What Tuesday and Wednesday Looked Like

Yup, it was crazy trying to can with a very active toddler!

Tuesday Mike was gone all day playing for libraries and schools which left little guy and I on our own. Typically I love days like that, but when you are trying to deal with produce that can't wait and do some canning it makes it a bit tricky. The above picture was taken at about 7:30 am and shows most of the contents of one cabinet now spread out on the floor. It actually got worse than this at times! Thank goodness for nap times :)

So this is what got prepared and canned on Tuesday.

There are 5 batches of strawberry jam in those jars. I've run out of 1/2 pint jars so we will be eating jam by the pint. I don't think my husband will mind having to eat up a bunch at a time! Strawberry jam is his favorite. We have more jam in this house than we could possibly eat in a year, but I'm sure that some will make for great gifts as well this holiday season. It is wonderful treat that I've never really bought, but we like having now that I have access to fruit that is best used for things like jam.

There are also 6 pints of zucchini relish, 2 pints of pear-apple sauce, 4 pints of pineapple, 4 quarts of tomato juice, 3 quarts of diced tomatoes and 4 pints of diced tomatoes. It is amazing how small 39 jars of food can look in a picture! Especially when it took me an entire day to get that all put up. I know I'll get better/faster at this the more years I do it. And I also think that it would be faster to focus on one thing at a time. I got such a variety of things that I had to multi-task in the type of things I was making. And goodness knows that it takes some serious time to make jam when you do it without pectin!

This is Wednesday's work.

Wednesday I started by washing up lots more jars! I think there are 25 more jars of things pictures. There are 6 more quarts of diced tomatoes and tomato juice, 5 pints of diced peaches, 3 pints of peach sauce, 4 pints of pear sauce and 7 pints of apple sauce. The pears I got were really 'organic.' The apples were also picked from trees that are totally ignored, but I've little worry about bad spots or worm holes. The pears have been much harder to deal with though. And after a while I started getting fed up with them. I've got a few more to do (they weren't fully ripe yet) and I'm kind of dreading them. Some of the remaining ones are bigger and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get some diced pears out of them. We'll be eating an awful lot of sauces this winter!

I've still got lots of apples to deal with and many of those will be come sauce as well. I will be freezing some and may try and do some apple pie filling. My biggest worry is running out jars as it appears that I will be soon.

I realized I never took a picture of Thursday, but it was an all applesauce day. I only canned what I had cooked down or at least cut up the day before. My family needed me to be more focused on them and the apples are more forgiving than the other produce. I believe I did about 14 more jars that day. 4 quarts and 10 pints if I remember correctly, all applesauce!

Hope your food preservation is going well!

Heather