Goumi Harvest

The "Scarlet Sweet" goumi is really producing! It's only just a few years old and is loaded with fruit.

 

We picked all these and there are probably twice that many still on the bush.

 

 Decided to make fruit leather out of them since they're a little tart. So, I ran them through a Foley food mill to separate out the skins and seeds. Then put the pulp and juice into a pot and started heating it. The pulp sort of coagulates into a red "curd" which I skimmed out into a bowl and added it back in once the clear juice had boiled down into a syrup. I added a couple tablespoons of sugar and spread the bright red, thick sauce on a plastic wrap covered baking sheet to finish drying. Pretty close in taste to a Fruit Roll Up.

Poppies, wild and cultivated

Side-by-side comparison of the flowers of a perennial cultivated Oriental Poppy (Papaver orientale) with a much smaller weedy annual relative, the Long Pod Poppy (Papaver dubium). I always leave a few of the weedy one to reseed because it's such a pretty weed that I don't mind a few here and there.

I know these two should NOT intercross but just for fun I slathered a bunch of the black pollen from the Oriental Poppy onto the stigmas of the Long Pod Poppy. I'll plant those seeds somewhere I can see if anything weird pops up.