Raspberry Currant and Blueberry Currant Jam

It's been a busy stretch here at the Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes homestead.  We made Homemade Strawberry Jam last week and completed the jamming triumvirate this week by making Raspberry Currant jam and Blueberry Currant jam.

Alycia visited a friend a couple of times who has extensive raspberry bushes in their yard and picked about 6 quarts of berries each visit.  We froze some of the berries and used our trusty Raspberry Currant Jam recipe to make the rest into jam.

But before we made our jam we had to harvest our currants.  We "currantly" (in case you were wondering, yes you should be laughing now) have four, two red and two black, currant bushes producing berries with another two that should be online next year.  The red currants taste better, but the black currants have more pectin and in order to balance them out to get the right flavor/pectin relationship I usually go 50/50 red and black currants.

Here's one of our red currant bushes, loaded with berries.  It took Alycia and I less than an hour to harvest all the berries from both bushes. 

Alycia harvesting berries.  I picked them too, just pausing to snap this picture.  Between the strawberries, raspberries, and currants Alycia was quite the busy little berry picker this summer.  I'd like to think she's getting pretty good at it. 

Here's the some of the proceeds of our currant harvesting.  Enough for several batches of jam.  Luckily we had lovely jam making weather, unseasonably cool and breezy, so it wasn't such a terrible chore for me to labor over a hot stove for hours.

We have about 50 jars (mostly half-pint - and they couldn't all fit in the picture) of  various jams occupying the pantry.  Knowing that we have a years worth of delicious homemade jam makes me pretty dang happy.  Our next posting at Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes is a pretty special one, our 500th.