As per usual on my trip down to Limpopo, I brought back a whole lot of the fruits in season that side. Normally I do this and sell whatever I can this side at a profit in order to make some of the fuel money back. However this time I drove down with my car and not the truck as I did the last few times. this meant that I was limited on what I could bring back.

I brought back some mangoes and passion fruit from my farm, 50kg's of Litchi, and a bunch of other trinkets that I could sell at the nursery. Sadly due to the new covid restrictions, the nursery was forced to close its gates yet again until further notice.

I moved quite a bit of fruit off hand, however I was left with quite a bit of litchis and very little time to sell them. So I decided to do what I always do with excess fruit - preserve them.

Not that I have preserved litchis in any other way than throwing them in vodka (which I also did this time)

So I decided to try something different.

Litchis in ginger syrup sounds nice...

I decided to experiment a bit with preserving peeled and pitted litchis in a ginger syrup. For this I peeled and pitted about 6kg's of litchi fruit (that is about 13.23 pounds of fruit)

Then I grated a hand sized piece of ginger root (peeled) and set that aside alongside the prepared fruit for now. Then I started working on the syrup.

For the syrup, I used 6 cups of water with three cups of sugar and half a spoon of salt.

First you let the sugar dissolve in the water completely over a very low heat before turning the heat up until the mixture comes to a boil. At this point I added the grated ginger and left this to boil for about an hour and a half to get a nice thick syrup, then I added my fruit and blanched them for no more than 2 minutes.

The fruits were now ready to get bottled.

While the syrup was cooking on the one plate, I started sterilizing my bottles. For this I would boil the bottles as well as the lids in water on the stove for a few minutes then take them out.

I never dry the bottles once I take them out - I shake them out a bit and then leave them for a few seconds, the tiny bit of water residue normally evaporates.

Once the bottles were clean and dry, I filled them with the fruits then topped up the bottles with the ginger syrup, placed the lids on the bottles, and then turned the bottles upside down so that they could seal.

I must say that this preserves does not get a lot of points for looks, but as far as flavor goes, they certainly take the prize. I can not wait to try this out with some ice cream and custard...