08/18/2025
Thursday night we had an intruder steal two of my ducks from the coop. An unfortunate event, the cause of which has hopefully been remedied. I'm hoping that I'm still on track to get eggs in the September/October timeline, but we shall see.
The summer pears/Keifers have been ripe for a few weeks now, and the girls have been eating at them but due to a sickness that swept through the house by force, we haven't been able to fix anything with them. It's taken us weeks but we're finally past whatever the plague was that the girls had.
On a more positive note, the beauty berries are ripe here, and of all the wild edible things growing on the property, beauty berry jelly is probably my wifes favorite. I actually happened across the fact they were edible by accident last year while scanning plants with my plant ID app and doing research to verify.
The berries when ripe turn a bright almost unnatural looking purple, they're small, and a bit of a pain to pick. They're also full of seeds and when raw are almost inedible, however with a little patience that inedible purple berry turns into a fragrant brown (looks like it's burnt) liquid, that when sugar and pectin is added, turns into a delectable red juice that solidifies into a jelly that tastes like grape jelly with a hint of a floral taste mixed in.
