Harvest diary, canning talk, garden bounty, farm supplemented, full pantry, pressure canning, water bathers, canning carrots, canning green beans

I apologize up front.  This post is all over the place.  Mostly because I  was  dialed in on canning up the garden and any fruit I could get my hands on. It's going to read like a diary and/or casual talk while working...... 

3 weeks ago......

Today's delightful surprise... home canned green beans. DD and I have both been canning like crazy for the last few weeks. DD has a spectacular green bean bed.  It probably puts out at least 5 pounds of beans every other day. She gave me 6 pounds yesterday when I went to visit.   I came home and pressure canned them immediately. We both have the new Nesco smart pressure canner which makes canning oh so easy.   But, operator error can still occur. I didn't leave enough head space and one jar came out with a poochy lid. So, tonight I opened it and had it for dinner. It's the very first opened jar of beans of the season. I had forgotten how good home canned green beans are.  No chemicals to make it stay weirdly green after cooking, no metallic taste from a can... just cooked green bean goodness. I followed the directions in   The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  (This link is an AA link , I make a small commission, but it doesn't cost you anything) I cleaned the beans, cut them in half, stuffed them as tight as I could get them in a jar, put a teaspoon of salt in them and then filled the jar with boiling water, put on the lids and put them in the canner. My Great Grandmother would have been   string-bean green with envy.  The taste really did take me back to my childhood and the dinners with my great grandparents. 

Canning Note: When the canning book says "leave a generous one inch of head space in jar" .....  Fight the temptation to fill it to the top.... and leave a GENEROUS 1 inch.

(next day)

It's taking a minute to get this blog up..... I haven't had a lot of time to sit in front of the computer. Today I canned more green beans (Yay!) ,chicken stock and a case of pasta sauce.  All while looking at the 25 pounds of carrots on the dining room table that are next in line to be canned. Then its apple season! With lots of homemade apple sauce and some apple pie filling. Then  I found a couple of pretty little red cabbages out in the back of the garden. I'm trying to decide what to do with them.  I'm sure they will get canned, but how?  

I am having a grand ol' time and I'm eternally grateful for the abundance of the garden and all the fruit I have been gifted this season from backyard trees  and bushes full of apples, pears, plums, blackberries, raspberries, quince, and even grapes.... All this canning requires jars, which are at a premium this year. The thrift stores and FB Market place have lots of jars available.... because they are gouging. 99 cents and up per jar, which is silly.  Because they are useless without lids and rings. So, once you buy the jars and then a box of lids and rings.... It is more expensive than a brand new case of jars. Home canners know this, so all the used canning jars are still sitting on shelves in thrift stores and garages.  Note to thrift stores... It's not 2020. There is no shortage of jars.

(next week)

I started this post almost 10 days ago.  Yesterday I was able to make dinner in a kitchen that didn't have the crock pot going, a big stew pot  full of tomatoes going and 1 or more canners going.  For dinner I made a big pot of vegetable soup and a loaf of bread in my itty bitty 'just for dinner' bread maker. I put 5 meals worth of soup in the freezer and it felt downright simple after what the last 6 or 8 weeks have been.  I am not putting away the pressure canner just yet, but I have been able to put away the big water bathers (yes, I meant bathers , plural) I have three sizes of bathers .... regular size, extra large and extra small.  I love the extra small it is fabulous for small batch and overflow from the smart canner. I made a case plus 4 jars of applesauce, and I got all but 3 of them in the electric canner so I pulled out the small bather. It holds 4 pints...... and that's all I need it for. 

I'm not quite done yet.... I still have some collards in the garden. I might get some more growth out of them now that I have cut them back. I'm expecting every jar of collard greens to taste different. I was canning so fast and hard that towards the end I was barely seasoning them. That 25 pounds of carrots I mentioned earlier?  They got peeled and canned in pint jars. I followed the process in the canning book. I sliced them, blanched them, salted them and poured hot water over them and stuck them in the canner. I got a case of pints ... And a big gallon bag for the freezer (some went into the vegetable soup last night).  I thought it was pretty good considering I only grew one batch of carrots this year and I got 25 pounds from a 3x3 bed. Ive already opened one pint and they were very good and surprisingly sweet.  DD has an apple tree. So, I imagine there will be more applesauce and possibly apple pie filling.  And  stock. I have a chicken carcass in a bag in the freezer with some veggie pieces ready to go in the crock pot. But, for the most part the power canning for the season is over. My garden this year was fairly small and the early high heat   thwarted a lot of my cool weather vegetables like my broccoli but all in all it did ok. I have plenty of frozen zucchini for bread, lots of spinach still out there growing and even a few green beans.

What I got out of  a pretty small garden:

 Raspberries, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, greens, green beans, broccoli, cabbage, kohl rabi (Ok... I only got 3 kohl rabi but hey, I got some), snow peas, black-eyed peas and sugar snap peas..... squash and even one teeny tiny volunteer pumpkin all came out of three  5x5 beds, one 2x4 bed,  one 3x8 bed, a bunch of containers and the border/garden thingy. The last owner built a bed that was basically a fence along two sides of the yard. About 10 feet on one side and about 8 feet on the other. It's almost 3 feet high but only 2 feet wide.  I'll let you do the math. 

In all, not a huge garden. But I supplemented with my local favorite farm... 30 pounds of beets (pickled and  pantried),   Around 50 pounds of pears from a friend. Around 30 pounds of plums (currently fermenting in a carboy in a corner..... ) More apples than I could weigh...turned into apple sauce, apple pie filling, dried apples for storage and snacking.  Peaches that I brought back from eastern Washington (along with pluots for jelly).  So, my pantry is full. I can not complain. Will I still need to make grocery runs this winter? Yes, but I won't be buying as much.  And I will know exactly what is in my food. No Surprises.

I'm already planning next years garden while I am putting this years to bed. I need to get some horse manure from DD and a bale of straw. ... And I may have a way of deterring the deer.  But those beautiful  garden destroyers are a rant for a different time!

 

Nesco Digital Canner Review, Latest edition Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, Ball Blue Book 1937 and 1986, Pressure canning small batches

When I first started gardening, I learned a very valuable lesson.  Only grow what you will eat. Do not grow things that you do not like to eat.  I fondly recall the year that I grew eggplant ... a lot of eggplant. Discovering at harvest that I actually think eggplant is well, kind of gross.   I gave it all away.   I've kept that experience in mind as I have bravely ventured into pressure canning land.   I have been making it a point to only preserve things I know I like and that I will eat even if there is no apocalypse.  Green beans is the first item on the list. I like green beans. Last year I blanched and froze  a few pounds, but when I got around to eating them, they just weren't right. They were kind of tough and chewy and just not appealing so I decided to can them this year. This meant a new skill and a new tool.  I picked up  one of the newest canning helpers, the digital pressure canner.  I have been delighted by the results so far.  My beans are classic canned green beans.  Without the digital canner I might not be doing this because I'm just straight up afraid of my stove top pressure canner. I'm terrified it's going to blow up.  I mean.... Ive blown up stuff before (and set a few accidental fires) so it's not an unreasonable fear. I would have used it in spite of the fear, just probably, not as prolifically as I have done with the digital canner.   And my anxiety levels would be through the roof with the stove top canner.   So.... I decided the best course of action was baby steps.  (I know, uncharacteristically cautious of me) I did my research and to be honest that was mostly reels on how to use it.  I was worried that it would be too difficult and would wind up in the back room collecting dust so  I bought the smallest   canner on the market.  The 9 1/2 quart Nesco Digital Smart Canner. The cons are only ...3 and 1 is about the way the directions are written, so we are going to start there.  Con 1. It only holds 4 quarts or 5 pints at a time (it takes many half pints and has a little shelf you can use to stack them on top of each other).  Con 2. When pressure canning it takes an hour to an hour and a half to cool down before you can open it and refill it.  Con 3.  The directions that come in the booklet could be a little more clear. But that is pretty much the negative right there.  The positive.  This thing is great for quick small batches. If you want to can what is coming out of your kitchen garden you wash 5 jars and lids with hot soapy water.  Pack your jars with your homegrown produce or homemade stock or whatever it is that you want to can.  (The Newest Ball Canning book has easy, simple and safe recipes that make the process go fast) When your jars are ready, you put them in the canner and close the lid. Set the pressure level, set the time and hit start. You have wait about 15 to 20 minutes for the water to get hot and then for the correct pressure to build and then a beep goes off to tell you to close the vent (2 beeps actually but that's part of the complaint about the directions). Once the vent is closed, your job is done. You now have   about 2 hours to   wander around doing other stuff while the machine does its work. No monitoring necessary.  That's the pressure canning. The water bathing is even easier and there is no long cool down time to water bath.  The Nesco canner uses a lot less water than water bathing, so you get savings there as well and the mess is pretty minimal.  I'm glad I got the small one . I'm not dragging heavy pots of water across the kitchen from the sink to the stove. So far this year I have pressure canned pasta sauce, chicken stock, beef stock and vegetable stock, green beans, collard greens, spinach and sweet potatoes. All of these are things that used to live in my freezer and are now happily living in the pantry and using no electricity to be shelf stable. 

Of course, recipes and directions are a necessity.  For decades the Ball Blue Book has been a staple in kitchens across the USA. The internet says the first Ball Blue Book was published in 1909 and they are all still usable.  When it came time to can this year, I drug out all my canning books. The Ball Blue Book 1937 edition and my Grandmothers Ball Blue Book 1986 edition, I have a copy of the Farm Journal Freezing & Canning Cookbook from 1962 and a copy of the Kerr Home Canning and Freezing Book from 1982.   All usable but still.... I thought maybe... just maybe I might ought to bring my canning skills into this century... Not decade .... century.  I thought maybe I would see how science has evolved the food preservation process over the decades.   So, I bought the New and updated Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  448 pages... It's a lot of information and it's also organized very differently from the old books. For example, Granny's 1986 edition is only 112 pages and the 1937 version is only 55 pages.   The newest book is a little more idiot proof than the 1937 version but the 1937 version has comprehensive tables so you are not constantly flipping pages.  The newest book does not have tables but it has   little tips all the way through on how to keep fruit from browning, how to keep pickles crisp, the difference in fruit strains and which one to use for what, what kind of vinegar to use for whatever recipe you are looking at, how to cut the vegetables up for pressure canning, how to pack jars etc.  etc.  I keep the big three  (the Ball books) handy at all times for cross referencing.  The most significance difference in the books are the recipes. There are many recipes for salsa in the new book and no recipes for salsa in the 1937 book. You will find mincemeat in the 37 edition but not in the newest edition. No Pasta sauce in the 37. So, in many ways the Ball Books are a good history of foods and the mix of cultural influences in America through the years. 

While the recipes are great and very tasty, the number one benefit of all the books is correct processes for preserving foods safely. 

I'm putting the amazon links to the canner and the new Ball canning book here at the bottom in case you want to take a look

Nesco Pressure canner

Ball Canning Book