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!

Packing Peppers

There are some crops that I grow that need daily upkeep in the peak season to make sure they don't get out of hand.  If the cucumbers or zucchini go too long between harvests they become too big to be tasty so I try to make sure that I pick them often.  Peppers are a nice crop for me because I can let them go for quite a while between harvests.  I often leave good sized peppers on a plant just so they have a chance to really ripen and change into their final color.  However, like any crop, peppers are more productive if you keep them picked, so I do go through and thin out the large ones every few days.  Today was a thinning day and I found an abundance of large peppers on my sweet bell peppers and sweet chili and banana peppers.

The peppers were nicely filled out and had nice thick flesh.  These were all perfect for preserving.  My favorite way to preserve my peppers is to freeze them.  Preparing them for freezing is as simple as cutting them in half and removing the seeds and then throwing them into a ziploc bag.  I don't even blanch my fresh peppers before freezing and they do great.  Once frozen they keep well and getting them ready for cooking is as simple as a rinse under hot water and chopping them into pieces.  I don't chop them before freezing because it can be so time consuming and I often like to make stuffed peppers so having a clean halved pepper ready to go makes things nice and simple for me.  This harvest of peppers filled two gallon ziplocs and they were tightly packed!  They went into the freezer for now and will happily be added to my meals over the coming months.

Home Grown Dill Pickles

Over the years I have canned so many quarts of dill pickles that going through the steps is becoming second nature for me.  I have the recipe nearly memorized, though I always double check it when I have to double up or halve things for a batch.  This year I am attempting to do frequent small batches so that I can use the cucumbers when they are as fresh as possible.  Every day that I pick cucumbers I put them directly into the fridge for storage until I have enough for a batch.  I can typically get three to four quarts of pickles from filling a gallon bag with cucumbers so that is the size batch I have been doing recently.  I can do larger quantities but saving that many cucumbers really fills the fridge quickly and makes for a long canning session when I get around to them.  I would rather do frequent smaller canning sessions just to keep things more manageable.

Obviously the first step in my pickling adventures involves harvesting the cucumbers.  I generally like to pick them when they are about 3-4 inches long because that is the size that seems to handle canning the best.  Larger cucumbers still get used as long as they are not longer than the jar and they don't have large seeds when I slice them open.  The larger cucumbers don't fit into jars well when they are whole, but I can pack many into a jar if I cut them into spears.

Once enough have been harvested I move on to stage two of the dill pickle making process.  I simply clean each cucumber with a scrub brush and make sure that the flower is removed from the end.  After they are washed I cut the very end off of the cucumbers where the flower was.  This prevents the finished product from having a bitter taste.

Step three involves an overnight soak in a brine solution made simply with pickling salt and water.  I brine my cucumbers in the fridge overnight so they are good and cold when I pack them into the jars for canning.  I think this helps the finished product to be more crisp.  All of the recipes for dill pickles that I have found usually call for them to soak for at least twelve but no more than eighteen hours.  I think less and they won't absorb enough salt and more would make them too salty.  I usually try to get them canned closer to the twelve hour mark to keep things consistent.


Step four is the actual canning process.  Before I ever take the cucumbers out of the fridge I make sure that I have everything set up for canning.  I get my water bath boiling and the jars cooked for at least ten minutes while I prepare everything else.  I mix my pickling solution and bring it to a boil on the stove.  Usually it takes a little while for everything to heat up and that is when I pick my fresh dill and peel garlic cloves to add to the jars for flavor.

  After I get it all prepared I make quick work of packing the jars with as many cucumbers as I can fit along with the dill, garlic and mustard seed for flavor.  Each jar gets topped off with pickling solution and promptly returns to the boiling water bath.  Once every jar is full and back in the canner, I cover the pot and turn up the heat until everything comes to a good boil.  At my altitude I have to boil the quarts of pickles for twenty five minutes to process them properly.  The jars cool down in the canner for ten minutes before they are removed to a counter-top where they continue to cool down and seal overnight.

Once they are cooled down I remove the rings and test the seals of the jars to make sure they are all tight.  These jars will go into storage for the winter and by the looks of things I will have more than enough to last me until next season.  Perhaps I will have to start selling the extras at the local farmers market!

Making Plum Jam

 Last week I bought two boxes of fresh plums from the farmers market.  The original intent was to use them all for plum wine, but after halving and pitting thirty pounds of them, my hands were too sore and tired to use them all.  The unused plums remained in their box for another week before I could get to them again.  At this point they had reached their peak of ripeness and I picked through them to get rid of any that were past their prime.  I still didn't have the time to properly can them yet though, so I made quick work of pitting and halving what was left and they went into the freezer until I could find enough time to make jam.

Today was their lucky day.  I pulled the bag of frozen plums out of the freezer and set them in a hot water bath to thaw for a while.  From here they went into my largest stainless steel sauce pan where they simmered while I set up the canner.  They were nice and juicy plums and they smelled so sweet as they cooked on the stove.  I measured them out to be about nine cups of plums which is 1 1 1/2 times called for in the recipe, so I adjusted the amount of pectin and sugar that I added to make sure that my final product would gel properly.

I stirred them constantly as they heated on the stove to make sure that I dissolved all of the sugar.  This recipe calls for a ton - twelve cups for the nine cups of plums that I had.  I think I am making plum candy instead of jam!  After the mixture came to a hard boil I kept stirring it quickly for another couple of minutes, then turned off the heat.  I skimmed off as much foam as I could and then filled the jars from the canner one by one.  The result was fourteen half pints of this beautiful plum jam that I will be enjoying all winter long.

Onion Harvest : Round Two

It has been about a month since I harvested the first bed of onions.  The second bed I left until I could find a large block of time to devote to the project.  The bed was thick with weeds and the rains have stopped over the past couple of weeks so the soil was very dried out.  Some of the onions had begun to cure where they were.  I started at one end of the bed and worked my way to the other end row by row.  I made one pile of onions and one pile of weeds next to the bed and was again impressed by the size of many of the yellow onions.  Some were larger than my palm!

This bed also contained my first attempt at growing shallots.  They seemed to thrive in my garden this year and I was rewarded with a nice harvest from a 2 x 3 foot area on the end of this bed.

Both of these harvests were brought indoors to finishing curing on shelves in my kitchen.  Once the leaves dry up I will trim them all back and store the onions in a cool dark room.  The onions that were harvested a month ago were at the point in the curing process where they needed to be trimmed for storage.  Once they are all cleaned up I like to keep them in onion bags that I have saved from the store.  There was an impressive amount when I was done and I hope they will last until next spring.

The reds don't keep as well as the yellows so I will be cooking my way through that bag first.  I also kept out some onions that looked like they would go bad soon, so those will go to the front of the line when I pick them out for a recipe.  Chances are they will end up in a batch of salsa once the tomatoes start ripening. In a month I will add a few more bags of cured onions to my stores and I will be one step closer to being ready for winter.

Wine Making 101: Sweet Plum Wine

Summer is peaking here in western Colorado and the local farmers have been bringing loads of fruit to market every weekend.  I had been waiting patiently for the arrival of the first crop of plums and was rewarded last weekend with forty pounds of fresh picked plums for $50.  I was hoping that there would be a good crop of large plums, but at this point I will take whatever I can find that I can afford.  These plums were pretty small so pitting and chopping them became a labor of love.

They were at the peak of ripeness and the insides were a rich maroon color and the sweet smell that filled the air as I chopped was divine.   One by one each plum was scrubbed, pitted and coarsely chopped.  It took many hours and I think I got through thirty pounds of them before I decided that I had enough.  I wanted thirty six pounds of them, but I was so tired that I will be happy to get five gallons of wine out of them instead of the desired six.  If I can get the cherry wine bottled before the plums go out of season I may try a third batch of wine this summer if I can find the time.

Once I had enough plums chopped and in the primary fermenter I poured a couple of gallons of boiling water over them to bring the volume up to a full five gallons.  Once it cooled down I mixed in half the sugar from the total recipe and measured out small volumes of some additives to help the yeast grow and be happy.  I let that mixture sit overnight in the bucket before I added the most important ingredient: wine yeast.

The whole mixture sat in the primary for seven days and I needed to mix things up in there once a day while it was fermenting.  Once this first stage was over I strained the whole thing through cheesecloth, mixed in half of the remaining sugar from the recipe and then it went into the secondary fermenter which is a glass carboy.  Here the wine will bubble away for a month until the alcohol level is high enough that the yeast die off and fermentation stops.  I will rack the wine at this point and add the remaining sugar and give it another month or two to clear completely.  Once clear it will be ready for bottling and drinking (the best part!).

Morning Harvests

I have started my late summer routine of going through the garden every morning and picking what has grown to a good picking size.  I take a small basket with me and walk the rows with it, digging through the jungle of plants looking for treasure.  Every morning I am rewarded with baskets of goodies.

At first the baskets only had a handful of each crop, but as the summer wears on, the baskets fill quickly and I need to make several trips to the kitchen to deposit my prizes to make room for more.  The variety of crops I gather changes slightly from day to day depending on how fast certain crops are ripening.


Right now the summer squash are at full production and I am getting so many that I have been giving them away by the bag.  The cucumbers are just getting started and it takes a few days to fill a gallon bag.  In a few weeks I fear I will be filling a gallon bag a day and I will be spending hours in my kitchen canning pickles when I am not at work.  The green beans are just starting to come in finally, and I hope that even though they got a late start I will still get a decent harvest of them for the freezer.  My peppers are loaded with fruit, but they are slow to ripen yet, so I am just picking them for fresh eating right now.  Once they ripen and change color I will have a rainbow selection of peppers for my salsa recipes and for the freezer.  The tomatoes are also being slow to ripen.  I have only found a grand total of five ripe tomatoes so far, though the plants are heavy with green ones.  I am doing my best to clear out the freezer so I have room for the mountains of veggies that are growing to fill it.