Being a "rural lifestyle realtor" poses some challenges and even danger at points. Don't get me wrong...I love the rural lifestyle and the joys and challenges that come with it. But, when my husband showed me the pea-size agarita berry and told me how "easy" it was to beat the bushes to harvest them...I thought, "What da hay...I'm gonna harvest me some of them agarita berries and make me some jelly!".
I watched him, the night before, bring in a bowl of berries and then step out on our back porch to sit on the porch swing and pick the stems off. Didn't seem hard...and he was inside withing 15 minutes or so washing them. So...with large plastic bin in hand and my trusty broom, I headed for the first agarita berry bush. I was immediately poked in the patooty by the holly-like leaves and whipped around to the acute pain in my backside only to be poked on my arm by a retreating branch on my front side. Yeeeeeeesh!
Not being detered by a little pain...I placed my bin under the branches and starting to "beat the bush". Berries were flying everywhere...just not into my bin. By this time, sweat is pouring off my forehead and my sister, Melody, comes out to see if she could help with the process. She too got poked and we both said out loud, "There's gotta be a better way to do this!"
"Tongs", I declared. "If we had two sets of tongs we could hold the pokey branch with one set and scrap the berries off with the other." Brilliant...at least for a couple of minutes. Fast forward an hour later and we called it quits on the harvesting part and decided to go ahead and clean the little berries and get ready to boil them down for agarita juice.
Well...in theory cleaning them sounded like a quick and easy process...but we soon realized that it was just as deadly pulling out the sharp leaves in the cleaning process as it was in the pickin process. By this time we figured if we ever got to the jelly makin part, and if we ever sold a jar of agarita jelly, we would have to charge about $50 a jar to make it worth our while...
My sister called it quits after we gleened a large bowl full and I was left with a bin full of not-so-ripe berries and a bowl of berries that still could be used. The jelly has yet to be made...but the berries are ready. So...stay tuned for Part 2 of Agarita Jelly Making...
They say that the best things in life come through hard work... Um...maybe "they" hadn't made agarita jelly yet.
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