My dear hubby and I have been together for 11 years and from the beginning, the first weekend of October has been about his Grandma and her birthday. October has arrived and this last weekend was my Grandma-in-law's birthday celebration, so we were off to northern Wisconsin again. October is the perfect time of year to head north and enjoy the changing of seasons.

After a wonderful birthday lunch for the special lady with 16 family members (that's a lot of 'smart' talking), we returned to Grandma's house where there are always fun surprises...

The backyard orchard had grapes that were ready to be harvested, and harvest we did!

I collected about 2/3 of a bag with some help, then hubby showed up... he's a great grape picker and he filled an entire bag! Note: we weren't sure what we were going to do with these grapes, we were just picking them. We're crazy like that.

This guy was there, too. I like him.

After returning home with bags of grapes, onions, potatoes, and pears, (Grandma's is a one-stop-shop) there was much discussion on what on we were actually going to do with our bounty of grapes.

We settled on:

Grape juice: 1 cup of grapes, 1/4 cup of sugar and boiling water in a quart jar and water bathed for 10 min - this is the recipe we were given and they're resting now, so I'll update you when we try it.
Grape jelly: I use Ball's Pectin Calculator for the recipe (it's really quite handy) and we used honey to taste with this low/no sugar pectin:

I've never made grape jelly and hubby has tested and approved my first batch, so we have more jelly making ahead of us this weekend.

Do you have any suggestions for making low/no sugar jelly or jam?

Next weekend we are off to our annual sauerkraut event and I can't wait to share the details on that!

Cheers!