Grapes

My mom has a beautiful flower garden at her house! Dad and Mom added a Concord grape vine a few years ago (I actually have no idea how long ago!) and it has grown so much! This year I got to get the harvest of grapes!
There were so many grapes for just one plant!

They are kind of growing in with an ever green tree. Lillie was going to help pick them but it was too "pokey" for her=)


The picture above is the bowl I filled as I washed them and picked them off the stems. It seemed to take forever! And it is a giant bowl!

And this picture above is the grapes left on the stems that I haven't cleaned up yet.

I looked through several grape jam or grape jelly recipes and it seemed to me that it would be easier to make jam instead of jelly.
So I separated the skins from the grapes (which is actually way easy just time consuming), then pureed the skins with some sugar, added more sugar and a little lemon juice and the grapes (with seeds in them) and cooked them all up for awhile.
Then strained them (by pushing through a sieve with a spatula) to get the seeds out and the bigger skin chunks. Then cooked it some more to thicken it up and bam- homemade grape jam! Of course then I used a hot water bath to seal up the filled jars.

I actually figured out with the second batch that I didn't need to separate the skins and grapes-just puree everything and the seeds were hard enough that they stayed together, so I could proceed just as before. Just much less time involved!

This is what I got from my first day's labor=) That was only two batches. I didn't have a very good stock of jars because I didn't really have any idea how much it would make. I probably still have about 3 or more batches worth of grapes left. And all that from one grape vine! Amazing! And oh so yummy!!