Rosella Jam... FINALLY!!!

For those sick of hearing about our Rosella monster bush we have finally harvested and made the jam!!!

Picking the Fruit...

Everyone got involved, Dragon was quite helpful, Lion felt his skills would be better put to use running around the yard pretending to be an echidna sucking up ants.

Making the Jam...

First you make a batch of peanut butter cookies to keep you going because there is a lot of work to do...

Mummy McTavish Peanut butter cookies

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar (best with half brown and half white or raw for that gooey inside and crunchy outside)

1 egg

mix it all together, add bit and pieces if you want (chocolate, chopped dried fruit...) bake in a moderate oven for 10 minutes. let them cool on the tray.

then you've got to get all those seeds out, so get some helpers... I roped in Grandma and GREAT-grandma. Also, great-grandma knows how to make it so we really needed her.

then there is a lot of chopping (we got through it super fast thanks to our two Tupperware Quickchef's:) ), cooking, waiting, stirring, messing, bottling and a few other steps and you get some REALLY YUMMY JAM! we got 11 bottles of various sizes. some quite small some were REALLY large. It took all day, because we had nearly 6kg of rosellas to get through, but we learnt how to make rosella jam and we have a cupboard full of jam to have on scones and pikelets!

Some flowers...

The Rosella's are ready for picking... These are the flowers on one of wolf's orchids.
Although this isnt the worlds best photo (certainly not the worst either, i'm happy enough with it...) I want you to use your imagination...
doesnt the little bit inside look like a goldfish blowing a kiss???

It's a Rosella Monster!

I have never seen such a happy Rosella bush as ours. The story goes... Western Australian farmers were having troubles with these weeds in their fields and couldnt figure out how to get rid of them. They would self seed and grew into these little shrubs that the birds loved to eat the fruit off. Their wives came up with an idea, lets turn them into something useful. So they made jam out of the fruit and it just happened to be really yummy. So now people actually try to grow rosellas. We didn't. well not this year, last year was a very bad year for rosellas, the rain was at the wrong time or something so the small plant my grandma gave us struggled and struggled and it just didnt make it, hardly any around town did. when we took it out of the pot grandma gave it to us in I tipped the rest of the soil into the veggie patch. one day this plant starts sprouting. we figured out what it was and let it grow assuming it wouldn't take up too much room, most plants struggle to get to 1m tall. Ours is now towering over the 6ft fence, providing great shade for the cubby house, and is getting covered in flowers! the fruit are coming along on some branches too! They are very pretty flowers, I had to take some photos. I dont have time at the moment to make this entry look like someone has spent time formattting it so it's all a bit messy but here are the photos. I told grandma I would give her the fruit so she could make me some jam, she said she would teach me how to make jam. We'll see how that goes:)