Foraging for Freezer Jam

Though Isaac and I drool over farms and gardens on our drives in the countryside (and imagine we were actually capable of maintaining that type of thing), we love cities and will probably live in a city-ish area for a long time/forever. At the same time, We're becoming more aware of how separated our lifestyles are from the natural world, and how weird that is. For example, I was eating lunchmeat the other day and realized that the thin circle of pink stuff I put on my bread came from an actual bird (more or less--maybe lunchmeat isn't actually even meat anymore). Isn't there something wrong with going most of my life not even thinking about that? And shouldn't it make me nervous that my shampoo has a million chemicals in it that I've never heard of? Or that every product in the grocery store has corn in it? It's sort of shocking to think about how blindly we (I!) go about buying things off shelves--mostly I just make sure things don't have corn syrup in them and then don't worry about much else.

We're not necessarily buying into the whole "organic"/"eco-friendly" fad, and we certainly can't afford to do all our shopping at co-ops and farmers' markets, but we're starting to shift our thinking from being passive about all the degrees of separation between us and our planet to making efforts to come back to the way God intended things--taking care of his creation (including ourselves) in the ways we can.

I'm reading this book called The Urban Homesteader which has some pretty encouraging and practical ways to live naturally in a city. One thing they mention, for example, is that you really can find bits of land to grow things, if you look hard enough (our building has a weedy front lawn and a scary upstairs covered patio thing!). I'm also interested in the cleaning products section. Vinegar and baking soda are miracles.

Along with that, we're also curious about what grows on its own in Spokane. We love free things. We found an apricot tree in a public parking lot and helped ourselves to a bunch of them. OK, so yes, we went at night and knocked them out with a soccer ball...but they were going untouched and just dying on the pavement! I made some freezer jam out of them. Why have I never made freezer jam before? There are so many things that are easy/cheap to make--and best of all, I know exactly what's in them.

I got the Ball brand no-sugar needed fruit pectin and followed a recipe inside the box.

 So the apricots got a bit smooshed...

Ta-da! Three jars for the price of a third of a jar!