Canning, and other homestead chores

Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 12:53

I have not posted in a long time. I have been very busy with getting my canning started. I was very excited to find out that my mother had a peach tree at her new house. She called one day to say that the peaches were ready to pick and so away I went. I picked ALOT of peaches. 4 boxes to be exact! So I was able to get 24 pints, and 7 quarts of peaches canned, 7 quarts of pie filling, and 12 pints frozen. I also made a ton of peach jam, 3 peach pies and peach scones. So I was definely done with peaches after the 3 days it took me to get all of this done, but it was very rewarding. She also had a plum tree in her yard to I picked a basket of plums too. I made plum preserves and some plum sauce. I have also been canning other pie fillings and now have 6 quarts of blackberry and 14 quarts of cherry pie filling. I have some pics that I will be posting after I figure out my new computer and how to resize them to fit.

My DH cleaned all of my canning shelves out in the storage room and painted them all white, including the cement floor. It is very clean in there now and looks great. I will get the pics posted as soon as I can.

My garden is doing great and I have sooo many tomatoes coming on that if they ever get ripe I will have plenty to put up. I wanted to do diced tomatoes, tomato sauce and tomato paste. I knew that this would take a ton of tomatoes so I planted 19 plants that I grew from seed. Most of them are roma tomatoes and I know that these are great to what I want so I am excited to get started.

I am only getting started though I still have a lot of things I want to get put up this year, but things just are taking awhile here to get ripe. I heard about keeping a canning journal where you write down what you canned and the quantities, then around next May or so you take an inventory seeing what you have left. What was used up or things that did not get used, and use this information to know what to do the new year.

Well my sister is calling and I want to gab with her so I will be going.

Mona