Home Canning

[JEBar]

we hope to get it canned next week .... we want to get as much of that type of thing taken care of prior to my knee replacement surgery on the 21st .... I'll post pictures and be happy to taste it for you ...

[JEBar]

another day, another couple of runs through the canner .... today, squash relish

[daytime dave]

That's a new one on me. Mom and her neighbor can everything, but I'm sure they never did this one. It looks interesting.

[JEBar]

a quick internet search will turn up bunches of recipes .... as is the case with many dishes, most folks start out with a basic recipe and then customize it to their taste

[JEBar]

a new year, a new canning season .... on the way back from spending the summer in South Dakota we picked up a bushel of white half runner green beans at the Asheville, NC farmer's market on Wednesday, got home on Thursday, on Friday my job was to string and snap them while Maureen operated the canner .... next week we move to canning tomatoes

[PT7]

Great beginnings on putting up all that good food for the months ahead! Can't have a garden here, but one year my daughter got me a vine tomato plant. And it was one that did produce a lot of nice red, juicy tomatoes (kind of a surprise). Like Dave, the squash relish is a first time for me....but it looks good enough to eat! Have you ready a good bunch of tomatoes to can?

Years ago when I helped my Dad, Mom, and Grandma harvest two large gardens and get busy canning a lot of different veggies, it was kind of an exciting time. We also had three large apple trees, one peach tree, and one cherry tree. Mom put up many pies & cobblers into the large basement freezer. The canned (zero sugar) applesauce she prepared was something else! Wish I had some.....
Come January with a blizzard happening outside, it's really enjoyable to bake a fruit pie. Warms the innards very nicely (if you don't put too much ice cream on top!).

BTW, noticed in the photo you're starting to can some Pringles, too. How many cans of that do you expect to do?!?

All I can end this post with is a big YUM

[JEBar]

home canning Pringles isn't worth the effort .... it takes a really sharp blade to make the thin, wafer slices .... we used to have an acre + garden but gave that up years ago .... we've found we can go a farmer's market and buy the same fresh produce, in bulk, often for less than we could grow them .... we then run them through our 42 year old canner .... when needed we also have my Dad's 70+ year old home canner that we can press into service ....

[Ozarkridgerunner]

Great to see the old traditions alive. We still can some out of our garden. When I was growing up my Grandfolks on both my Dad and Mom's side raised huge gardens. Truck patches we called them. Grew about everything our climate will grow. They canned about everything including kraut and different relishes , pickles and of course beans ,tomatoes and so on. Root cellars full , well houses , basements etc. Really was amazing the amount of work involved in growing and putting it all up but very rewarding. We ate like kings. And oh yes , I put my time in the garden ! Tilling planting hoeing picking. Snapping beans , shucking corn etc. We always butchered our own hogs, beef and chickens. Smoked and cured our pork , rendered lard. Even still made lye soap. We used to store about 1500 lbs of potatoes in the root cellar too ! My grandmas and mama and aunts always working putting up and preparing food and us in the fields. Great memories of hard but happy , simpler times. We used to can a lot of sausage when we butchered hogs. We would cure hams and side meat. My grandpa would grind the rest and season with salt , black and red pepper, and sage ( lotsa sage!) that we grew ourselves. We would do this in the smokehouse then bring pan fills in the house where grandma and mama would roll it into balls and fry in a huge cast iron skillet. They would have hot jars setting ready and spoon the cooked sausage in them and then pour hot grease in the jars and seal and turn upside down. When the grease cooled, it made a perfect seal under the lid. When you wanted sausage, just get a jar out of the cellar, open it up and dump it in the skillet to heat it up. That's some real eating I can guarantee you!! Like JEBar ,being from the rural mountain country of the South it was our way of life. Well , I've gabbed long enough. Some other time I might have to talk about moonshining history of my family !!

[JEBar]

Have you ready a good bunch of tomatoes to can?

we have two bushels of canning tomatoes on reserved at a local farm that does a great job with strawberries and tomatoes .... we are supposed to pick them up tomorrow morning

[Mags]

Used to do a lot of home canning, but after our kids grew up an left home it felt like too much work for the two of us. My favorite and least favorite was corn. Loved eating it, but hated the smell of canning it. The garden spot is now bartered out to a bee keeper. He gets the space for his bees and we get a couple cases of 12 pt jars of honey each fall.

[Ozarkridgerunner]

Used to do a lot of home canning, but after our kids grew up an left home it felt like too much work for the two of us. My favorite and least favorite was corn. Loved eating it, but hated the smell of canning it. The garden spot is now bartered out to a bee keeper. He gets the space for his bees and we get a couple cases of 12 pt jars of honey each fall.

Not a bad trade at all there , Mags. Love that raw honey.

[Mags]

Yup real 'sweet' deal. Honey goes into a lot of our baking.

[JEBar]

8-13-18 .... phase two, canning tomatoes .... earlier this morning we purchased two boxes of canning tomatoes from a local farmer who has a long history of producing a high quality crop .... canning tomatoes takes much less time that green beans .... bottom line, a few hours later my wife has canned 25 quarts and 1 pint .... with what we still have leftover from last year, we should be good to go .... most likely, our next batch will be pickles

[JEBar]

its that time of year, 28 quarts of tomatoes canned today .... tomorrow we move to canning pickles

[JEBar]

today we canned a year's worth of Mountain Pickles .... they won't be ready for 6 weeks and that's a shame because we are all out

[JEBar]

we are once again home canning White Half Runner green beans .... 49 quarts and 9 pints .... as an interesting note, apparently large numbers of folks who stayed home due to COVID decided to raise a garden and are now canning their veggies .... this has caused a shortage of rings, lids, and jars .... our local stores have been cleaned out and even Amazon orders are delayed for weeks ...

[Ernie]

My first time canning this year. Bought the ball canning book and it is chock full of good information. Canning tomatoes right now and have lots of peppers that I am dehydrating. Potatoes are now ready and squash is getting close. It is a learning experience for sure but I intend to continue to learn.

[JEBar]

canning is a long standing family tradition that goes back to both of my grandmothers .... sadly, it may well end with our generation, our kids have no interest in it

[dave77]

Went on a hunt for local lids yesterday, everyone is sold out. According to a guy at a local store people are buying large quantities of lids and selling them on Ebay and Amazon for inflated prices. They did have some qt. jars with lids and rings so I got a couple dozen of those. They were on sale for $10.99 a dozen which is less than a dozen lids on Amazon.

We've done 18 pts. of cherries, 9 qts of spaghetti sauce (still more tomatoes to harvest) and a fair amount of freezer jam.

A guy up the road has a an orchard of a new variety of cherries called Skylar Rae's.

Neat story about how they were developed in the link. The tree was found just up the road from my place and since we keep an eye on his irrigation pipe that crosses the creek on our property the orchard manager has been giving us a full lug (15lbs) the last couple of years. They are definitely the best, sweetest cherries I've ever had and he's not giving us the best of the crop (I saw some of similar quality at Fred Myer for $10 a lb). The best go to places like Japan for big bucks. I've heard that an acre of really good exportable cherries can net a profit of $200,000. Of course with cherries if it rains at the wrong time they can lose the whole crop. Was on a recent drive along the Columbia River and a lot of the new cherry orchards are completely covered to protect them from wind, rain and birds.

https://www.stemilt.com/stem-blog/intro ... -cherries/

[JEBar]

this thread was started back in 2016 .... I'm 74 and can't remember when our family didn't can various veggies .... I'm happy to see that many more folks appear to be canning .... that said, I didn't see it coming ..