December dawned a little warmer than usual, but not much. There were cold spells with lows in the 20’s, and there were sprinklings of rain here an there. Most color had faded from my garden, save the last of the leaves to turn and fall: the leaves on my blackberry. Every year they are some of the last bits of red, yellow, orange, and green to leave my garden. I always enjoy seeing them. Meanwhile, the last of the tomatoes left on the vines withered away to nothing, but indoors I had one final round of fresh tomatoes that I’d picked green in November and that had ripened on my counter. Fresh garden tomatoes in December! John and I baked them with chickpeas and feta for a tasty meal.
Mid-December, John and I got a Christmas tree. This year we didn’t even check the traditional spot in a strip mine where we and others from Patchwork had gone to collect cedar trees for decades. If you remember, lately it’s only been John and I going to get trees there and last year when we went it just felt like too much had changed and it was no longer a good idea. So last year and this year we got a normal commercial tree. Times change.
Just before Christmas, I pulled a year’s worth of raspberries and two years’ worth of blackberries from my freezer and turned them into jam. I like blackberry jam a lot better without seeds, so I used my Squeezo Strainer to separate them out before making jam. It was more difficult than it should have been because I got impatient with the slow-to-thaw berries and tried to run them through when they were still a little frozen. Eventually I got one batch of raspberry jam, two batches of blackberry jam, and one batch of blackberry preserves.
What’s the difference between jam and preserves, you ask? Well, I accidentally used half the sugar I should have on my last batch of jam. I knew I should have made myself check the recipe, but instead I told myself that it was the fourth time through and I remembered the recipe just fine. I didn’t realize my mistake until I noticed that the jam hadn’t gelled correctly. I looked online to find a remedy and the first search result started with the words of wisdom, “If you don’t want to invest any additional work in that jam, the best choice to make is to change your expectations. If the finished product is just sort of runny, call it preserves (they can be great stirred into oatmeal or yogurt, or spooned over waffles). If it’s totally sloshy, label it syrup and stir it into sparkling water.”
As I was finishing the jam, a serious winter storm was gathering. Snow and extreme cold air were forecast to hit our area in the afternoon on December 22. Everyone was urged to get our affairs in order. Suddenly we were prepping our home and workplace for bad weather at the same time as we were preparing work to be closed for the holidays. On the day the storm blew in, the high temperature on my weather station was 44 degrees and the low at bedtime was 3 degrees with a windchill of -10 degrees. Very early in the morning on December 23, the low on my weather station got down to -6 degrees and the windchill reached at least -19 degrees. In other areas around the city where the wind could blow even harder, the windchill got to at least -29 degrees. On Christmas, it was still cold. Christmas night it snowed more. Things started to ease on December 26, but it was still plenty cold.
It was stressful. One night we had an alarm going off on our furnace at home. We had a couple furnaces at work limping along and spent time during our holiday working to keep them going. We had a pipe briefly freeze at home. We were monitoring two buildings at work and the four cats sheltered in them. We pushed off leaving to visit my family for Christmas once then again then just decided to stay home. Since we’d intended to be gone, we hadn’t stocked up on groceries before Christmas, but we still managed to use things we had around to make a fancy Christmas feast of Chicken Cordon Bleu and roasted sweet potatoes from my garden.
The snow was pretty while it lasted, enhancing all of my outdoor Christmas lights. After it melted and the weather warmed, I did notice that many of my plants that normally stay evergreen through the Southwestern Indiana winters have turned black. The leaves on the honeysuckle on the back fence are brown and limp. The azaleas in the front have many leaves that turned brown and are falling off. I will be interested to see how well things come back to life in the spring. Clearly this weather was on the colder end of what they can tolerate.
And with that, we ended 2022! Now it’s time to look toward next summer and to start ordering my seeds.
Squirrels and Tomatoes 