Canning Day: Peaches and Pickles

Today has been a marathon canning day for me.  I brought home a 25 pound box of peaches yesterday and I wanted to get to them while they were at their peak freshness.

  I also had 4 gallon bags of cucumbers from the past few days that needed to be canned before they got too old.  The day started bright and early with prepping the cucumbers for their 12 hours brine soak.  I scrubbed each cucumber and cut the flower end off and sliced the larger ones into spears. Then they all went into a brine solution and finally ended up in the fridge to keep them nice and cool while they soaked.  Once that was done, I did a round of dishes and then started setting up to can the peaches.

I set the canner on to boil and added the first round of pint jars and lids.  It usually takes a long time to heat the water bath, so I always get it going first.  Then I turned my attention to the peaches. They had to be peeled, pitted and sliced before they were treated to prevent browning in a lemon juice/water mix.  Then they were ready to be canned.  Once a had a good amount of peach slices, I heated up a batch of light syrup.

 By the time the syrup was boiling,  the jars were ready in the canner.  One by one I packed them with peach slices and then topped them off with the light syrup.  Each batch was six or seven pint jars of peaches and I ended up doing three batches, and might still have enough for a fourth, though I might not have enough jars at the moment.  This endeavor wound up making 19 pints of peaches for $25 and I still have some to spare.  Not a bad deal if you ask me.

After I finished canning the peaches, I did another round of dishes and then started to prep the canner for a batch of pickles.  It didn't take long to heat up the quart jars that I was going to fill with pickles, so I started a batch of pickling liquid as soon as the water started boiling.  While this was heating, I peeled garlic cloves and trimmed dill heads for each jar.  One by one I filled the jars with cucumbers, packing them as tightly as I could.  I had enough cucumbers for two batches of pickles and wound up
with ten more quarts of pickles.  It was a long day, but a very productive one.  I am quickly running out of space on my pantry shelves and I haven't even started canning salsa or tomato sauce yet!

Drying Apricots

This summer has produced a bumper crop of fruit for this area and a friend of mine had plenty of extra to share.  I was given a large box of nearly ripe apricots a couple of weeks ago, and they have been sitting patiently in my fridge ever since.  I finally found some time to process the ones that were still good and I decided to dehydrate this batch.  The fruits were very small, but tasty and I simply sliced them in half to remove the pit, dipped them in a honey/ lemon juice/ water mixture and laid them out on the dehydrator to dry.  The lemon juice and honey help preserve the color of the fruit as they dry as well as add a little extra sweetness to the finished product.

I filled all four trays of the dehydrator with the halved fruit pressed inside out and let it dry at 130 degrees overnight.  The next morning I was able to squeeze all four trays of fruit into one quart jar.  Talk about saving space and weight!.  I think it was a third of the box that filled the trays, so about 8 pounds of fruit reduced to just a few ounces.

These dried apricots will become snacking food for hiking, camping and road trips.  If I wanted to, I could reconstitute them and make jam or add them to dishes too.  My plan is to finish off the rest of the box as soon as I can since they probably won't last much longer.

Peppers Galore

The pepper bed had been a slightly neglected bed as I have been busy trying to keep up with the weeding.  This week I was able to address that problem and low and behold I had a bed full of happy healthy pepper plants!  I hadn't been paying them much attention, and they had grown beautifully despite my neglect.  Once the weeds were out of the way I discovered that I had a number of good sized sweet peppers on several plants and handfuls of jalapenos that would be ready in a matter of weeks.  A couple of my purple beauties even had full sized peppers just begging to be picked.  They have a deep purple skin that looks nearly black, but when you slice them open, the insides are as bright green as any green pepper.  It makes for a lovely salad addition.

I think I will try to leave the peppers on the plants to let them ripen as long as possible.  I have planted varieties that will ripen to red, orange and yellow if I let them, though I didn't write down what I planted where, so I guess I have to wait to find out which is which (aside from the purple ones - those are pretty easy to spot!)

In a few weeks I hope that the tomatoes and the peppers start to match their production so I can preserve some jars of salsa.  I will use only garden fresh ingredients because I know that they make the best tasting salsa anywhere.  From the looks of things, I will have plenty of peppers to fit the bill.  I may even get a few extra to freeze for future meals by the time it's all said and done.  I am looking forward to the rainbow of colors that will be coming out of my garden in the coming weeks.  I think that harvest season is by far the best time of the year because everything is so plentiful.

Tomatoes are Trickling In

The tomatoes have been growing fast in the summer heat and though many of them have set fruit, none of them have been  starting to ripen until now.  I have been doing my best to keep the plants trained to the trellis, but many of them have reached the top, so now my only option is to allow them to grow over to the other side.  I have stopped trimming the suckers off at this point since I would like them to grow as much fruit as possible now that they have reached the height I wanted.  We are heading for fall soon and it would be nice to get a good crop before the first frost. I was hoping to be able to move the chicken coop over this bed when it was done raising chickens for the season.  The plan was to have the coop double as a greenhouse in the winter, so all I need to do is cover it with plastic when the time comes.

.  One of the cherry tomatoes on the end has decided to start turning red.  It has large clusters of fruits that are close to the ground and those have been the first to go.  They only took a few days once they started and then they seemed to stall with a large amount of green near the stem.  I decided to try one anyway to see if it was ripe enough and by golly it surely was!  There is nothing else on earth like the taste of the first ripe summer tomato picked fresh off the vine.

The vines are thick and the plants are heavy with fruit.  I think when they start ripening I will be spending even more time preserving food in the kitchen if that is possible.  Either that or I may freeze them all until I can get around to processing them.  Any tomatoes that I freeze will become a basic tomato sauce and likely all the fresh ones will end up as salsa for as long as the peppers and onions hold out.

The Realities of Growing Your Own Chickens

This week was a reminder of the things that don't always go right when you are raising your own chickens.  I have been fairly lucky in the past with my hens that I raised for egg production, but this year I tried my hand at producing meat chickens.  All had been going very well until this week.  One evening I came home from work and did my usual rounds of checking on the garden and the animals, feeding and watering as needed.  As I briefly watched the meat chickens move around their pen I noticed that one of them seemed off, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  He didn't seem to want to move much and seemed to be off balance, often holding one wing down to steady him self.  I know that it has been hot lately, but up until this point, none of the chickens seemed to be suffering from the heat.  They all could find a shady place to hang out in the heat of the day, and I always refilled their water when I come home for lunch.  He also didn't move away from me when I entered the enclosure like all of the other chickens did.  He had never stood out to me as an overly friendly rooster like the little white delaware that seems to enjoy my company, so this behavior was totally a red flag for me.

I picked up the strangely cooperative young rooster and checked him over thoroughly.  I looked closely at his skin and his feet looking for mites, or wounds of any kind and found none.  His eyes were clear and bright and his comb was bright red, so I don't think he was anemic.  He wasn't panting or having any difficulty breathing, and strangely didn't seem stressed by all the poking and prodding.  His crop felt full and he was nice enough to give me a healthy looking stool sample as I examined him.  He let me stretch out his wings and feel his legs and body and I noticed that he did seem a bit on the thin side.  I wonder if the other chickens had been keeping him away from the food and he was weak from it.  The only other thing I found when I checked him over was a couple of gouges in the skin of his comb.  They didn't look fresh and there was no blood on him anywhere, so I don't think that they were a new problem.  The roosters have had their little squabbles in the pen, but none of them have been overly violent and no one has been injured badly to this point.

I placed him on the ground and observed him for a while longer.  He only tried to take a few steps at a time, often stepping on his own feet and still seeming off balance.  He wobbled over to the feeder and proceeded to have a snack, so I knew that he still had a good appetite.  The wobbly, drunken movements worried me though.  I also noticed that he seemed to collapse after a few steps and just sit  where he fell and didn't really seem interested in moving much.  Part of me wanted to try the wait and see approach, but the little voice in the back of my head was being insistent that I isolate him from the flock in case what was causing this rooster's problems was contagious.  I went inside and set up an isolation cage for him.  I had a large cat carrier that fit the bill, so I put a generous layer of wood shavings in the bottom and filled up a chick feeder and waterer for him and then went back out to check on him.  He had managed to get to the lowest perching spot in the enclosure and was kind of resting, but still didn't look quite right.  A couple of the other chickens tried to pick on him a few times, and he offered no resistance, nor did he try to get away.  He couldn't stay with the rest of the flock or they would most likely kill him eventually so inside he came.  He seemed fairly cozy in this isolation cage and I covered it with a towel and left him in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on him.  He never made a peep, though I did hear him eating from time to time, so he must have been comfortable enough.

While he rested in the cage, I started scouring the internet for answers for my rooster's strange behavior.  Over and over again the listed symptoms pointed me to Marek's disease.   Marek's disease is a virus that is common to poultry and there is no cure for them if they contract it, though they do make a vaccine for chickens to prevent it.  This batch of chickens was not vaccinated, so they are automatically at higher risk to contract this virus.  The sites I read stated that some chickens will develop an immunity to it by the time they are 5 months old, but these chickens are only 3 1/2 months old, so they are still at an age that is susceptible to it.  I am hoping that I isolated this bird early enough that the others won't get sick too.

I let him rest overnight and checked on him again in the morning.  He had hardly moved in his cage, though he had eaten half of the food I gave him.  When I took him out to see how he stood, he still seemed very unbalanced and still didn't seem to want to walk more than one or two steps, still crossing his feet and hanging his wings down for balance.  Marek's disease causes paralysis because it attacks the nervous system of the bird.  I was wondering if I was seeing a gradual paralysis in this bird because it seemed to take great effort for him to take a few steps and he seemed to have more trouble with his right side than his left.  If I left him to his own devices he generally plopped down where he stood and made no effort to get up and move, even if I urged him along.  At this point I was glad that I had isolated him.  I don't think that his condition had improved at all in the day and if anything he had gotten a little worse.  I decided to give him one more day and to see if the vets that I work with have any idea what was causing his problem.

The next day I brought him to work with me where he spent the day in a crate watching the day's activities.  He never made a sound here either, nor did he crow in the mornings like all of the other roosters that were still acting normally out in the pen.  He did manage to eat more food in his little resting place, but that was about it for normal behavior still.  Even at the vet's he was very docile and didn't really want to walk.  Still he stood with crossed feet and drooping wings when picked up to stand, but mostly he just settled down in a heap where ever we placed him.  Even the vets were suspicious that he had Marek's.  They offered to give him an anti-inflammatory injection, but he didn't really seem like he was in pain to me.  He didn't make a noise as everyone felt him over and didn't seem the least bit interested in moving away from anyone.  He was still eating and drinking as far as I could tell.  I decided to take him home and give him one more night to show any signs of improvement.

Today when I took him out of the cage he seemed even weaker despite resting alone for the past three days and having free access to food and water.  I would think that for an otherwise healthy chicken, he should have been moving around much more than he was.  I set him outside by the garden to see if he had any desire to walk around. He stood for a little while on his crossed feet and then sank to the ground where he stood like he was exhausted.  He still pecked at the nearby vegetation, but made no movement to explore the area.  At this point it didn't seem like there could be any other cause than Marek's disease.  Apparently in some cases the birds will have tumors on their internal organs, or their eyes can become affected and change color.  I certainly didn't want to keep this bird around my flocks any longer due to the contagiousness of the virus.  I will be watching the meat bird flock very closely for any other strange acting birds.  I hope than none of them come down with it.

I decided to dispatch the bird and then do a necropsy to the best of my ability.  I have seen many surgeries on dogs and cats, so I had a pretty good idea what healthy organs should look like.  I closely examined his skin and feathers, looking for any signs of old bruising or injury and found none.  There was very little fat on this bird I had noticed and overall he seemed a bit on the thin side.  I don't know if that was just due to his age, or if he hadn't been eating enough for a little while.  I examined his crop which was full of his chicken feed and some of the plant material that he had recently eaten.  I ran his intestines and every thing looked normal, no tumors or blockages.  The gizzard was full too, but all looked like normally digesting food.  The kidneys looked normal also, though one of them may have been a little rounder than normal.  I haven't seen what bird kidneys look like very often, so I don't have a good reference for that.  The liver looked normal and was uniform in color with no tumors or lesions.  The heart and the lungs looked normal as well.  None of the bones were broken or felt out of place.  I could find no physical explanation for why this bird was behaving the way it was.

Sadly this has become a lesson learned for me.  I hope I get off easy and don't lose any more birds in this flock.  Next time I order chicks, I will make sure that I opt for vaccinated birds to save myself the possible trouble in the future.

Filling The Fridge Without Going To The Store

Since harvest season is in full swing, I am having a hard time finding room in the fridge for much.  I am trying to stay on top of preserving my harvests by freezing some crops, and canning others.  At this rate my kitchen freezer will be full by the end of the month and I may need to plug in my chest freezer to store more.  I have also been dehydrating some things like yellow squash as I pick more than I can eat for myself.  The chickens have been very busy lately and if they keep laying at this rate I will be getting about three dozen eggs a week for awhile.

The fridge serves as temporary storage for things like cucumbers or fruit.  These are crops that can wait a couple of days until I have the time to preserve them.  I also keep the eggs in the fridge of course, but I have been writing the day they were laid on the eggs with a pencil, so I know which ones are the oldest and I can use them up first.  The freezer is how I am preserving things like broccoli and green beans.  I hope to be able to freeze enough to last through many winter meals.  My main broccoli harvest is over, but I think I have about 30 servings frozen at this point.  I may add a few more before the season it through.  The green beans have just starting producing enough extra for me to freeze, so I am not sure how big of a crop I will get from them.  I am just doing my best to harvest as thoroughly as possible to stimulate them to set more beans for me.

My pantry shelves have been filling at a rapid pace as well and I may have to invest in another set of shelving if the cucumber harvest continues as it has.  If they keep it up I will be canning at least eight quarts a week until frost.  I have also been getting offers of free apricots, so I'm sure I will have to make another batch of those soon.  I was thinking about getting another box of peaches, but I am still working on the first one that I bought last week. Once the tomatoes start ripening I will start making pints of salsa and tomato sauce.  I can look forward to the next eight or so weeks being filled with lots of time in the kitchen.

Cucumber Production is Kicking into High Gear

I am so very happy about how well my cucumbers are growing this year.  They are doing so well, that they are contemplating taking over the nearly bare beds on either side.  One of my next planned projects is to work on taming the vines to the trellis again.  They are also putting out flowers by the hundreds I think.  The season has barely begun and I have already harvesting 12 to 20 at a time.  My latest harvest revealed a couple of extra large pickles that are on the verge of becoming chicken fodder, though I think I may use them for spears if I trim them down to the right size.

The white ones and the smaller green ones will become baby dills and I might squeeze a can of spears out of the large green ones.  The white ones are so small because they tend to want to be short and round little cucumbers if I try to let them grow longer.  They have a milder flavor as well, and I'm curious about the differences in the flavors of the finished pickle.  Guess I will find out soon enough.  I will be canning them tomorrow morning, along with the cucumber harvests from the last few days.

Right now I have enough to nearly fill this gallon bag, so I think I will be able to get several quarts of pickles from this round of harvests.  I can't wait to add more pickles to my pantry shelves!  At the rate that these cucumbers are growing, I may have to devote an entire closet to their storage.....I might even have enough to share!

A Dinner Plate to be Proud Of

I have been eating really well from the garden in the past few weeks.  Most of my dinners include a fresh picked salad using a variety of lettuces that are growing among the corn and beans.  They are doing very well in the shade of the taller plants, and many of them haven't bolted yet.  My salads have had a good variety of other veggies in them as other crops are becoming ready to harvest.  The extra variety started with the radishes, and some broccoli florets, but I have since been able to start adding sliced cucumbers and fresh carrots to my salads as well.  In another week or so I should also have fresh tomatoes to add to the mix.

As for side dishes, I have started harvesting my potatoes and onions little by little.  I like to make a dish that my father refers to as "Potatoes A La Wendell"  It is basically fried potatoes with onions and garlic added for flavor.  I usually make this dish for breakfast, though in smaller amounts it makes a good side dish for dinner as well.  It makes a good base dish for adding a variety of vegetables to.  For dinner today I added a little bit of sliced green pepper from a young pepper that had a damaged area that was going to go bad.  The other side dish for this meal was some fresh broccoli left over from the last batch that I froze.  Aside from the pork chop on this plate, everything that you see here came fresh from my garden, and I picked it only minutes before I cooked it up and ate it.  Let me assure you, it was delicious.

 I have to admit that I feel a real sense of accomplishment when I sit down to a meal like this.  This food is here for me because I planted the seeds months ago.  Those seeds are going to feed me many meals over the coming winter.  Those seeds mean less trips to the grocery store, and more money in my pocket.  Those seeds mean healthy, fresh food that is only as far away as my backyard, or come winter, my freezer and pantry.  Garden season is heading for it's peak, so it's going to be a very busy next couple of weeks, but by the same token, there will be many garden fresh meals to be had.  I'm looking forward to every single one of them.

Peach Season Is Upon Us!

The beginning of August marks the peak of the fruit growing season around here.  All of the orchards are heavy with fruit and the local farmers market has been inundated with fresh peaches.  This last weekend I bought a twenty pound box of peaches for $35.  Not a bad deal at $1.75/lb.  Since there is no way that I could eat twenty pounds of peaches in the next few days, a canning bonanza became the order of the day.  I started with making some jam.  I tried to use the blemished or bruised peaches for the jam since they get finely chopped anyways.

I mixed four cups of chopped peaches with a box of powdered pectin and two tablespoons of lemon juice.  I brought the mix to a boil on the stove and then added five cups of sugar and stirred it in well.  After it came back to a good boil, I let it go for another minute or two, then turned off the burner and skimmed off all the foam that had formed on the surface.  I carefully poured the jam into my half pint jars that had been prepared in the canner, wiped the rims, set the lids and set them back in the canner.  Once the canner came back to a boil, I let them go for twenty minutes before turning off the heat and letting them cool for five minutes.  After the cooling period, I let them rest on the counter overnight to set properly.

The next thing I worked on was the sliced peaches.  I knew I wanted to can about seven or eight pints of slices, so I choose eighteen of the prettiest peaches in the box.  In small batches I set them in boiling water for a minute or two, then set them in an ice bath to loosen their skins.  It usually helps to use the freshest, ripest fruit possible to make it easy to peel them.  Once they were peeled, I pitted and sliced them and threw them in a pre-treatment dip of lemon juice and water to prevent browning.  While I was slicing all the peaches, I made a batch of light syrup to add to the jars of peach slices.  I let the slices drain for a bit before I started packing them into jars.  All the peach slices packed nicely into eight pint jars that I topped off with the syrup. One by one the filled jars went back into the canner and once it was full I brought it back to a hard boil.  I boiled the peaches for thirty minutes, then allowed them the cool down time of five minutes.  They joined the jam on the counter to cool overnight before then were labeled for storage.  The pantry is filling fast at this time of year.  A few more weeks and I think I will be adding jars of salsa to my stores as well.

Freezing Broccoli

Another one of my nice heads of broccoli was ready to be harvested.  It was so large that it barely fit in my harvest basket even after I pulled off all of the big leaves.

It wasn't as large as the first head that I picked, but still weighed in at 2 lbs, 4.8 oz.  After the weigh in I washed the broccoli and trimmed it into florets and stem chunks to prepare it for freezing.  While I was doing all the chopping, I heated a large pot of water on the stove for blanching.

I usually try to blanch my broccoli for about five minutes before I rinse it in cold water and then let it soak in an ice bath to stop the cooking process.

Once the broccoli has cooled enough, I transferred it into labeled freezer bags and then promptly put them in the freezer.  I think I was able to get about ten servings out of this batch, with a bit left over for tonight's dinner.  It is nice to be putting things back into the freezer for the season, since it had been getting fairly bare in there.  So far I have 23 servings of broccoli in my freezer, with one more head left to harvest. 

The First Batch of Pickles Has Arrived!

I don't know if you can tell, but I really love pickles.  Almost to a fault.  Since I have started canning my home grown goodies, I have made a point to can as many of my own pickles as possible.  The past several years have not been very kind in the cucumber department, but this year I think I will be happy when the first frost hits and brings an end to the cucumber growing season.  In the past couple of weeks the cucumber harvest has started trickling in by twos and threes.  I had mostly been able to keep up with them until the last couple of days by eating a few fresh sliced with salt and vinegar - a good instant pickle replacement.  But then I found more than a couple cucumbers that needed picking....I found about 15.  I knew that I could never eat that many in a day, and since I found that many in a single day, I knew I had to become diligent about keeping them picked or I would end up with monster cucumbers that are no good for pickling.  I will start saving the small batches in the fridge for a day or two before I start the pickling process.  I like to make sure that I have enough to make it worth my time and effort to boil the water and process the jars.  One jar at a time is not very efficient.  Once I have enough cucumbers to make several jars I will can a batch.  Right now I will probably have to make a batch every 2-3 days.

The batch I made today was good old fashioned dill pickles.  They had a good recipe on the back of the Morton pickling salt box that mostly matched up with the recipe that I found in my Ball Canning Book.  The only difference was that it called for less salt overall, so I thought it would be a good one to try.  I have used one of the Ball recipes in the past and have found the end product to be far too salty.  Early this morning before I got ready for work I quickly sliced the cucumbers into spears and added them to the brine I had mixed up the night before and set in the fridge to chill.

When I got home I filled my large pot with water and set it on the stove to boil.  Meanwhile, I heated the pickling liquid in another pot on the stove.  I always make a full batch of the liquid, and refrigerate what I don't use so the next time I make pickles I can just use up what I have.  Since I think I will be canning a batch of pickles every few days, this will save me a little time in the whole process.  Once everything was boiling, I added a spring of dill and a clove of garlic to each jar and then packed them as full as I could with pickles and topped them off with the liquid.  This batch was only three pints, so I didn't have to use very much.  I reserved about two quarts of the liquid for the next batch.  I boiled them for another twenty minutes and then let them cool for five minutes before I removed the jars from the canner.  I will let them cool overnight before I remove the rings and label them for storage.  I always date my canned goods and never eat anything that has been stored for over a year.  I did forget to add the mustard seed to this batch....I will have to remember that the next time since I do like the flavor that it gives to the pickles.

Here they are in all their glory....the very first pickles of the year.  I couldn't be happier!