Ok, pic's later. But, I took the plunge, and raided the neighbor's lilacs!
I harvested much more than I needed -- two 2.5 gallon buckets of blooms. I found it's best to pick blooms in whichall the flowers have opened rather than some still in the bud stage. I'm using Jack Keller's recipe no. 2 which uses the Welch's grape juice.
I found that one full bucket of blooms (I'm talking about the whole head here)seemed to produce enough petals called for in the recipe. But that is still a LOT! I'm sure others know that the bloom you see on the bush is actually dozens of individual, 4-petaled flowers, each with a small stem.
I've now learned much more about lilacs than I ever wanted! When the flower heads are pulled from the peduncle (the stem) it left the stamens and pistils on the stem. There was a little bit of nectar in some, but that mostly made sticky fingers. This is a tedious process but interesting until you realize that after an hour of processing, you've still got a long way to go! But, except for the occasional broken stem I got the petals in the primary and the water boiled, poured over as called for, and left it for 48 hours.
Pepere, if you've notstarted, I'd suggest that you put the flowers inastraining bag and then put the bag in the primary. That is assuming the boiling water isn't going to melt thebag -- I used nylon -- but I'm sure someone will point out if I'm wrong!That would be easier than the way I did it, which required straining into another (sanitized) container (with the nylon bag) then transferring back to the primary!
Martina, like Pepere I await your wisdom.
Just don't tell me I could have just thrown the whole bloom in, stems and all! I can see why you'd make this a gallon at a time!
But, I'm on the way!
