Summer canning

FreezerHunter

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Joined
Aug 26, 2012
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65
Location
Central Kansas
My Mom puts me to shame each year with the amount of tomatoes she cans (Dad put in 70 tomato plants this year, so they get way more tomatoes), but so far this summer I’ve put up 18 pints of tomatoes, 8 pints of salsa, 4 quarts of tomato juice (for red beer), 8 1/2 pints of taco sauce, 5 1/2 pints of grape jelly, and 4 pints of bread and butter pickles. The jelly, pickles, taco sauce, and salsa are for my son’s 4-H fair entries, so he got to do much of the work with an assist from me handling the super hot portions of the work. I like seeing the jars fill up the pantry!

How goes it? Anyone else spending time in the kitchen preserving foods to enjoy this winter?
 
We are in for 25 pints of hand picked blackberry jam and probably 20 of strawberry freezer jam (bought the strawberries) tomatoes don’t last long enough around here to can, which is good for me as I like them better fresh.
 
We planted tomatillo plants this year for the first time. We put out 12 plants not knowing how they would do. Well we ended up with two five gallon bucket fulls of them. My wife had put up 36 pints of salsa verde so far and we’ve given away pounds of them as well! Needless to say next year we are planning on dropping down to 4 plants…
 
We are still good for choke cherry jelly so we never picked any. The Saskatoon berries we just freeze for pies. Didn’t do any other berry picking. Started making a few pickles. Our tomato plants have lots of bush and not much tomato so we robbed a bunch of my grandma for making salsa
 
I've been freezing salsa for the last couple seasons with good results. Anyone have experience with freezing and canning? I'm wondering if canning yields a better product.
 
Bout 20 quarts if pickles so far and I think 15 quarts if salsa. The whole family gets together in a couple weeks and we do around 125 quarts of tomatoes and bout half again that in salsa every year.
 
We planted tomatillo plants this year for the first time. We put out 12 plants not knowing how they would do. Well we ended up with two five gallon bucket fulls of them. My wife had put up 36 pints of salsa verde so far and we’ve given away pounds of them as well! Needless to say next year we are planning on dropping down to 4 plants…
Yeah, 12 sounds like a lot. However, my experience with tomatillos has been very inconsistent. Some seasons not so great, but when they're happy plants the yield is amazing and sometimes overwhelming.
 
63 pints of salsa, about 16 or so half pints of choke cherry jelly, don't remember the count on green beans and sweet pickled beets. Forgot we canned a fair amount of brook trout earlier this summer.
I'm finally done, it's time to go do something fun.
 
Forgot( yeah I know I've got CRS right now);)
Also did about a dozen or so Lime pickles they beat sweet pickles hands down and did about a dozen quarts of Dill pickles to add to the count.
 
image.jpg

Couple dozen bottles of pickles so far

I think I’m about 12 quarts of crushed tomatoes

This is batch 2 of salsa. It’ll never make it into the canner, gets eaten while I let the “flavors come together”.

Also trying some chili paste
Just jalapeños and garlic fermented for about a week, added some vinegar to change the ph and hopefully stop the fermentation. At least it’s fairly hot. 9E2C9B7F-2F8A-4FBE-B458-8C1C9D47D736.jpeg
 
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