Making Strawberry Lemon Preserves

Last week, I hosted a canning workshop with my CSA… and it was a great time! We learned how to make strawberry lemon preserves, perfect for this time of year. It was a small turnout – 4 people plus myself and the teacher – but that made for a nice intimate gathering. We all learned a lot, and even after three years of canning, even I learned some important tips (and some in hindsight that seem like no-brainers). Canning 101 techniques are always good to revisit.

aj explaining something
Our teacher, AJ Simone

AJ had already combined the strawberries, lemon, and sugar and let them macerate for a day before the workshop. He mentioned that the CSA strawberries he used made a huge difference in the end product – they were far superior to supermarket strawberries. Of course, the strawberries we got from Hepworth Farms were simply incredible, and were probably the best strawberries I’ve eaten outside of the ones my grandfather used to grow in California.

strawberries and lemons cooking
Strawberries and lemons cooking

This collage shows the strawberry-lemon mixture from the initial draining, to the resulting juice that will boil down to a syrup, to the fruit cooking in the syrup.

The kitchen sure smelled amazing during this whole process.

Strawberry Lemon Preserves Processing Collage
Processing the strawberry lemon preserves

This collage shows the processing of the preserves, from spooning them into the sterilized jars, to screwing on the lids, to processing them in the hot water bath.  I’m fortunate to have a nice big pot for processing – a 16 quart stockpot! It gets used pretty much in the summer only (I bought it years ago on sale).

This is the final product:

the finished product - strawberry lemon preserves
The finished product - strawberry lemon preserves

This was one delicious batch of preserves. And look at that color! I loved the pure strawberry flavor combined with the tang of the lemon – it’s definitely not too sweet. And that’s understandable with the proportions in mind – 3 pounds of strawberries, 2 whole lemons, and only 1 1/2 cups of sugar. One can get away with a relatively low amount of sugar because pectin isn’t being used in this recipe.

This recipe makes about five half pint jars worth of preserves, but sometimes it can come out to 4.5, which is what happened to our batch. We ate the .5 amount, yum. AJ was an excellent teacher and I’m hoping we’ll see more workshops led by him in the future.

To learn how to make the preserves, head on over to AJ’s blog, Handjobs (For the Home), for the full recipe for strawberry lemon preserves. For a few more pictures, as well as full sizes of the images in this post, check out my photoset on Flickr: CSA Workshop – Making Strawberry Lemon Preserves.

Tree Pruning and the Promise of Future Fruit

pruning workshop sign

A couple of weeks ago my guy and I attended a tree pruning workshop as part of the Bronx Green-Up.

There are a number of fruit trees in our backyard that are quite overgrown and scraggly right now. They are so overgrown and scraggly that they will not efficiently bear fruit, so we won’t get to enjoy much of a harvest as a result. So, I wanted to learn how to prune the trees to improve the situation. Sure, I could ask my landlord to do it, but I thought it would be more fun to learn to do it myself.

The workshop was held at the El Girasol Garden on 138th Street. A woman named Sara Katz led the workshop. She is a community horticulturalist with the NY Botanical Garden. She educated us on basic pruning techniques, as well as why you prune and when.

So, why should we prune? Well, there are four primary reasons: 1) to increase air flow throughout the tree to avoid fungal disease, which can lead to rotting fruit; 2) to increase access to the sun by the fruit, which improves the quality of the fruit as well a their color; 3) to removed dead, diseased, and damaged branches/wood; and 4) to encourage the tree to have good form, which both pleases the eye and helps the tree remain stable and accessible.

garden through the trees

One of the things that mystified me was how to decide when to prune. Turns out late winter (right now!) is the best time to prune. When you prune in the late winter after the most intense cold has passed, the tree is less likely to sustain injury, like frostbite. Additionally, it’s just easier to see the shape and construction of the tree in winter because the leaves are all gone.

Sara gave us guidelines as to how much of the tree to prune:  never prune more than 1/3 of the living wood in any season; and it’s better to under-prune than over-prune. That being said, some trees are more vigorous than others, and can be pruned with more intensity. Stone fruit, like apricots, peaches, and plums can be pruned more aggressively than apple trees, because apricot trees grow faster than apple trees.

There are two main kinds of pruning cuts: thinning out cuts and heading back cuts. The purpose of thinning out cuts is to remove crowding in the tree, by removing a whole branch. Heading back cuts involve shortening the length of a branch, and consist of larger cuts. If done properly, the result of thinning out cuts is no new growth where the cut was made, and the result of heading back cut is to encourage growth and later fruiting from the cut point.

As far as pruning technique, clean cuts are very important.  Cut cleanly to the branch, and the tree will respond positively.  Messy cuts can cause problems later down the line.  Also, use different tools for live wood vs. dead wood: loppers and pruners for live wood, saws for dead wood.

garden sculpture

As far as tools, loppers are the pruners with a cutting tip attached to long handles.  Pruners are smaller, and fit into the hand; you often see people pruning rosebushes with these.  There are also tools with very long handles for higher reach, like to prune way up at the tippy top of the tree.

Probably the most challenging aspect of the afternoon for me was figuring out what exactly to prune.  A basic list is as follows:

  • Suckers or watersprouts. They are called watersprouts if they grow off of branches, and suckers if they grow up from the ground around the base of the tree.  They grow straight up and are pretty easy to spot.  They are vigorous growers and drain nutrients that the tree needs for fruit production.
  • Downward growing branches. They do nothing for the tree and should be removed.
  • Broken branches or stubs. Usually the result of earlier damage, such a storms, improper pruning, or a break.  Disease and/or insects use such places as an opportunity to set up shop, so it’s best to remove them.
  • Shaded interior branches. Since they won’t get much sun, the fruit they bear – if any – will be of lower quality.  Remove them.
  • Rubbing branches. When branches rub together, it injures their bark, which is an open invitation to insects or disease.  Make a heading cut (shorten the length of the branch) or simply remove one of the two branches.
  • Narrow crotches. This happens when a branch grows upwards instead of outwards.  This is not conducive to good form for the tree; the ideal crotch angle is 45-55 degrees.  Remove.
  • Competing leader. This usually occurs near the top of the tree, when a branch is allowed to grow taller than the central leader.  Such competition will cause the tree to grow unevenly, which makes the tree unstable.  A heading cut is the solution to this problem.

We now feel well-armed with knowledge and practical skills in basic tree pruning as a result of attending this workshop.  Our teacher was excellent and taught us a lot.  We look forward to pruning our fruit trees, and having an improved harvest compared to last year, which from all accounts was a meager one at best.

Future fruity NOMs are ours!

bronx sky