I canned for three days straight

…and when I woke up this morning, my legs were so stiff and sore I could barely walk! :joy: Maybe I ought to take more breaks to stay limber, huh? But it made for a good reason to sit here in my chair and crochet all day (and my girls mopped the mess I made all over the kitchen floor and did the laundry. Woo hoo!).

We live down a long gravel road bordered by wild blackberries. My family went out and picked a bunch the other day. I think I ended up with 16 half-pint jars of jam and 2 gallon ziplocs of whole berries in the freezer. And there’s still more out there! We also have an Asian pear tree in the yard that decided that everything was ripe Right Now. Unfortunately, it has problems with coddling moths, so I had to do a lot of paring and chopping to get the usable parts. Even so, I ended up with 6 quarts of pear slices and 5 pints of pear mincemeat. That was a new recipe for me – it smelled like Christmas in here yesterday! :christmas_tree: :blush: When we bought this place a few years ago, I learned that Asian pears have lower acidity than European pears, so you have to acidify any canning recipes that use them. 2 Tbsp of lemon juice per quart.

Hopefully my legs will begin to cooperate in the next day or so (currently I lurch around like Frankenstein) because I want to go check out the crabapple trees in the cemetery behind our house and see if they’re ready for jelly!

I know there are some other canners here on LC! What are you putting up??

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You’ve worked really hard, you deserve a day of rest! I’ve canned 9 half-pints of jam so far and I’ve started dehydrating zucchini. I do it in a conventional oven so it’s a slow process. I can’t find new or used dehydrators anywhere right now so proper dehydrating has to wait until next year. I air dried some lemon balm and mint for tea.

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Blackberry jelly! We have them on our property, too. I also put up a few jars of pickled jalapeños and sauerkraut and am oven roasting and freezing tomatoes. I spent most of my canning mojo this summer on dill pickles, over 100 quarts.

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My husband and I made cherry jam with cherries from his parents’ cherry tree a couple of weeks ago. I just had some on my PB&J yesterday. :yum:
We also made jam as favors for our wedding last year. That took a long time. Making one batch just for us this time was definitely easier!

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All that jam sounds amazing! I might can some sauce, we have a lot of Roma/paste tomatoes ripening right now. The other preserving we’ve done was dehydrating tomatoes, nice big juice ones in a variety of colours, my faves are the ones with yellow skin & green flesh! Lots of cherry tomatoes too, they’re sweet like candy. We grew celery for the first time ever, it’s so green & woody, lol. We dehydrated & powdered it, dried loads of kale as well. The freezer is full of whole kale, sauted celery, chopped green onion, tomatoes, & stewed rhubarb. There’s a peach crumble in there too, I made multiples when peaches were ripe at market. Yum!

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Oh man, that takes patience! Bummer that you can’t find a deydrator. I used mine for the very first time this summer – I dried zucchini, too! The instructions that came with my dehydrator are not very good – it’s really poor English to the point where I don’t even know what they’re talking about. The instructions for drying cherries said to “go nuclear”! LOL Um, I think not.

Holy cow! That’s a lot of pickles! I was all excited about my fruit and forgot that I did some pickles, too and have a few more to do. But nothing approaching that! How long does 100 qts of pickles last you??

Oh, nice! We just planted a little baby cherry tree this year, so it will be awhile before we get anything off it. Jam as wedding favors is a neat idea, but that must have been a lot of work!!

Man, I’m jealous. I started my tomatoes too late this year, so I doubt I’m going to get much off of them before it gets cold. :frowning: Your freezer sounds well-stocked! I put a lot of rhubarb and blueberries in ours. Oh, I wish we had peaches. They just don’t grow well on our side of the state.

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