Pomegranates Everywhere!

Our pomegranate tree produced a lot of fruit this year. So we had a good time picking pomegranates and making jelly.

You can't tell from this picture but even though we had picked a box and 5 or 6 bags full of pomegranates, there were still a lot on our tree. Thank goodness we had this picker so we could get the ones that were on the top branches of the tree. Emily liked helping also.

But mostly she liked eating the pomegranate seeds. She walked over to the box of pomegranates and started picking at the cracked ones and eating the seeds. Her whole face and hands were stained red from the juice. She also liked playing in the dirt near the box. Her shoes were full of sand and needles to say I had to give her a bath afterward. She definitely had fun.

Here are just some of the pomegranates we picked. We had a whole lot of them. We gave about 6 or 7 dozen away and still had plenty left over.

This is Russell juicing the pomegranates. We got three gallons of juice before we ran out of jugs to put the juice in. After juicing them and staining our clothes and hands red, we started making jelly! It was actually pretty easy. We just followed the recipe on the Pectin box and got busy cooking. We made 6 batches of jelly and still had 1 1/2 gallons of juice leftover!

As you can see, we made a lot of jelly! We made about 40 jars of jelly. The jars were various sizes but most of them were 8 oz. jars. The jelly turned out sooooooo yummy! You might be asking yourself what we are going to do with 40 jars of pomegranate jelly. Well if you are our neighbor or friend, you now know what you are getting for Christmas! I am trying to come up with a cute saying to go along with the jelly so if you have any ideas please comment on this post and let me know.

The next morning, we used a gallon of the pomegranate juice to make syrup. We found a recipe on the Internet that looked good so we used it. The syrup is kind of tart but still really good.

We still have about 5 dozen pomegranates that I don't know what to do with. I'm thinking of making more jelly so they don't go to waste but if anyone has any good pomegranate recipes please let me know.