Pickle Overload

I think I may have gotten in over my head with my cucumber bed this year.  I planted 20 cucumber plants and they all are doing extremely well.

  I have been filling 6-8 gallon ziplocs a week for the past few weeks and I feel like I have been canning them non stop.  

This weekend alone I canned 21 more quarts of pickles.

  I have lost count of how many jars that I have made total, but I have given away at least 30 quarts and I still have somewhere in the realm of 40 quarts in my house.  Buying jars is becoming an expensive investment and I am contemplating feeding the cucumbers exclusively to the chickens for the rest of the season.  I am also running out of shelf space for all the pickles and am now resorting to storing them in their boxes in the back room.  I don't want to stack any on top of each other though, so I may need to invest in more shelves to hold all of my canned goods for the long run.

I may still give more away this holiday season so I will probably can a few more rounds before all is said and done.  I am hoping that I start getting jars back from the first round of giveaways, so I can reuse them instead of buying more jars.  I am definitely looking forward to the first frost for it will mean the end of picking and canning cucumbers for the year!  All in all this has been the best cucumber year that I have had yet, but the harvest has been exhausting!  I guess that means that I will have plenty of time to rest up this winter eating the bounty saved from summer.

Making Plum Wine

I have a love of sweet plum wine.  I had my first taste at a wonderful little sushi restaurant and the rest is history.  After moving to the mountains, I had a hard time finding a place that sold any.  I didn't have a hard time finding plums however, so I decided to make my own.  I had made a couple of small batches in the previous couple of years and everyone that tried it, loved it, so I decided that this year I should make more than a gallon of this variety of wine.  The only problem was that I didn't have the proper vessels for the six gallons that I wanted to make.  Luckily I had a friend that had both the primary and secondary fermentation tanks that I needed, and they weren't using them at the moment, so they lent them to me.


Now that I had the equipment, I could get the plums I needed to make the wine.....all thirty six pounds of them.  The majority of the plums came from the local farmer's market.  I bought out one happy vendor of all of her plums which were a beautiful yellow fleshed plum with sweet and juicy insides freshly picked that morning.

 The rest of the plums came from a friend that had a red plum tree that had just started ripening fruit.  I sliced all of the plums in half and removed the pits.  Then I cut them into chunks and threw them in the first fermentation bucket.  I mixed them with half of the sugar called for in the recipe then topped off the bucket with boiling water.

 After cooling down overnight I added the wine yeast, stirred it well and then covered it.  For the next week I stirred up the bucket twice a day to help break down the fruit and release it's juices.  Once the week was over, I strained off the wine into the final fermentation vessel - the glass carboy.  Here the wine will finish fermenting over the next few months.  I will add more sugar to the wine the next couple times I rack it to allow it to reach the sweetness level that I want.  Once it has cleared I will be able to bottle it.  I am looking forward to sharing this wine with friends and family over the coming year!

Turnips and Beets: Round Two

This year I tried my hand at growing a couple of new crops that I had never grown before: turnips and beets.  I had an "extra" garden bed that I didn't want to go to waste, so I filled in some of the extra space with a few short rows of turnips and beets.  Two things went wrong with this bed.  The first was that the drip irrigation that I installed for this bed didn't work very well, so the plants struggled under severe water stress.  The second thing was that I didn't bother pulling the weeds in this bed for a very long time, so it became very overgrown.  The weeds had gotten so bad that I didn't think that any of the turnips or the beets had survived.  The weeds did act as a living mulch for this bed however, and when I finally got around to pulling them I was pleasantly surprised to find that some beets and turnips actually did survive, though none of them had well developed roots yet.  Had I been better about keeping them watered and weeded, I probably would have gotten a good crop from both of them by now since they should grow fast enough to be harvested sixty days after they are planted.

Because they have such a short growing period I decided to give them another chance.  This time I used the bed that was occupied by peas in the spring.  Since this was another bed that had some watering issues, I made sure to add plenty of extra holes to my drip irrigation line here before I planted.  I used a shovel to lightly turn the bed to help break up the larger clods of soil and to make the surface soil fine enough to plant into.  I planted one side of the bed with turnips and the other with a variety of beets.  With the drip line working better, these seeds sprouted in no time and are well on their way to forming good sized roots for harvest.  The other thing that I tried to do in this second planting was to space my seeds out better.  The first round of seeds came up very crowded and I think they didn't grow well in part due to the fierce competition for space.  This time I tried to give a couple inches to each plant, and made sure to thin them while they were still small if they were still too close together.  This approach seems to be working out much better since the row of turnips is filling in nicely without looking crowded.  The beets were a little slower to get going, but their half of the bed is starting to fill in also.

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.