Canning Frenzy

This week began with a refrigerator full of cucumbers that needed to addressed.  My schedule hadn't been favorable for canning, so finally after saving cucumbers for five or six days I was able to pickle them.  That one session ended up making 12 quarts of pickles and kept me up until one in the morning to get them finished.

I also had a bag of pears that I bought last weekend at the farmer's market that I had been intending to can all week as well.  That was a simple session since I only had eight pears.  They were perfectly ripe and easy to peel and core and I ended up with three pints of them for later.  The pear crop wasn't very large this year, but I was happy to be able to preserve a little bit of it.

There were frozen bags of apricots and plums that were also waiting to be transformed into jam.  The apricots were from an early summer canning session and the plums were what was left over from making plum wine.  I didn't need all of them for the wine and I didn't want them to go to waste, so they became a batch of plum jam.  In all I ended up with fourteen half pints of plum jam and six half pints of apricot jam.

All of these came to be in just the last few days and there are more to come.  I am already preparing myself for another round of pickles later today and plan to can more peaches in syrup next week.  Once the tomatoes start ripening I will be adding jars of salsa and tomato sauce to my stores as well.  In an effort to clean out the freezer a bit more I will probably be canning more chicken stock here soon too.  I need the freezer space for all the broccoli and green beans that I will be harvesting in the next few weeks.  Canning foods makes them super convenient to use and it is nice to be able to store food without a fridge or freezer.  The only downside is that there is never enough shelf space!