Adventures in Canning

Previous canning experiences for Mckay and I were much like our gardening experience. We'd seen/helped our parents can things before when we were children, but had never actually done it ourselves before.

We got a lot of tomatoes from our garden this year, so I figured I'd try to can some of them. I talked to several friends who had done it, read books and felt like I could try it out. I borrowed a water-bath canner from our wonderful friends and set out one afternoon to can some tomatoes.

It took way longer than it should have (mostly due to me checking and double checking every little step to make sure I didn't mess things up), but I came away with two beautiful quart jars of tomatoes. I was so proud of myself. This was on Monday of last week. 

That night, we decided on a whim to join some friends for apple picking. A family from church has 12 apple trees that were ready to pick and they invited us over to pick some apples and make apple cider. I thought we'd come home with a box of apples for pie making and a bit of cider. I WAAAAYYY underestimated. We worked several hours that night and made 13 gallons of apple cider using this family's cider press. AFTER making the cider, we still had 10 or so big boxes full of apples between the 3 families who picked apples that night. While the other wives and I were cider-making and talking, we decided that we could make some apple sauce and pie filling with all the extra apples. Having just successfully canned my tomatoes that day, I was totally on board with more canning.

So we made an afternoon of it. On Tuesday, we met at one house and we peeled, cut, cooked and canned apples. For five hours.  ...  Our 6 children ran around the house entertaining themselves while 3 beginner canners worked and worked and worked.

And after that tiring, long day we hadn't even canned any apple pie filling yet! Knowing that Mckay would fire me if I came home with only applesauce and no apple pie fixings, we planned to meet together again two days later for more canning. We all thought it would be best to take a mental health day in between canning days. After 5 more hours of canning on Thursday, we were exhausted but oh so proud of our hard work.

In all, we canned roughly 28 quarts of apple cider, 18 quarts of pie filling, and close to 30 jars (both big and small) of applesauce. Every single jar sealed and not one of them broke. I'm told that's rare among so many jars.

 And after we were done with all our canning, there were still five boxes of apples leftover.

I took some home with me and made apple turnovers on Friday.

They were yummy.

By Saturday I had more ripe tomatoes so I canned two more jars.

And then I made two apple pies; One for us to eat and one for a friend who just had a baby.

And then I rested for a few days and tried to clean up the tsunami left behind in our kitchen.

 We divided 80 or so jars between our three families, so here are my canning spoils from the week:

9 quarts of cider, 8 quarts of pie filling, 5 pints and 1 quart of applesauce, and 4 quarts of tomatoes.

 Mckay said that our finished product picture should look like this:

because we still have apples leftover!!

And after taking this picture I found 3 more jars of applesauce on the counter. There are apples all over my house!!

In all seriousness, it was a super busy week, but a very rewarding week. I had a crash course in canning that will pay off hugely when we get to eat yummy food all winter. I'm not nearly as scared of canning as I was before and I'm happy that I learned a new skill. Maybe next near I'll try pressure canning.

Gardening

One of my goals for this year was to plant a garden. As a kid, I would help my dad in the garden, but haven't really done any gardening on my own since. I thought it would be a fun family activity and a great way for the boys to see where we get our food. We wanted to start small this year to see if we could get the hang of it.

We started our garden earlier this year in May. We bought some garden soil.

Then we built and filled in our 4x4 garden box and started planting.

Dallin and Connor loved digging in the dirt.

A few days later, we decided that one little 4x4 garden box was not enough for all the things we wanted to plant. So we tore it up and started over. We were able to successfully transplant all of the plants that we had already planted, even some of the "from seed" plants that had begun to sprout tiny leaves. 

We added 2 more 4x4 boxes, lots of water, sunshine and a few of months. And here is the finished product!

I'm surprised at how easy it was to grow a garden.  Every thing we planted took off and grew like crazy with very little effort on our part. There was a big start up cost, so it certainly wasn't cheaper than just buying the produce at the store, but there will be less to buy for a garden next year.

 We grew cantaloupe (below) and strawberries (not pictured) from seed. 

Dallin and Connor got little seed starter kits for Easter so they could each grow their favorite fruit. (Can you guess which fruit goes with which boy?) The strawberry plants were too small to produce anything this year, but we've gotten several cantaloupes from the garden so far. Dallin is so excited because he LOVES cantaloupe. Also in this cantaloupe/strawberry bed are some cucumber plants.

This bed has carrots (front of the picture) with green beans and snap peas behind them. We also planted lettuce here which has already run its course and been replaced with a second lettuce crop.

The third box has mostly tomatoes in it. It makes me so happy to be able to go outside and pick tomatoes for my dinner when ever I want to. I'm the only tomato eater in our house so I get them all! I'm also going to make pasta sauce and such with the tomatoes so everyone else in the family will appreciate them. Next to the tomatoes are bell peppers (which didn't produce much) and cilantro (which REALLY didn't produce much, but now we know to NOT grow that next year).

 Perhaps our favorite plant of all in the garden is the Thai basil plant.

It's a little different from traditional Italian basil. The leaves are smaller and have a slightly different taste, but it still works in cooking Italian food and makes our Thai dishes taste perfectly delicious. It grows beautiful purple flowers on it. We've been pinching the flowers back to promote more leaf growth, but I think it would make a beautiful "flower" bush in a yard.

 We gotten a lot more food from our garden than what is pictured below, but this is what was available at the moment and I want you to see what we've grown.

There are usually a lot more tomatoes ripe at once, but I had just canned a bunch of them. More about our adventures in canning in another post...