Oranges & Marmalade

 We have two orange trees that have been providing us with wonderful, sweet, juicy oranges for a number of years now and this week we finally got around to picking this years crop. The children had a lot of fun picking the oranges and investigating the garden.  It had recently rained so there were plenty of slugs and snails around for them to interact with. 

Our two trees provided us with three very large bags of oranges, which are just as delicious as past years.  In previous years we have eaten a lot of them, given some away and juiced the remainder, but this year we decided to use some of them to make marmalade as a homeschool activity. After cutting and leaving our oranges to soak overnight, everyone sat down and watched Paddington 2 for inspiration. 

Today we completed making our marmalade and it went fairly well for a first attempt, although next time we will slice the oranges finer.  A distraction at a crucial time resulted in a small amount of burning but it was not enough to ruin it thankfully!  Four jars were filled and Lorelei and Rosalie, our official taste testers, rated it highly.