Archive for month: September, 2010

My first thought was, “Hmm, the hyacinth bean vine has started growing onto the ailanthus bush.  But something didn’t seem quite right…

And, not a great surprise in this yard… it’s a beautiful little snake.

Such a sweet little face!  I think it’s a Rough Green Tree Snake, Opheodrys aestivus.

He crawled onto the fence for just a little bit, trying to escape my annoying camera; he was probably 16 to 18 inches long, and no bigger around than my little finger.

Once I backed off, though, he literally sprang back into the small tree, which was clearly where he felt more at home.

Charlotte has been missing for a couple of weeks.  She was back, looking slim (having divested herself of a sac full of eggs, I assume!) and missing a leg.  On top of it all, her handwriting (ass-writing?) has gone way downhill…

For Chris’s birthday, I took him down to central Texas for a skydiving class.

Chris, looking dashing in his jump suit. We tried really hard to get him into the neon-green-and-pink one, but he swore it wouldn’t fit.

Me, looking portly in my jumpsuit, and explaining something with lots of gestures. For some reason, Chris found the gestures hilarious.

… because he kept taking picture after picture. I don’t even remember what I was describing.

Heading to the plane. From left, it’s Matt who was just jumping for the fun of it, James the jumpmaster who was going to help make sure I didn’t die, me, and the pilot. The pilot was SMOKING hot, but I couldn’t find a casual shot of him without looking like a creepy old perv, and you don’t want to creep out the guy who’s going to be flying your plane.

Everything went to plan; I did the scheduled drills in free fall, pulled my pilot chute, the main chute opened, and I flew it down to the right field.

Where I landed, on my butt, quite firmly. I understand that the impact was audible across the field. I was uninjured.

Chris flew his with a little better control than I did; he landed upright, but rolled.

I was so focused on landing without breaking anything, that all my pictures came out with my stern, concentrated look… Chris had a little more fun with his ride.

Overall, it was quite a thrill, and I’d definitely do it again. The only real drawback was that there was a LOT of hurry-up-and-wait… we sat around for hours waiting to go up in the plane. The free-fall portion of the ride seemed amazingly brief, and it was hard to really get a sense of what was happening aside from all the air rushing at me. What I really enjoyed most was the slow descent under canopy, floating along peacefully where I could see all the countryside and feel the chute responding to the toggles as I pulled them.

One of the reasons that I get really annoyed when people refer to outdoor sericulture as “wildcrafting,” is that I know from wildcrafting… we usually called it “picking blackberries” or “picking wild grapes” in my family, but we have a long history on both sides of going into the wild and coming back with jams and cobblers.

I posted last October about my favorite Passionfruit patch.  It’s on a freeway verge, so it’s not really “wilderness,” but with the plants growing there naturally, this is definitely wildcrafting.  This past weekend, I saw highway mowers scalping along some of the Dallas highways, and so I decided I needed to make another visit before it gets chopped off to the ground.

Unless you noticed the areas of darker green vines, or saw them when they were in flower, you’d never know they were there.  The purple flowers in the foreground are some kind of nightshade relative.

Different view of the same strip.  There are vines on both sides of the freeway, but the ones on the far side of the bridge had fewer fruit.

The vines that were in fairly low grass seemed to bear the best and most fruit.

The leaves and tendrils are distinctive.

These fruits are almost ready.  If the fruit drops when the vine is lifted up, it’s ready.  If it clings to the vine, it’s too green.

The two fruits on the lower right are ripe; the one holding on to the vine is for next week’s harvest.

There are a lot of green, lush vines that get partial shade from the freeway bridge.  Unfortunately, they had almost no fruit.

The flower on the wild type vines is lovely, but not terribly showy.  I notice them while driving down the freeway, but they’re certainly not eye-catching from a distance.

They’re quite pretty close-to!

Occasionally, lifting up a vine will yield a whole line of fruit ready to go.  I love when this happens.  It’s like an Easter egg hunt set to “easy.”

Almost two hours of picking yielded fifteen pounds of fruit, enough to fill three plastic grocery sacks.

I looked high and low to find a recipe for jelly, but everything I could find was for tropical passionfruit, Passiflora edulis, and I’m dealing with the American passionfruit, or maypop, Passiflora incarnata. It was really evident when I would find instructions like “slice passionfruit thinly”… anyone who thinks they can slice these things has better knife skills than I do. I finally realized that I needed to search on the colloquial names… “maypop jelly” found a likely-looking recipe pretty quickly.

The best method I found for separating the peels from the pulp and seeds, was to pop the top open…

and squeeze out the guts.

It leaves very little waste.

A kettle full of the pulp and seeds, before cooking.

After a little simmering, they start to lose their shape, and the juice starts to flow.  Unfortunately, it’s still a SERIOUS pain in the butt to get the pulp clear from the seeds – it clogs the sieve, and there’s a lot of fussy work with the spoon.  The food mill was not helpful, as it tends to crack the seeds and give the whole thing a much different flavor.

I’m withholding my opinion for the moment on the jelly recipe – I made two batches, and they cooked up beautifully, but neither has set.  I have read that high-acid jellies and marmalades can take weeks to set, so I’m giving it a little time before I try re-cooking.  I can tell you for sure, though, that the flavor is amazing.