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!