of sugar as fruit, but we couldn't countenance putting so much in. We decided to try half the weight of the fruit and poured in five kilos of sugar with added pectin. Even then it seemed a lot.

We had some problems boiling this thirty pounds of mixture. I had a huge pot, but it became too full and the jam mixture splashed out across the cooker, up the wall and onto my hands. I didn't realise you could get nasty burns from hot jam. So we split the mixture and boiled each hard for over ten minutes, my hands in oven gloves this time. The jam seemed to set okay when we tried it on a saucer, so we bottled it. The next day we opened a jar and found the jam was only semi-set, but with a great rich fruit (rather than sugary) flavour. I've been eating our blackberry and apple jam every day since on my toast.

Another of the good things about foraging and jam-making is that it enables your entrance into the local exchange economy. You give a pot of jam or a bag of apples to a neighbour, and at some future point you will receive in kind. Yesterday a neighbour brought me a big bag of damsons. Today I'm going to combine these with the blackberries that T and I picked a week or so ago on our latest foraging trip (and froze) and have another go at jam-making. I'll still only put in half the sugar, but this time I'll add the juice of a couple of lemons to help the jam set. I wonder what damson and blackberry jam tastes like?