Lisa Zahn

Last weekend we visited my almost 90-year old Grandma for a night. When I saw that the elderly bachelor next door had about four huge rhubarb plants ready for picking, I asked permission of his niece-in-law (who happens to be one of my Grandma's caregivers) to go get some. She was going to harvest some herself and said I should "help myself". So I did, taking about 5 pounds of it. That evening, when we got home, I took the last 2 quarts of last year's farm-picked strawberries out of the freezer and prepared to make some jam. I had a packet of no sugar/low-sugar Sure Jell and found rhubarb jam recipes online at this site . I looked at all the recipes and decided to devise my own based on what I had and what they recommended. Here is the recipe I made up: 2 pounds chopped rhubarb 2 pounds frozen strawberries (same measurement for fresh, about 8 cups worth) 6 cups sugar 1 packet of the low-sugar/no sugar Sure Jell I put the chopped rhubarb in a pot and sprinkled 3 cups o...

Yesterday we got one of our rain barrels up and ready to collect last night's and today's little bit of rain. George put a gutter and downspout on the shed and then with a lot of help from Rose he turned one of the 55 gal. laundry detergent barrels we got from the hospital into a rain barrel. Above is the two of them drilling the overflow hole. Eventually this will connect to the other barrel with a bit of hose and then we'll have two barrels to collect rain. It won't take much to fill them both. We've had two about ten-minute rainfalls since we set these up yesterday afternoon and already the first barrel is 2/3 full, just with water off the 14' wide shed roof! Before we connect the two, we'll have to put the faucet on the second one so we can get the water out though. By connecting them, we only need one downspout which I think looks better. You can Google "rain barrel how to" or something like it and get lots of sites for how to do this. The one...