Does anyone else make jam?

[DumbledoresGirl]

Or am I the only one?

What have you made lately?

This weekend, I picked nearly 20lbs of soft fruit and so far I have made:

5 jars of raspberry and redcurrant jam
7 jars of redcurrant jelly
5 jars of raspberry and blackcurrant jam
51/2 jars of raspberry jam

I love making jam. Raspberry is our favourite. I find 5 minutes boiling is adequate, but ours literally come in from the garden and into jam within 15 minutes! (If I don't do it that quick the kids eat them all.

I have the jam funnel mentioned earlier on in the thread. It needs you to use large jars with wide necks, so I still find I am using a ladle as the funnel doesn't fit in the jar.....

My 8 year old and I made raspberry jam on Monday having put the sugar in the oven first for 15 minutes (spread out on a baking tray). Then threw it in the raspberries and boiled for five minutes. Delicious

Today we made blackcurrant.

I have never made jam before but I am now a complete convert and will be making lots more!

DG - try it before you comment - soaks into bread, absolute taste of summer.

Have remembered Melon and Ginger jam fantastic, soon be the season for it!

okay, so it's 9 o'clcock and I've just finished making blackcurrant jam from the fruit picked last night from my garden. Now inspired and have a question re plum jam.

Do the plums need to be ripe? I have a tree in my garden which has produced for the first time this year in reasonable quantities. Some of the fruit is dark and ripe but the rest isn't. Do I wait and chance that I lose the ripe ones or go ahead now?

Balckcurrant jam, yum!

It's good to use a mixture of ripe and slightly under ripe plums as the under ripe ones have more pectin. I used a mixture of both and it's delish! You could always freeze the ripe ones for the others to catch up. For me it would depend on how unripe the other fruit was - rock, rock hard then I probably wouldn't.

Am relative novice so maybe someone else might have a better idea.

Blackcurrant even.

Thanks for that, I'll get some sugar later and make that tomorrow's job, if I can bribe my children into helping me pick the plums