Last week, Seamus was bugging me to make grape jelly. I’ve been on a jelly-and jam-making tear lately anyway, so what was one more round? I didn’t think there were enough ripe grapes on the vines, but I sent him out anyway to check.

He came back with half a bushel, more than enough. We don’t know what kind of grapes they are; they’re certainly not the traditional purple jelly grapes, but I figured they would work anyway.

It took us two days. On the first day, we picked each grape off the stem and filled a gallon-sized pot with them. We added a little water and cooked and crushed them down to extract the goodness. After that, we ran them first through the food mill and then let them hang in cheesecloth overnight to get good clear juice for jelly. Seamus did much of this work.

The next afternoon, we started in again. We cooked the juice with the sugar and pectin, and prepared everything for canning. Seamus did some of the canning himself even, being very careful with the hot stuff. He’s a little too short to safely reach into the canner, so I did that part.

The end result was nine jars of a pretty pink jelly.  After a week, it’s already fully jelled. We whipped up some biscuits for breakfast on Saturday morning and tasted it – fantastic stuff! I know what he’s going to be packing for lunch come fall, and good for him!