A Freezer Full of Plums

Welcome to my annual fruit tree harvest report! The title of this post pretty much says it all, but I'll add some more details, as much as for my own future reference as for anything else. This was the second year of doing my 'meshless' fruit growing method. I've decided it's actually a thing and not just laziness!

The first to ripen was the cherry tree, around mid-November. The tree has grown strongly in the last year and I'm very pleased with it. The harvest was bigger than ever before. I'm pretty sure I took a photo of the fruit but I can't find it now. When I say "bigger than ever before", it was about 3 handfuls. I picked them while still underripe and laid them on a tray for a few days to ripen. We ate them with dessert for two nights in a row and then they were all gone. We only lost a few to birds.

The next to ripen was the apricot tree, around mid-December. The harvest was smaller than last year, about twice what you see in the basket in the photo (below). I stewed them and it came out to slightly less than one takeaway container full. I was lucky enough to be able to visit Mum at Christmas, and gave her a small, precious containerful.

I should mention the nectarine tree. It was having an 'off year' (apparently that's a thing). It produced many blossoms, but only two fruit grew from them. Then they were ruined while still only half-grown by the storms we had in December. The weather bureau reported widespread Brown Rot alerts to fruit farmers at that time -- it never occurred to me before that they apply to backyard single-tree gardeners like myself, too!

Last but certainly not least were the plums. They were still too small and hard to be affected by the brown rot, and we had a bumper harvest! despite my severe pruning of the tree last year to prevent it from producing too much. It seems that backfired, hm.

Harvesting fruit is fun -- looking amongst the leaves and selecting the ripest ones, feeling them still warm from the sun, placing them in the basket.

Despite my best efforts, some were eaten by birds. This photo (below) represents probably half of what was lost, but rest assured, it was only a small portion of the total produce! Towards the end, some dropped naturally as well, as I ran out of energy and skipped a couple of days of harvesting and processing.

I made sure to pick up all the dropped and bird-ravaged plums, as if left they might sprout into baby plum saplings. As nice as that sounds, I've learned from experience that it's not such a good thing -- they grow too close to the parent tree, so they need to be dug up (not to mention it makes mowing very difficult) and I never had a single one transfer to a pot successfully. And besides, I already get more plums than I can handle, even with just one tree!

I decided to process all the plums by stewing, bagging and freezing them. I didn't have the energy to make jam, and besides it's too hot in Summer! I can always defrost some and turn them into jam later if I want. I picked enough each day to fill the slow cooker, washed them and cooked them on High for about 2 hours.

I let them cool for a bit, then used the highly sophisticated method of fishing through them with a spoon to remove the stones. Each batch yielded about 3 sandwich-bag-sized bags, and there were 9 batches so that makes.... a lot of plums! Once frozen, they filled up about half the freezer (it needs defrosting, I know!). Once I'm able to visit my family again, they'll be sharing in the bounty. Sometimes when I open the freezer door, I think: if anyone else looked in here, they'd think I was a prepping vampire!

I guess there will be a post on plum recipes coming up soon?

Craft Goals for 2021 - My Make 9!

The Make 9 craft challenge has been around for a few years now, but with everything that happened last year, I had completely forgotten about it. Even when I was reminded by seeing other people's goals popping up here and there on the internet, I hesitated. It just seems strange to plan for the future these days. Finally though, last week I felt an urge to work on some craft projects again and thought, maybe I'd like to do a Make 9 anyway!

(The accompanying pictures aren't really relevant, they're just nice backgrounds from photos I found on my phone!)

I deliberately made the goals very vague. My interests tend to change rapidly and without warning, so I wanted goals that would accommodate anything I was interested in at any given time. I did take the chance and looked through my current and planned projects list to add some to the grid. I made sure to choose some smaller projects, with the awareness that I'm starting 6 weeks late. Here are my thoughts:

1. something I want - probably my next sewing project: a skirt from a blue/silver floral fabric I bought recently. Hopefully it will be more successful than my last sewing project!
2. something I need - a pair of shorts, because I need them. Not sure what fabric to use yet.
3. a gift - a secret project! Ideally I'd like to have it done by the end of March.
4. a long term project - Green Plushy Monster. It's not that long term, I guess, maybe 18 months. But he only needs some arms and maybe a fuzzy hairdo and he'll be done.
5. a small project - to finish off: Trollen Braid. Over Christmas I had a mini-obsession with making trollen braids (a new-to-me craft). I started 2 and I'd like to finish at least one.
6. for a festive time - future project: Christmas garland. I bought some supplies to make a Christmas garland a couple of years ago and haven't gotten around to putting them together yet. It can sit on the back burner until close to the end of the year.
7. spliced - Lace Gilet - an experimental work in progress at the moment. I bought two lace dresses and want to try to splice them together into a gilet (sleeveless cardigan thingy).
8. altered - pants enlargement. I bought some pants online and they were a bit small, so I'm planning a way to make them fit.
9. decorated - Tablet Weaving piece. As I talked about earlier in the year, I taught myself tablet weaving. My enthusiasm slowed down a bit on the third piece, but I'd like to finish it off and find something to use it for.

Of course, this may change at any time!

Habitica : Gamified Motivation App

A few weeks ago I started using Habitica. In the creators' words, it's a "free habit and productivity app that treats your real life like a game". The app has been around for several years, and I have to admit, it's not new to me either. I tried using it a few years ago and found it too complicated and confusing. But for some reason I decided to give it another go, persisted in trying to understand it, and now use it daily.

Anyone familiar with roleplaying games will understand how the Habitica game works. You have a character with a certain amount experience points. Every time you complete a task, these increase slightly, and over time you level up. When you level up, you receive stat points that you can allocate to the character's four stats. You also earn coins that you can use to buy outfits, decorations and weapons. There are four different character classes to choose from, with different skillsets. (I'm a Rogue!) Players can join challenges or play in a party to defeat monsters. I haven't personally joined a party myself, but I am doing some challenges which are fun. You can also collect pets! Currently I have my favourite one with me -- my pink dragon!

The core of Habitica is the tasks, and there are 3 different kinds which work in different ways. As I mentioned earlier, I did find it a bit confusing at first, but I came to understand it fairly quickly. The 3 different kinds of tasks are:

* Dailies -- tasks that you repeat every day, week, month, year, etc. These might be 'do the dishes', 'take my tablets', 'clean the windows', 'buy a planner'. These tasks disappear once you tick them off, but reappear on the appropriate day.
* To-Dos -- one-off tasks. Once it's done, you get the kudos, and it disappears forever.
* Habits -- these are things that you'd like to get into the habit of doing. They are repeated but don't have regular intervals. You might do them several times a day, or only once or twice a week. Examples might be 'read for 1/2 hour', 'work on art', or 'weed the garden'.

The three kinds of tasks are in different sections, and you need to flick back and forth to access them. I would say that's the only drawback of Habitica that I've found, but once I understood the purpose of the different types of tasks, it was a lot easier to handle. I've been using Habitica daily for over almost a month, and have found advantages that the other organising systems I've used don't have. The tag system is invaluable: I've set up tags such as 'morning', 'evening', 'computer' and 'garden', so I can filter tasks according to my situation at any particular time. This is something I couldn't do with other systems I've used, and I've come to find it incredibly helpful. In fact, Habitica has completely replaced Trello and my whiteboard as my way of organising my day.

The game is quite forgiving in many ways. At the beginning of each day, all of the previous day's not-done tasks are displayed, giving you the chance to tick off any that you did but forgot to update in the app. It also has a built-in motivator: every day that a task isn't done, it turns a deeper red colour, and when you finally do those, you get extra experience and coins. Ones that you've diligently been doing daily turn green and then a beautiful turquoise colour. Of course, it's up to the player's sense of honesty to faithfully record what they did or neglected to do! I don't know about you, but I always feel like I didn't really earn something if I cheated to get it.

I could go on about Habitica's features (like the group challenges and supportive community) but I'll leave it for now! All that remains is to tick off the "Blog Post" task. :D