April showers bring May flowers but that is not the end of the sequence. May flowers bring June fruit, which is one of my families favorite times of the year. School is out, it is warm enough to wear shorts and sandals and there are yummy things everywhere you look in the yard. The honeyberries ripen first, but the birds eat most of them and the kids just graze on them. Strawberries are the star of June. They trickle in at first and then we are picking a few pounds every other day. This year we will have harvested about 60 lbs. in June. We ate them fresh, made freezer jam, strawberry-rhubarb jam, and everyone in my family's favorite Sky High Strawberry Pie. It is just the recipe off the back of the Danish Junket, but it is really good. The blueberries and blackberries are just starting to ripen and the raspberries are picking up steam, but June is all about strawberries!
Making Homemade Jam is Fun and Easy to Do
Rhubarb is one of our first big harvests. We freeze most of it for crisps and rhubarb cakes in the winter, but we always have a bit for strawberry-rhubarb jam. This year my younger girls did all the hard work, chopping, stirring and measuring. I think they had a great time. You can see below that they were so proud of their work that they couldn't wait for it to cool down so they could taste it. They employed a little fan and a lot a watching to speed up the process. I canned the rest for later this winter.
Strawberry freezer jam is even easier. Crushed berries with sugar and pectin stirred in sit on the counter for a half hour, then are placed in freeze safe jars to go into the freezer until we want to eat it. It doesn't last long. Some of my kids have been found eating it with a spoon and not even pretending to put it on anything. It will all be gone before snow flies again, but what a treat on pancakes, sandwiches and straight from the jar.
Sky High Strawberry Pie
As good as Jam is, fresh strawberry pies are even better. We only get a few each year and we never waste a crumb. We try to share, but fresh strawberries right from the garden make this a 10 star dish at our house.
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