Faith, Folklore, and Friends

Y'all know it doesn't take much to get me excited, and I was just tickled pink when I saw this. These vines are loaded with teensy weensy little orbs that will grow into plump, juicy muscadines. Last year, we spent quality time with our neighbors eating muscadines right off the vine.  Hopefully, we can do the same this year in October.  Of course, we will have to watch for little foxes and other creatures that like them as well as we do. The tomatoes are still small, but they are looking good! Hub waters them faithfully when it doesn't rain. That little squash is about an inch long, but squash grows quickly and we will be eating them in a few days.  There is about a hundred others about an inch long.  It always happens like that; there is just a few days between the time we are yearning for squash and the time we are tired of squash. I am loving this beautiful spring we have been gifted with! The world's favorite season is the spring....

  Yesterday, we took about a gallon of the muscadines and made preserves.  There was eight pints and a little extra when we were done. These are not easy preserves to make, because you have to separate the pulp and hulls in order to take all the seed out before you can cook the preserves.  It took a lot of time, but hopefully, it will be worth it when we spread it on bagels and biscuits this winter.  Thanks to my magic Ninja, the hulls and pulp were ground into small pieces, making it almost like a thick jelly.  Sorry I don't have pictures for every step, but it was impossible when there was so much going on. The house smelled fantastic as the preserves were cooking, and for a long time afterwards.  We did the obligatory taste test, and I think these sweet preserves will be worth every bit of the work!

  Most of us associate the smell of burning leaves with autumn, but another scent some of us remember is the aroma of ripe muscadines.  If you are walking in the woods where the muscadines are abundant, you can smell them before you see them.   Looking for muscadines in the woods used to be one of my favorite things to do in the fall.  Many years ago, when my sons were still little boys, we spent one fine Sunday afternoon looking for some ripe muscadines.  We found them, a copious amount hanging from vines that had grown in the trees so high, it was impossible to reach them. The ground underneath the trees were covered with the ripe ones that had fallen.     There was a dead tree, similar to this one, that I sat on and picked up the muscadines for about an hour.  We got a bucket full, then walked home in the mellow late afternoon sunshine.  That night, my back began to itch, and I asked Hub to check to see if I h...