Jewels from my garden

We have one Concord grape vine that was here when we bought the house.  It’s planted in a space where I wouldn’t have chosen for it, but I didn’t have the heart (or knowledge of how) to move it when I started planting my own garden.  Every year, I cut it back a couple of weeks before Halloween (I use the vines as decoration for the front of our house) and come spring, little buds inevitably appear which over the summer grow into a mass of vines that takes up almost half of the side wall of our house and get tangled among the flowers that are planted nearby.  Come October (just before I cut it back for Halloween), that one vine provides us with a large bowl full of beautiful, dark purple jewels!

This year, they’ve been transformed into delicious, maple syrup sweetened jelly using, for the first time, a book that I bought years ago but never referred to it because it just seemed too daunting, too technical for me.  And it is, but definitely proved to be worth the read!