Time Saving Canning Hacks From Prep to POP!

A "light load" in 2017 with chocolate black raspberry
dessert spread, blueberry pie filling, strawberry-lemonade
concentrate, and black raspberry vinegar.  

     Have you ever had someone see a picture of your canned goods and think you're nuts and that you must never have a chance to sit down, like ever?  

     For us, it's not uncommon to make sure by the end of canning season anywhere from 700 to 900 jars of canned goods are filled to last us until we can those particular products again (and yes, we plan to eat them all before you ask).  To do so, it could easily mean a couple dozen jars done in a morning or evening, or 100+ jars done over a long canning weekend.  We've noticed that a lot of people seem to think that doing this will take FOREVER, but it doesn't have to!  There's certainly places that you can "cut corners" to save time and still safely can your garden's bounty for out-of-season use.  

Step 1. Sterilizing canning jars 

Washing canning jars in my husband's
apartment kitchen in 2012.

     Jars right out of the package or off your storage shelf (even though they've been cleaned in the past) are not considered sterilized.  Did you know that according to the National Center for Home Food Preservation you don't have to sterilize your jars if you'll be processing them for more than ten minutes in a water bath or pressure canner?  Since we can everything for more than ten minutes, we do an abbreviated "sterilization" by washing our jars with a clean washcloth in a scrubbed out sink in hot soapy water.  Then they get loaded onto cookie sheets and placed in a 200 degree oven to keep them warm.  We heat them for at least ten minutes in the oven prior to use so the jars are hot when they come out, and therefore hot when the hot lid/food hits them as well.  We've found this assists in keeping the jars from breaking when different temperatures meet.  

     Tip: Any water drops that are left on them when they enter the oven are usually gone by the time the jars come out, and therefore we don't bother drying them off between the two.

     Tip: We found that however many jars your recipe calls for, always have an extra one or two ready to go because it'll likely make more, not less, than what your recipe says.  So think like a Boy Scout, and Be Prepared for that to happen.  

Step 2. Heating lids

     I've watched some people skip this step altogether, but along with it being more sterile for your soon-to-be processed canned goods, it also really helps get the wax on the standard canning lids heated up.  There's multiple ways to heat lids including just piling them all in a pot on the stovetop, but we use two handy gadgets - a canning lid rack and canning magnetic lid lifter - that make quick work of heating and using the lids.

      A canning lid rack holds twelve lids vertically, and can be submerged in a pot of water.  It keeps the lids separated so they don't accidentally stick together when the wax begins to heat up.  New these cost between $9-20 depending on the brand.

     A canning magnetic lid lifter is simply a magnet on the end of a stick.  Complex I know!  In the early days of us canning we used a pair of tongs to lift the lids out of the hot water, but now with a magnet, there's no more having the lids accidentally slide back into the pot, and seemingly hours of fishing around in the bottom of the pot for the last remaining lid.  New these cost between $2-8 depending on the brand.

     Tip: Heat an extra lid or two in case you drop one during the processing.  They can always be cooled down and reheated again at a later time.  

Step 3. Prepping your canned goods

Prepped recipes during Peach Season 2015.

     Ask yourself, "How many recipes worth am I planning on making today?" before you get started.  We don't just prep one recipe at a time, but at least two.  If you're planning on doing a lot of canning, you never want to have a stilled canner as a stilled canner means wasted processing time.

     I had started pre-prepping multiple recipes during peach and apple processing a few years ago because it just made more sense to get it all done while your hands were already sticky, and you could sit and watch television.  In that case, I chop all the peaches and other produce that is needed for a particular recipe beforehand, label them and stick them in the fridge so whenever I need to refill the canner with something other than what I was previously canning, there's a recipe more-or-less ready to drop into a pot and heat up.

Pizza sauce (back left), sweet 'n' sour sauce (front left) and tomato sauce
(front right) cooking down on the stove in 2016.

     When doing jams or tomato sauce-based recipes, I like to have one pot on the front burner, and one pot on the back burner, spaced evenly apart time-wise so that when one set of jars is ready to come out of the canner, a new set can easily go in.  I've found that it takes me approximately 10 minutes to take the jars out of the oven, fill them on the cookie tray so any drips and spills are easy to clean, and secure the lids and bands.  Usually, right as I'm putting on the last band, the previous load of jars is ready to come out of the canner.

     Tip: Gallon pickle jars, half gallon canning jars, and 8+ cup plastic containers make great options to store pre-prepped goods before you're ready to use them.

     Tip: To keep your fruit looking fresh and the proper color, place in a container of cool water with some Fresh Fruit powder or lemon juice.

Step 4. Heating your (water bath) canner.

      Fill up your canner with water before you need it.  We even get the water in our water bath heating about thirty minutes before we need it so that the hot jars won't touch cold water when they go in.  Then, even if you have to adjust the water level of the canner, it won't take nearly as long to heat back up once you've filled it with canned goods. 

     Tip: Keep a mixing bowl filled with water in your kitchen sink so you can level off the water of the water bath canner to at least one inch above your jars once they are in.

    Tip: If you want to keep your jars (especially those that go into a pressure canner) from getting water spots, add a little bit of white vinegar into the water as you are heating it.

Step 5. Filling the jars

     Splish!  Splash!  I think I need a bath!  This is by far the messiest part of canning for us because you're on a tight timetable to get the hot jars out of the oven, the hot ingredients into the jars (we don't do a lot of cold pack), and the hot lids on the jars, and then everything quickly and effectively into a canner.  I found the most effective way to do this is make sure you have a fully prepped "fill space" next to the stove (if possible).  Imagine that you're prepping a surgical area, so you want to have everything laid out in easy reach.  Here's the big three that you need to remember:

• Gather everything you need to fill the jars: ladle or deep spoon, funnel for easy filling (we use a plastic collapsible canning funnel that costs around $5), small metal spoon to skim off foam or change volume in the jars, butter knife to remove air bubbles.
• Keep the lids and rings at close reach.  This sometimes includes putting a potholder out for the lids if they are located on a burner too far away on the stovetop, and having a basket full of clean rings handy.  Make sure you have your magnet handy if you are using it!  
• Hot pads are your friend.  We put out two potholders for our cookie tray to balance on with the hot jars from the oven.  You'll also want to have an oven mitt or glove to remove the cookie tray, take off the hot water bath lid, and also to tighten any rings on the jars once they are filled.  

     For me, it's always easiest to work in a grid pattern when I fill the jars then, leaving those furthest from the canner for last so nothing gets dripped into the otherwise empty jars and they can either be filled with another load, or cooled and put away without having to clean them.

     Tip: Think of this process as an assembly line.  Fill all the jars first, so you have the chance to adjust their volume easier if need be.  Then put all the lids on.  Then put on the rings and tighten them as you go.  Once they are all ready to go, open the canner lid and place them in.  

     Note: Even if a lid pops once the ring is screwed on, process it anyways.  Processing is not used just to seal the jar, but to heat whatever is being canned to a high enough temperature to make it shelf stable.  

Step 6. Removing the jars from the canner

Removing jars from the canner in 2012.

     CRRRRAAAACCCCKKKK.  It's bound to happen at least once in your canning career; a jar cracks either in the canner, or once it's removed, and makes what could be considered one of the stickiest canning messes you'll ever see.  To try to prevent this from happening, take some precautions:

• DON'T remove the jars immediately from the (water bath) canner, but turn off the burner, remove the canner's lid, and set the timer for five minutes.  The jars not only start to cool down during these five minutes, but the lids (at least in our experience) are more likely to pop within the first minute or two of the jars coming out.  
• DON'T remove hot jars from a canner into the direct flow of an air conditioner or fan, or cool them in that air flow.  The change in temperature is likely to make them break.  DO keep those cooling devices on until it is time to remove the jars or otherwise it'll be hot, hot, hot in your kitchen!
• DON'T knock the jars against the side of the canner when removing them.  
• DON'T drop the jars back into the canner.  Actual jar lifters designed for the purpose of lifting canning jars make a world of difference to the safety of your jars.  They cost anywhere from $3-$13 new depending on the exact style and brand you choose.  
• DO slightly tip the jar to drain most of the water off the lid before you move it to your cooling location.  The last thing you'll want is a burn from the very hot water.  

Canned pineapple, apple pie filling, apple butter, and hot
pepper jam cooling on the table in 2013.

     Make sure you have a place prepared to let your jars cool before they need to come out of the canner.  You can use cookie trays with dish towels or cookie racks on, turkey roasters with their roasting racks, dish towels or bath towels laid out on tables or counters, or also cookie racks with towels or foil underneath to catch any overflow that might occur.  Although we started off just using the cookie tray and racks to cool them on, as our batches got bigger, we quickly ran out of racks.  We now remove all of our jars to a cookie tray to then carry them over to their cooling location on a large bath towel set on either a table, desk or trunk away from any direct air flow.  

• DON'T check your lids too early.  This may result in a false seal, and therefore a ruined jar of canned goods.  Within about an hour or two all the lids should have popped.  Any canned goods with lids that have not popped should be stored in the fridge.  Wait at least eight hours to pack up your canned goods for storage.  
• DO label all your canned goods before storing them with both year and their contents.  Trust me... you won't remember which kind of jam it is when you're looking at a sea of reds and purples without having a label on it.  

     I hope some of this is helpful in making your canning process a little easier!  What time saving tips do you have in the canning kitchen?  

How Much Should I Plant?

     As we work towards the ongoing chore of planning and planting the 2017 garden, that semi-crazy idea of growing enough food to sustain ourselves comes to mind once again.  In reality, we don't have the space, nor the time, it would take to be truly 100% sustainable, so we (more or less) plant enough food to supplement our trips to the grocery store, and certainly lower the grocery bills.  

So much zucchini!  2013 was the year of
more zucchini than I ever cared to see,
some of them almost reaching the
width of baseball bats!  

     Determining exactly how much we need to plant to do this comes with a lot of trial and error, and for certain crops, we've never made it past the error stage.  There are; however, some crops that we are essentially sustainable with unless there is a bad harvest year.  There was the one year that we planted a whopping 200 pea seeds, and yielded over 20 pounds of the tiny green things that blistered our fingers as we shelled them by hand.  The following year we upped it to 400 seeds and a different variety for the spring, and got a measly few ounces of peas that didn't even amount to half a pound for our efforts.  There was the year that our zucchini was decimated by squash bugs, followed by a year where we prayed the squash bugs would decimate the single plant that was producing over 30 pounds of zucchini and causing us to toss more than just the occasional scrap to the chickens.  It's essentially a toss up with what Mother Nature might throw at you.

     It all boils down to how much should I plant?  I've been asked this question multiple times, and in reality, it all comes down to trial and error.  We started off using advice from the internet by simply Googling "how much to plant" paired with some common sense to figure out how much to plant the first year.  From there, we started to expand upon what we needed more of based upon how quickly certain crops were used up.  Here's three tips to get you started that go beyond Googling "how much to plant":

Sit down and calculate what you actually use over the course of a year.

We try not to overburden ourselves with canning and do 1-year,
2-year and 3-year cycles.  Pictured above is a 3-year canning
cycle of Mixed Berry and Strawberry jams.  This year
(2017) our cycles collide so we will be canning all three
cycles at once.  YIKES!

     I know this sounds time consuming (it is) and bothersome, but when your up to your ears in spaghetti squash that only one of your family members will touch, you'll wish you would have listened.  We have three categories that we take into consideration: canned goods, frozen food, and dry goods (and root crops).  I generally don't calculate what we'll eat fresh because that greatly fluctuates with what is in abundance when harvesting.

     Below is an example of what we preserve for consumption later.  (Items that are crossed out means we are using up our current stock and do not plan to can or otherwise preserve them again in the coming year.  Items that are in parenthesis means that we plan on adding them in the coming year if our harvest permits.)

Canned Goods Apple Barbecue Sauce Apple Butter Apple Juice Apple Pie Filling Apple Pie Jam Applesauce (Baked Beans) (Beef Stock) Blueberry Pie Filling Bread and Butter Pickles Carrot Cake Jam (Chicken Stock) Corn Relish Corn Salsa Cranberry Relish Cranberry Sauce Dill Pickles Duck Sauce Grape Jelly Grape Juice Ham Stock Hot Pepper Jam Ketchup Marmalade Mixed Berry Jam Peaches Peach Honey Butter Peach Jam Peach Pie Filling Peach Salsa Pineapples Pizza Sauce Raspberry Jam Raspberry Jelly Raspberry Lemonade Concentrate Rhubarb Jam Rhubarb Relish Rhubarb Sunshine Concentrate Roasted Red Pepper Spread Salsa Sauerkraut Spaghetti Sauce Strawberries Strawberry Jam Strawberry Lemonade Concentrate Strawberry Rhubarb Jam Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Filling Strawberry Syrup Sweet 'N' Sour Sauce Sweet Pickles Sweet Pickle Relish Tomatoes, Diced Tomatoes, Whole Tomato Juice Tomato Paste Tomato Sauce Tomato Soup Turkey Stock Vegetable Stock Wineberry Jam

Frozen Foods Blackberries Blueberries Broccoli, florets Cabbage, quartered Cauliflower, florets Chili Peppers, diced Celery Celery Leaves Corn on the Cob Corn Green Beans Green/Spring Onions Jalapeno Peppers, diced Lima Beans Patty Pan Squash, sliced Peaches Peas Pumpkin, cooked Raspberries Spaghetti Squash, cooked Strawberries Sweet Peppers, sliced Tomatoes, whole cherry Wax Peppers, diced Wineberries Yellow Squash, coined Zucchini, coined Zucchini, shredded Prepared Frozen Foods From Garden/Produce Apple Dumpling Roll-ups Cream of Celery Soup Egg Rolls Enchilada Sauce Pesto Chicken Scraps  *We keep chicken scraps  frozen to feed them over  the winter to supplement  their diets when there is  limited pasture Cabbage, shredded Garden Scraps Mulberries Radishes Frozen Produce Surplus left from previous years

Dry Goods Basil, multiple varieties Black Beans Catnip Chili Peppers Corn Dill Garlic Hulless Oats Hutterite Soup Beans Kidney Beans Lima Beans Mangals - chicken feed Meadowmint Onions, multiple varieties Oregano Parsley Pinto Beans Popcorn Potatoes, multiple varieties Pumpkins Scarlet Runner Beans Speariment Squash Sugar Beets - chicken feed Thyme Tomatoes, sun-dried

     Now after reading that list you are probably feeling a little overwhelmed, or perhaps proclaiming "ain't nobody got time for that!"  (Which I wholeheartedly agree with.)  Again, this is an example of how calculating what we use over a course of a year works for us.  It is certainly not meant to be what your family will do because every family has different tastes.

You plant it, you preserve it!  Processing tomatoes is always
the biggest chore around here because there are so many of
them!  This is an evening's worth of cutting tomatoes in 2014
to go through the processor and start canning in the morning.

     In this example, I'm going to use tomatoes as it's a fairly common item for people to plant in their gardens.  Out of the above items, the following have tomatoes in: Corn Salsa, Ketchup, Pizza Sauce, Salsa, Spaghetti Sauce, Sweet 'N' Sour Sauce, Diced Tomatoes, Whole Tomatoes, Tomato Paste, Tomato Sauce, Tomato Soup, Vegetable Stock, frozen Cherry Tomatoes, Enchilada Sauce, and Sun-Dried Tomatoes.  That's a lot of tomato products!  Now say your family eats two large pizzas every month.  A large pizza equals one jar of pizza sauce, meaning you would need to can 24 jars of pizza sauce to get you through the year.  To make 24 (jelly) jars of pizza sauce using Ball's recipe, you will need 39 cups of plum tomato puree (or about 13 pounds worth of plum/paste tomatoes).  IF you are having a good season with a good plant, a single tomato plant can produce 20-30 pounds worth of tomatoes, so you would have to plant half a plant to make pizza sauce, and then the additional harvest for the remaining plant could go to another tomato product.  You would then use the same method for the remaining recipes you want to can to get an estimate of how many tomato plants you'll need to plant.  We usually plant one or two extra in the garden to help if we might have a bad year.  (Note: We plant anywhere from 18 to 40 tomato plants in any given year depending on how many tomato products need canned as we stagger our canning in 1-year, 2-year and 3-year intervals.  A 40 tomato plant year will yield around 600 pounds of tomatoes for us, or an average of just fifteen pounds per plant.  This leads me to my second tip...)

Write It Down!

     Every year you plant you should keep records to help you determine how much you need to plant in subsequent years.  Although you swear you'll remember, in the midst of a crazy harvest season, it's a lot easier to just write it down and look it up than wrack through your already nerve-wracked brain.  We use a cheap produce scale (it's not even digital) and white board that's attached to the side of the fridge to record weight totals as the produce comes in.  Once the white board gets filled, I input the totals and dates the items were harvested into an Excel spreadsheet that will calculate our total produce amount over the season. 

     Having records that tell you how much you planted, and how much you yielded are helpful in averaging how much you will get from each plant in your particular growing location.  Keep in mind, just because you planted ten tomato plants one year and got x-amount of pounds of tomatoes, it does not mean you will get the same amount of tomatoes the following year.  

     After looking back through your records you'll get an idea with how much you should plant.  Here's three examples from our garden, which we are only feeding two from: 

Lima Beans - 38" double row (about 150 seeds).  

This gives us enough to eat fresh, freeze some for use throughout the year, and also enough to dry as seeds for planting next year.  (What happens if we get too much?  If we end up with too many Lima beans, succotash will be added to the menu more often.)

Peas (Hull or Shell) - 38" double row (about 400 seeds) - single planting 

This gives us enough to eat fresh and freeze some for use throughout the year; however, we do not have (at this point) enough to save seeds as well.  We hope with a double planting in the spring and fall this coming year, there will be enough to save dried peas for seeds the following year.  (What happens if we get too much?  Looks like Sheppard's pie will have extra peas in!)

Potatoes - three 38" rows (about 10lbs of seed potatoes).

This gives us enough to eat fresh, store for use throughout the year, and about 10lbs worth to use as seed potatoes for the following year; however, we do need to supplement potatoes from planting until harvesting (about four months) from the grocery store.  Our on-going struggles with the Colorado Potato Beetle and blight also limits the crop that comes out of the ground during harvest.  (What happens if we get too much?  We'll let you know when it happens... ;)  We eat a lot of potatoes!)  

Don't be afraid to re-evaluate each year.

     Once you have a few years worth of experience built up you will quickly find that you may be pawning off zucchini or eggplant on your neighbor every year, stuck without lettuce for three months at a time, or having to buy onions at the grocery store as soon as you put your onion sets into the ground.  It's okay!  It's part of the learning experience of trial and error.  At the end of every (major) growing season we sit down and do a quick evaluation of what we need and what we have too much of, then we adjust our planting totals to try and do better next year.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes, as is in the case of 400 pea plants, it fails miserably. Just remember...

There is ALWAYS next year!

Canning Season

An evening's harvest

     Things are a little crazy around here as the summer harvest begins to come in, and the deep freezes and canning shelves overflow. We've just entered Week 3 of canning season, and as I was putting away some of the newly canned goods (Sweet Pickles from Week 1, and Bread & Butter Pickles and Sweet Pickle Relish from Week 2), I realized something... 

     No, it has nothing to do with the amount of cucumbers we're swimming in. Well, actually, I take that back, it just might. It also has to do with all the cabbage, tomatoes and peppers, and all the not-so-blank spaces on our canning shelves as we expand to can even more of our own foods each year. You see, we're not going to have enough room for all of our canned goods this year.

     I was concerned last week about running out of freezer space after having to dedicate another compartment to chicken scraps.  (Two whole compartments of one of our 15 cubic foot deep freezes are now almost full with vegetables/fruits for the chickens this winter, and before it's all said and done, a third compartment might be added as well to make sure we have enough for them.)  

     Now, with the lack of space for canned goods, some serious rearranging is going to need to take place, because figuring out where to store canned goods is not quite as easy as everyone thinks as this is our year's supply worth of food essentially being "purchased" at one time.  (Take a look at "You Plan To Eat All That?" if you don't believe me.)  

     Some days a weekend "shopping trip" to purchase this year's worth of food seems more reasonable.  I often wonder why it should take an entire "season" to can everything you need.  Why can't we just all jam it into a couple of days and be done with it all?  

Canning weekend of 2015

     Spoiler: Don't do this.  Once a year I get this brilliant idea and jam peaches, apples and tomato products into one weekend in August just to get them all over with.  Every year I come up for air exhausted and swear I'll never do it again.  This year, I've bypassed most of that stage and am making plans for a "relaxing" canning weekend containing all these products again from the fiery depths of my kitchen in August...

     This early summer has been the year of pickles for me.  The cucumber plants are (for once) doing what they are supposed to do, even though we have an outbreak of striped cucumber beetles to deal with.

Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
fermenting to make Sauerkraut

     So far we have a batch of Sweet Pickles done, with another batch fermenting.  There's Sweet Pickle Relish canned (recipe here), and also a batch of the simplest pickle I can find: Bread & Butter Pickles.  To top it all off, Sauerkraut is also fermenting alongside the Sweet Pickles right now, and I'm about to have to thoroughly rearrange the kitchen for canning season soon as from here on out, it is expected that I will be canning (at bare minimum) one recipe each week until October.  That's at least twelve weeks of canning (and a lot more than twelve recipes worth of things that will need canned)!

     I'm not quite sure how many more cucumbers we'll need this year, so our chickens might get lucky and have some extra cucumbers to pick at instead of just cabbage heads, broccoli, cauliflower, beet tops and radishes.  I'm sure they won't mind.

The Plymouth Barred Rock also pecking at some Watermelon rinds.

In Other News

Did you say food?  Our Delawares are the least picky
chickens I have ever seen when it comes to food.  

     To complete the cycle of chaos around here, the Delawares are begging for their own pasture (and three escaped their run in search of grass when I went to change out their water the other day, so we really need to get their pasture done).  Chicken chasing is not all that it is cracked up to be.  

    With temperatures climbing into the 90s for almost a whole week now, they and the Plymouth Barred Rocks have been getting mud puddle filled runs to help keep them cool, and they are loving it!  They have also been keeping us on our toes as we change out their water multiple times throughout the day and keep an eye on whether or not they are getting heat stressed.  In all the twenty-two chickens seem to be doing fairly well considering the temperatures.

Baling Straw on July 4th before the rains came.  The Mr. is
sitting out there in the tractor, waiting to get a wagon.

     The Mr. has been helping out our landlord occasionally with the hay and straw harvests this year, and my cousin who was visiting from North Carolina and I got to watch everyone try to get the straw bales in before the rains came on the Fourth of July.  The rains, which were supposed to only arrive in the evening, came early (around 2 p.m.), and sent everyone, along with their wagons, running for cover.   Fortunately, we live in the country, and the July Fourth weekend also gave us 18 different fireworks displays, which we watched from the sand mound.

We will also be working on replacing the greenhouse roof
before winter as a windstorm late last week ripped it to shreds.

     As we started to harvest our summertime produce, we planted a late season crop of Incredible Sweet Corn, and are now planning for our fall crops in the garden.  Just this past week our seed starter trays were filled with Winter Dream Cauliflower, Sun King Broccoli, Red Acre Cabbage, Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage and Blue Curled Scotch Kale seeds.   The seeds are currently waiting out the weather on the porch, where I can keep them easily watered, and will hopefully be moved to the greenhouse once needed adjustments are made to it.  Soon we'll harvest the rest of the cabbage and begin planting some of our fall season seeds.

Crops Being Harvested

July: Black Raspberries, Blackberries, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Cucumbers, Herbs (various), Hull Peas, Lettuce, Mint, Mulberries, Peppers, Radishes, Sugar Beets, Tomatoes, Yellow Squash and Zucchini

Upcoming in August: Blackberries, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Herbs (various) Lettuce, Lima Beans, Mint, Oats, Patty Pan Squash, Peppers, Radishes, Sugar Beets, Sweet Corn, Tomatoes, Wineberries, Yellow Squash and Zucchini

Until next time, Happy Harvesting!

Too Many Projects, Too Little Time In 2015

     I can't believe it's almost the end of January and I haven't wrapped up 2015 yet.  We ended our 2015 on more rain than I was interested in seeing, and started 2016 on piles and piles of snow.  The rain certainly was a change from the beginning of the year which was especially hard on our electric bills, even harder than our first one here, and the snow piled even higher.  There's certainly been some changes around the whole place as we're entering our fourth growing season at this home in a few months.  Come take the journey with us over the course of the last year:

Scaredy Cat and Purrball playing snowball ice hockey on
the quite icy driveway in February.

     When we started 2015, we had Momma Buttercup and nine of her twelve offspring running around the place keeping the rodents and bugs at bay for us.  Most of them waited for us on the steps and corncrib each time we returned home from a long mid-week "weekend" at my in-laws, and were full of love and energy.  Unfortunately, since then, we have just six remaining: Gravy and Whitey from the first litter, and Blue Eyes, Little Gray, Purrball and Tiger from the second litter.  The rest, being farm cats, all decided to head out across the fields one day, and we have not seen them since.  Perhaps, like Gravy, they'll come back after an extended absence (her's was only a little over a week), but we are not holding our breath, and instead loving on those we have remaining.

     Due to a break out of eye infections that soon spread across all of our cats, rabies shots, and needing to get a bunch of them spayed or neutered, the cats, to say the least, cost us a bucketful last year that we were not planning on.  Our hope is that we can reduce their medical bills and food bills in 2016, but for now I'm ashamed to admit their cost almost topped that of our springtime project...

     By spring we decided to add some feathery friends to entertain the cats... okay, we wanted eggs and meat, but they do certainly entertain the cats!  Seven fluffy chicks in May turned into four laying hens and three roosters who never shut up!  (Their alarm clocks are clearly broken.)  During this time, we raised them from three days old in a makeshift brooder in the shed, constructed their chicken coop on steroids (i.e. a "pastured poultry palace"), dug over a foot down to bury their main run, and we are now presently constructing their tunnel run and rotating pastures.  As of the end of the year, our stubborn hens have given us 81 eggs in all, and we still haven't come up with the time to thin the rooster flock.

     Their coop, and the whole chicken enterprise, cost us a rather hefty sum as well (more so for the fully enclosed runs and all the hardware cloth than the actual structure).  I'll let you guess how much the going price for "farm fresh" eggs is around here, to calculate just why we need 4,813 eggs to break even.

     The garden was another trial that happened to be occurring right alongside the chicken project.  Our 38' by 78' main garden, paired with the less well-kept upper garden and some random patches about the yard certainly kept us in food this year.  It was the first year we experimented with cover crops and mulching, and the chickens certainly enjoyed buckwheat treats throughout the spring into the early summer.  To say the least, things got a little weedy around the place as the season progressed and we tackled our other projects.

     I'm also happy to say, if you don't calculate the equipment purchase into the garden costs, we actually saved money gardening!  Fortunately, when I make my financial spreadsheet for everything we do, equipment doesn't fall into the garden costs!  However, the equipment set us back a little as well...

     To make things a little easier next year we added yet another project to our list: fixing up the implements for a David Bradley Super Power.  The Mr., with some help, got the Super Power running in early fall.  Now, we should be working on wire brushing, painting and repairing all those implements that we'll need for spring; however, we're working on chicken  runs and pastures and...

     ...started yet another garden project as well.  The Mr. really, really wanted to have the greenhouse up before planting season begun in early winter, so he called some of his family members fairly last minute in December and they  managed to get all four walls, rafters, and eleven of the windows installed in a single day.  Talk about teamwork!  If everything goes as planned, we'll at least have some seedlings growing in the greenhouse, even if the seeds are still started on the seed starter unit the Mr. built for us for this past spring's planting.  (Of course, this was the plan, prior to 30" of snow being dumped on us.)

      As the cats continued to vie for our attention, the crops and weeds were growing, and the chickens needed the permanent home put up, we still needed to do something with all of that produce.  For some reason canning season begun in mid-winter for me this year, and continued through until mid-fall (even though there are still things that need canned down in one of the deep freezes right now).  It was a lot of work to put up all of that food, and I can definitely say that in the next couple of days I'll be inventorying what we still have in stock to start making the final adjustments for our 2016 garden.

     The financial spreadsheet wasn't showing black by the end of the year, and I'm going to write that off on "creating a life we love living" by building up infrastructure, and hope we do better next year.  This is the first year of red, after two years in the black, so one can hope that 2016 we won't be seeing red again.

     Yup, can you believe it?  It's almost February of 2016, and certainly time to start thinking about the garden and projects for next year.  What big changes have you seen around your place this past year?

You Plan To Eat All That?

     To answer the many questions and commentary of our friends and family (and the rest of you who are probably thinking the same things followed by the words "nuts," "crazy," and "scary") who saw my canning posts on Facebook over the course of the last few months.  No we are not preparing for nuclear fire to rain down... nor are we stocking a fallout shelter... planning to go completely off the grid... prepping for the zombie apocalypse... or any other apocalypse for that matter!  YES, we do plan to eat our canning.  

     What provoked this blog post is the photos leading up to this one... 

     You are currently looking at 720 jars of canned goods (amounting to a little over 85 gallons worth of food), which doesn't even happen to be all of them for the entire upcoming season, just the ones we have done.  It's called food and yes, a lot of it, and yes we understand you think we're nuts (as you've let us know this time and time again under no uncertain terms over the last few years).  So today, I'm simply here to say we plan for breakfast, lunch and dinner a little differently than you, and that our food store will not go to waste.

     Think of it this way... How many pizzas do you eat every year (remember not only to count Saturday night, but birthday parties, poker nights and every sporting event imaginable)?  We currently only have 15 jars of pizza sauce which means (unless we run out and buy a pizza), we can only have 15 pizzas in the next twelve months.  Having said this, more pizza sauce is planned to be canned, so we're adding to that 720 jar count.   There's just 29 jars of spaghetti sauce, or otherwise known as about two spaghetti-based meals a month for the next year.  Applesauce, peaches and pineapples?  There's 93 jars of them.  That means we don't even have two quarts for every week, and we often go through 3 or more of them when packing the Mr.'s daily lunches.  In essence, we are not only buying "a week's worth of groceries" like many of you might, but we're shopping for the whole year, which is why we have 720 jars of canned goods and you all think we're nuts. 

Having a second deep freeze is an amazing feeling for me

     What you haven't been seeing in between these canning sessions is the deep freezes starting to fill with garden produce and the dry goods shelves and root vegetable bins also being stocked up.  (This is probably good because I'm not sure I want to know what is above  "nuts," "crazy," and "scary" in your vocabulary.)  What each and every one of you is also probably forgetting, is that we don't want to buy (and hope not to buy) fresh produce during the winter when produce prices are so high as they're being imported from further and further away.  Although we are contemplating about adding a low tunnel or small greenhouse to the garden to extend our growing season, for now we have to rely on the shelves and current season.  We'd like to store our own garden's produce for our use over winter instead of running to the store.  In February, I can't run out to the garden for an onion, but hopefully I can go downstairs to our bins for one instead of hand-shoveling the driveway, letting the car warm up, skidding down the driveway on a sheet of ice because keeping the driveway ice free is a rarity, and then heading down the road through the snow and slush to the grocery store.  

     "But what about the ridiculous amount of jams you have?"  You protest.  

Mixed berry and strawberry jams from earlier this year

     Sigh.  For those of you who have been following along in previous months you can probably surmise by this point, we do have a bit of jams, jellies and butters built up.  So, yes our 187 jars of jams, jellies and butters are sitting downstairs among the rest of the canned goods.  But, while you see 187 jars of jams, jellies and butters that we'll never use in the next decade let alone year, I see peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, homemade cereal bars, and Christmas gifts.  No.  We will not eat all of these jams, jellies and butters this year, but I like to try and stock up for about two years at one time when doing them.  It saves me time, and although others will protest, I really think they taste just as good the second or third year as the first.  (To each their own.) 

     "What are those?"  You point, wrinkling your nose.  (I don't question your uncertainty as this is a scene that I have made before as well to my great grandmother's 40-year-old chow chow that she still thought was good and tasted fine.  For this very reason I am still holding strong to my pledge of not only never making chow chow, but never eating the vinegary mini-produce.  That smells lingers with you for a long, long time.)  Instead of chow chow, however, you happen to be looking at my chicken, turkey and vegetable stocks that will be turned into soups, stews and stuffings.  Yes, the jars of cream-to-brown liquids may not look the prettiest, but sometimes food tastes a lot better than it looks!  

     Before you bother with your next protest, as I've noticed you working on the next one as I answered your last, I'd like to interject with a quick story.  I once read Betty Groff Cookbook: Pennsylvania German Recipes that my mother had gotten for me.  In the book the story is relayed that Lancaster County, Pennsylvania native Betty Groff was entertaining some Amish neighbors for dinner and had invited them to see her shelves packed with vibrantly colored canned goods as she was "keeping the tradition" of canning. Afterwards her Amish neighbor had remarked at Betty’s cupboards of canned goods: “For you, this may be a tradition, but for us it is survival.” And, although you will assuredly come up with another protest, I stand by the words of Betty Groff's Amish neighbor.

     So, although most of you still think we are "nuts," "crazy," and "scary," when I go downstairs to get my apple pie filling for Thanksgiving dinner and your rushing around trying to figure out what you're going to make when the grocery stores are closed because someone who was bringing dessert cancelled last minute, remember... we're all a little nuts in our own special way.  

Hot, Hot, Hot

     Over the past couple of days, it’s been hot, hot, hot.  So of course, that means a perfect time to can right?  (Sigh.  Yeah, I didn't think so either.)  I keep trying to confirm to myself, we no longer control our lives, but a host of other factors do.  They control the produce and therefore the produce controls us.

     Last Wednesday the canning season picked up from prolonged to hectic with the addition of 2.5 bushels of Red Haven peaches and 2.5 bushels of Summer Rambo apples from a local orchard.  Of course, there were other things from the garden that got put on hold – tomatoes to pick, zucchinis to shred and slice, and cucumbers to pickle – but I’ve come to find over the course of the last couple of years, you can’t do everything at one time, but generally August is the month you go produce crazy:

August 8, 2011 (Our First Year) What do you do with a bushel of tomatoes?  Salsa, pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce of course!  What do you do with a bushel of peaches?  Canned peaches and peach pie filling!  [All in "the canning factory" a.k.a. Mom's kitchen.] 

August 6, 2012 (Our Second Year)This week's goal: 135 lbs of tomatoes, 25 lbs of peaches and 50 lbs of apples. Also known as blind ambition (and in rare occasions, stupidity). I prefer to think of it as not starving to death. [All in a galley kitchen inside my husband's college "bachelor pad" a.k.a. a tiny apartment kitchen.] 

August 21, 2013 (Our Third Year)And of course when it rains, it pours produce as our two bushels of peaches came in the same day as the [20.25lbs of concord] grapes (and another 20 lbs of tomatoes). [Finally in our current kitchen.] 

August 19, 2014 (Our Fourth Year)Well hello another round of processing... I can't say I missed you too terribly! Happy with the prices though! Only 1.5 bushels of peaches ($10 per 1/2 bushel), 1 bushel of apples ($3 per 1/2 bushel) and 32 pounds of tomatoes ("free" from our garden) this time around. [Note: Two days before we harvested the rest of the potatoes and onions, along with the patty pan squash.]

     This year (Our Fifth Year!) it was only $5 per half bushel for peaches and $3 per half bushel for apples.  Why don’t we have our own trees to harvest from, as you can certainly tell that we well, go a little nuts with all of this canning stuff (at least our friends and relatives seem to think so)?  Well, for one, we rent and fruit trees take a while to establish themselves, so therefore we have to confirm that we will also be established here for a while too.  Two, how you dig up a fully mature tree if and when you decide to leave and easily replant it elsewhere would be an interesting question to try and answer.  And, three… expense.  If we could get them cost-effectively, we might just try it. 

      So my husband came home on Wednesday afternoon from work and transformed our kitchen into a canners’ paradise.  (Okay, if we had an air conditioner attached to us and four extra hands that don’t get tired it’d be a little more like a paradise.)  Instead, it was the beginning of another painstaking endeavor with canned goods.  We were smart and remembered that there was no way we were going to be cooking during all of this (something we usually neglect to remember... at least for say, the last four years), so I ran to a local pizza place and got two large pizzas (which turned into three for the price of two when they messed up our order) that kept us in food for the next three days.

     The first night (of 5 hours) we managed to get 28 quarts of applesauce, 9 half-pints of apple pie jam (one of my husband's experimental canned good recipes this year), and 9 pints of bread and butter pickles that were awaiting canning in the fridge.  Might as well, put them in while the canners' hot!  We were finished sometime after 11 p.m. and I may or may not have fallen asleep on the couch during the second to last canner load.  

     By Thursday, our second day, my husband got what I considered the luxury of trudging off to work bright and early in the morning, while I took the hot kitchen to continue with the peach processing.  My goal was simple: By the time he got home from work, I should have enough done to have the canner running non-stop before we collapsed into bed.  When he got home, in went peach jam, peach pie filling, peach honey butter, and then canned peaches... and then the glass quart jars started to break.  There were no cracks when I inspected them, but it just so happened that it when the last two loads of peaches for the night went into the canner, out of fourteen jars, we came up with just eleven as my husband skimmed peaches off the top of the canner and we agreed to call it a night.  

     That's when our final day kicked in: Friday.  The Mr. once again headed off to work, and I got stuck in what I then concluded was the prison known as an active and boiling hot kitchen.  It was in one word, a warzone.  Canning jars, full and empty sitting everywhere.  Peach and apple guts splattered from the stovetop to the tabletop to the floor.  A pile of dishes that could easily have been used as an embankment and a boiling hot canner to top it all off.  It was the last day though, so I could at least be happy about that.  The last day of more jars of peaches; all of which came out in one piece from the canner.  Followed by apple pie filling, peach salsa, and a much deserved long weekend (i.e. two day weekend).  

     In the end, we filled 148 jars, and got 145 that didn't crack (and unfortunately a couple that didn't seal that now need either recanned or used up that are also precariously balanced in the already overflowing fridge).  I can happily say that the shower to remove the last of the brine and syrup off of me never felt so good, and that although three days of complete pain, I made it.  We have food for the winter!  (I never have to do this again, right?  ... RIGHT?!?!?!)  

     Are we done?!  You may think so after we canned all that, but sadly (and happily) no.  There's still more to process (even with the peaches and apples).  I have two 18-quart dishpans in the fridge weighed down with the garden's tomato harvest from the last couple of days.  Then another dishpan of apples for apple butter to can and apple dumpling rollups for the freezer.  Two gallon ice cream buckets and an overflowing basket of peaches to ripen and make into peach muffins and other goodies for the freezer.  Not to mention, the two zucchinis dangling from the fridge door as they are precariously balanced in between jars and the banana box of onions that we harvested from the garden last night to put up for winter storage.  That's only what's out of the ground thus far.  There's still squash and beans, potatoes and tomatoes, peppers and corn of multiple varieties to take out of the garden, and another seemingly thousand batches of pesto to make from the herb row before I need to remove the plants to attempt to overwinter them.  It's never-ending, but in the end, we have food and we're happy.  What more could one ask for?  

Gad-Cukes!

"Examine preserves [in storage], to see that they are not contracting mould; and your pickles, to see that they are not growing soft and tasteless."

– Lydia M. Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1832)

      Anyone else feeling a little tired lately?  It must be harvesting season, or canning season, or freezing season, or dehydrating season… hmm… maybe this is why I’m feeling a little tired.  Last week, I had the fortunate of walking out to our cucumber plants for the first time in my life, and harvesting cucumbers to process!  Then I had a few days where those cucumbers sat in a basket in my fridge and telling me to “process us quickly, before something else comes up!”  Looks like I better listen to those talking cucumbers because that sweet corn sure is coming in fast now! 

      Our first cucumber crop is looking to me like a batch of sweet pickle relish (and some bread and butter pickles)!  It’s not that we don’t like pickles (only I do actually, the husband can’t stand them), but some of our family members love the relish that we give as Christmas gifts with other goodies each year.  So before the day heated up, I headed out into the kitchen for some canning!  If you’d like to follow along and can some of your own sweet pickle relish, I’ve added the directions below. 

Ingredients:

• 6 cups seeded and finely chopped pickling cucumbers (We have “pickle barrel” cucumbers in the garden, so I ended up using five big ones and getting about 6 cups worth)
• 3 cups finely chopped onion (In my case that meant one big candy onion we had downstairs)
• 3 cups of seeded and finely chopped green and red sweet peppers (I used some from the freezer, and mixed together whatever I could find of the two since our pepper plants aren’t at the harvesting stage yet.  I usually try to go heavy on the red pepper for pretty, but couldn’t find enough of it to do so this year.  If you didn't notice, we're canning with what's on hand right now.)
• ¼ cup of pickling salt
• Cold water
• 3 cups granulated cane sugar (We prefer to use granulated sugar made with sugar cane instead of sugar beets, which are more likely to be GMOs.  You can find out on your bag whether you have sugar cane sugar or sugar beet sugar)
• 2 cups cider vinegar
• 1 tablespoon mustard seeds
• 2 teaspoons celery seeds
• ½ teaspoon ground turmeric

Directions:

Step 1: Scrub clean the cucumbers with a vegetable brush.  We actually have a carrot brush, which works wonderfully, thanks to one of the volunteers who gave out very meaningful Christmas gifts to all the staff members at a former job.  (She pegged what we’d like!  Our gift was all fun cooking stuff!).

Step 2: Start to multi-task, as I fill a water bath canner in the sink and start to get it up to temp on the stove by heating it on a lower setting as it will take a little while before I actually need it, I also start to finely dice and deseed the cucumbers.  Sure, you could use a chopper or food processor, but as some relatives and friends probably think by now, I must be a glutton for punishment as I hand chop them all.  For some reason, my mother taught me that chopping vegetables could be a joy – a task that I liked to take over when making lentil soup as a child.  Thinking back, perhaps she had some ulterior motives for this… All the “scraps” that I can’t use are going to the chickens.  (P.S. – All this hand chopping could take a while so pull out the laptop and turn on a video and try to pass the time.  I just happened to enjoy a very interesting BBC series on Edwardian farming on YouTube.)

Step 3: Finely chop onions.  (We discard our “scraps” to the compost bin bucket for these.) 

Step 4:  Finely chop peppers. Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with these peppers, they just happen to have frost on them from the freezer.  Thawing them just a little, but not entirely, makes them easier to cut. (We discard our “scraps” to the compost bin bucket for these.) 

Step 5: Combine all the vegetables and pickling salt into a pot or bowl and cover with cold water.  Let sit at room temperature for 2 hours.  Take a break!  (Actually, in my case, I started slicing cucumbers and onions and chopping garlic for bread and butter pickles as they chill for 3 to 12 hours in the refrigerator, so I could can them while the canner was hot.)

Step 6: Drain and rinse the vegetables in a colander under cold water in the sink.  Then return to the pot on the stovetop and add your spices, sugar and vinegar.  Bring it to a boil and reduce heat, allowing it to simmer for about 20 minutes or until about half the liquid is boiled off.  Make sure to stir occasionally or it could stick to the bottom!

Step 7: Ladle quickly into prepared jars, leaving a 1/4 to 1/2 inch of headspace on each jar.  (For some reason, it seems I never have enough hands available to remember to take a photograph of this step.)  Wipe rims clean and place lids and bands on tightly.  Process jelly jars for 10 minutes in a water bath canner.  Remove from the canner.  Place jars, upright, on cookie racks or clean dish towels to cool for at least 24 hours.

Yields approximately 8 jelly jars (8oz.).

And last, but not least – label the jars and load up the pantry!  Where am I putting these?  Oh, wait… there’s an empty spot!  Just let me shift a few things around… there.  DONE!  (At this point is where you can imagine a cartoon version of me standing back proudly examining my handy work as the cucumbers grow with profusion on the vine outside the window, about to explode at any moment.  And yes, a few short days later, it looks like we’ll have to be canning again soon.) 

 What have you been canning lately?