So not over the Rainbow

As a kid when we saw rainbows, all we wanted to do is find the end of it.  It wasn't so much because of the old tale that promised a pot of gold (although that could buy a lot of candy) - we wanted to see the leprechaun!  That little green suited dancing guy seemed like he would be a fun playmate for an afternoon.  Just think of the shenanigans we could get in to with a leprechaun!  And so as a child, every time we were lucky enough to see a rainbow- we wanted to find the end of it!
As we grew older the thought and excitement of the possibility of a leprechaun grew less.... let's say feasible, and the pot of gold- granted handy- also became a childhood day dream.  But even without the hope of a small fortune and a small green dancing man; we as adults are still fascinated by rainbows.  Rainbows are still a cool sight to see, they are rare enough that when we see one we must take a picture or in the case of a double rainbow a video!  I have to admit, I have never seen a rainbow form, I usually just catch a glimpse of one off in the distance... that is until this week.  We were unlucky enough to be in the middle of a fierce storm with funnel clouds and all this week.  But just at the end of the storm we were lucky enough to catch a rainbow form very close by.  Check out the video below, we were close enough to see the end of the rainbow very clearly, sadly no pot of gold to pay off our credit cards and no dancing leprechaun to take us away from work for the afternoon... but it was quite a cool thing to see!

mmm.... Red Currant Jelly

Currants are one of those under used berries you can very easily grow in your garden.  Currant bushes are very easy to grow and yield lots of berries.  Red currants are small bright red berries with a juicy pulp and they are very rich in antioxidants.  The most common use for red currants is jelly, we use this yummy recipe here http://allrecipes.com/recipe/red-currant-jelly/.

4 pounds fresh red currants
1 Cup Water
7 cups white sugar
4 fluid ounces liquid fruit pectin
makes 8 - 1/2 pint jars

Directions

1. Place the currants into a large pot, and crush with a potato masher or berry crusher if you have one. Pour in 1 cup of water, and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes. Strain the fruit through a jelly cloth or cheese cloth, and measure out 5 cups of the juice.
2. Pour the juice into a large saucepan, and stir in the sugar. Bring to a rapid boil over high heat, and stir in the liquid pectin immediately. Return to a full rolling boil, and allow to boil for 30 seconds.
3. Remove from heat and skim off foam from the top. Ladle or pour into sterile 1/2 pint jars, filling to within 1/2 inch of the top. Wipe the rims with a clean damp cloth. Cover with new sterile lids and rings. Process covered in a bath of simmering water for 10 minutes or the time recommended by your local extension for your area 

Be careful when mashing the berries, the red uncooked juice can stain... so no wearing your best whites or your wedding dress or anything like that.

For listings of Currant Bushes for sale on Trade My Flowers click here

Contest Winner!

Congratulations to Tammy Murphy, our winner of the $50 home depot gift card! We hope you enjoy!!

Stay tuned for another contest coming soon, keep watching here or at www.trademyflowers.com

HAPPY LISTING!

A Jostaberry... say what?

We saw a listing on the site the other day for a Jostaberry bush.... we got asking around our office, and no one really new much about the Jostaberry, so we decided to look in to it.

The Jostaberry is a cross fruit bush involving three original species; the black currant the North American coastal black gooseberry and the European gooseberry.  The tangy-sweet flavor of a Jostaberry (pronounced yust-a-berry) is a mix of grape, blueberry, and kiwi-fruit.  Jostaberries are great in jams, jellies, and pies.  The shiny, nearly black berry, which is smaller than a gooseberry and a bit larger than a blackcurrant, is edible both raw and cooked. The ripe fruit will hang on the bush in good condition through late summer.  Like blackcurrants the fruit freezes well, and like many other members of the Ribes genus it is rich in vitamin C.  They're a little harder to pluck than blackcurrants are, however, an advantage they have against the gooseberry is that the plant is thorn-less.
The plant itself grows to a maximum height of about 2 m, flowering in mid-spring, with fruit setting and ripening on a similar timetable to the blackcurrant. The plant grows and produces fruit well and is generally resistant to a number of common diseases afflicting other Ribes. Flowers are hermaphrodite and the plant is self-fertile following insect pollination. Propagation is usually by cuttings, rather than by seeds.  Space bushes about 6 feet apart in well-drained, slightly acid soil. Grow in full to part sun; in hotter regions, afternoon shade is best.
Maintenance is simple. Prune in late winter, cutting out broken or drooping branches. To encourage the growth of fewer, larger berries and new replacement shoots, cut the oldest one or two canes to the ground.

So now that we are well educated on the Jostaberry (maybe more than you wanted to know) we thought we would leave you with a recipe to get the Jostaberry juices flowing.... and if you want to get a Jostaberry bush check out the listing here



Jostaberry Ice Cream (courtesy of Icy Creek Blog )

2 cups of jostaberries.
1  1/2 cups of cream
3/4 of a cup of sugar (go up to a cup if you like your ice cream really sweet).
Combine jostaberries and sugar and heat until the sugar is dissolved and simmer for no more than five minutes. Blend the jostaberries but do not put them through a sieve. Cool, and then churn with the cream in an ice cream maker.


Enjoy!

The "it" plant for 2013

I came in from the garden just long enough to write about this years "hot" plant for planters.... The Canna.  We have seen cannas in lots of spring magazines this year and all of them seem to be pictured in planters. 

 

The consensus here at Trade My Flowers is we love it!  The canna lends a tropical feel to the planters that you can get even if you aren't anywhere near the tropics.  Not to mention the very grand statement these suckers make.  Some of these can grow to be 6+ feet tall, you will most certainly be the talk of the neighbourhood with these in your planted pots!

Be sure to pick a large pot to use when planting, you don't want it to A- tip or B- look out of proportion with the large height and leaves of the canna.  We planted the bulbs in our pots today to get a head start and hopefully by mid may we will have them sprouting and then we will add all of the filler plants.  Have fun with it, add some more tropicals, maybe some colour or some cascading vines.  The plus side of planting the cannas first, you get a few weeks to plan it out!

If you are lucky enough to have an awesome aunt with a cold cellar full of bulbs like we did, you are in luck this year.  If not, we do have a listing or two on our Trade My Flowers Marketplace.  Just remember to dig up the bulbs before frost in the fall and save them for next year!

Okay, back to the garden, so glad spring is finally here; the house work is so going to suffer for the next couple of weeks!  Oh and don't forget we have our forum up and running, let's talk gardens!

We are so excited about Spring we wet our plants!



We figured since we are finally seeing the beginnings of Spring it was time to officially talk about our site www.trademyflowers.com  (we promise to be short and sweet).  The marketplace portion of the website simply came from the need to split our large plants and over grown spots of our gardens.... The problem was; we all had overgrown gardens and when we split the plants, none of us had room for the others plants.  So essentially, this is where the idea for the garden classifieds came from.  We don't want to just throw out our extra plants... we want to find people who need more plants for their gardens and give our plants a new home!  Not to mention the bumper crop of tomatoes we have each year... waaaaaay more then our families can eat, so we post them up on the site and trade or sell them.  It keeps the veggies from going to waste and people who don't have the space to do a vegetable garden still get to enjoy homegrown veggies!

The marketplace operates much like most online classified sites do (Craigs List, Kijiji and so on).  If you see something you want to buy or trade you contact the seller and make arrangements with them,  its a simple as that.  We do recommend you read our help page if you are using the site for the fist time for guidelines on how to safely connect with buyers or sellers.

There are so many "garden things" you can use the marketplace for, not just plants and seeds.  Some of us here at TradeMyFlowers make things for the garden like planters, lanterns and yes one of us even makes cool picnic tables (we will hopefully see them up in the listings soon).  And there is a spot to buy/sell/trade old (or new) gardening books and magazines.  If its for your garden, there is a place to list it on the site.

Now is the time to be thinking about starting seeds, and we've got some pretty cool seed listings on the site, take a look  and see if there is anything you a have been wanting to add to your garden.

And "hey you, you with all of the seeds from last year's garden... start listing them on our site!  You can trade to get some new seeds you don't have or you can sell your extra seeds for some extra money!  Tell you what, we will even include a quick and hilariously bad video on how to place a listing on our site."

 

Honey I'm home!

I noticed a listing on our marketplace for farmers honey the other day and it made me think......As a child I wasn't a big fan of honey, but maybe that was because it was the store bought stuff in a bear jar that you squeezed out of his head (odd things scared me as a child).  Anyway, as I came to adulthood I thought I would test my childhood theory that honey didn't taste good.  And as you may have already guessed, I was wrong as a child (more often then I would like to admit).  But I do believe that it was in part because when I was a kid, we didn't get to have "real" honey.  The processed store bought honey tastes nothing like the real out of the bee keeper's farm honey.  I am using the term "real honey" here because using the term organic can be tricky.  I understand in some circumstances people need the pasteurized honey from the store and I completely support that.  But if your body is OK with non pasteurized raw honey, it is amazing. There are lots of studies to support how good this type of honey is for you, I know for me, it helped my hay fever more then some allergy medications do.  And for us people that have to watch our sugars, Honey's glycemic index is lower than sugar (still now low enough, but I take what I can get).

  I remember seeing a picture of a hotel in Thailand that had a whole honeycomb propped up high over a long tray and as the pure honey dripped to the tray, patrons at the restaurant could scoop some honey for their ice cream.  How cool is that!

   Raw honey will also taste and look different depending on where you get it from and what farming area it came from. I know a farmer who plated a different crop near his bee hives every year and each year his honey had a slightly different taste and different hue of amber to it (my favorite year was the time he planted lavender near the hive).  Again... How cool is that!

One important thing I learned is that sometimes when you get honey straight from the beekeeper it can have a thick creamy cloudy look to it.  I thought there was something wrong with it, but not to worry the farmer told me, it hasn't gone bad.  This is a natural process. The crystals may be large or small, a grainy, sandy type or smooth and creamy type. What makes it crystallize is due to the type of flower the honey bee visited when she gathered the blossom's nectar. The floral source determines whether the honey will turn into a solid form more quickly or not. Some honeys while raw will stay in a liquid form for quite a while. Other honeys will turn to a solid form with in a few weeks. This is due to how stable the sugar crystal is in the nectar. Remember the sugar crystals we made as children in grade school, we evaporated sugar water with a string dropped in it for the crystals to form on. This is similar to what is happening to the honey.

This is not honey turned bad, or anything that is affecting the taste or quality of the honey. You may find you like it in this state!! It spreads on toast or bread without dripping off. It won't run off the spoon as you take it from the jar to your hot drink. To turn it back to a liquid, pourable state, use gentle warming of the jar in hot (not boiling) water.  Also honey doesn't need to be stored in the refrigerator, this can speed up the crystal formation sometimes.

So in conclusion, check out the farmers raw honey listing here.. and also as a child, I was wrong... a lot.. sorry mom.

 

Trademyflowers.com