Tomatoes

Bought 15 pounds of tomatoes from Blackies this year because I couldn't wait to can!

This is mix from the garden and the Blackie tomatoes. I made a spaghetti sauce from the Ball Jar Book- which was a lot of work and I burned it... so, not doing spaghetti sauce again! Too much work and I like to make it and freeze it year round anyway.

So, new plan will be to just can the tomatoes to use for sauce. This batch provided 10 pounds for the sauce and the rest I canned. I ended up with 6 quart jars. I tried the pressure cooker and found that the pressure was too high and the water level dropped low in the jars.

The next batch was from the garden only. There were quite a few tomatoes- a mix of Roma and regular. These I did in the canner for 85 minutes and the jars came out much better.

Jams

This year I just stuck with the two I know best... I would love to try a different jam next year as the jam season is a bit slow...

Strawberry- picked 1 flat this year and used a good part of it for the jars of jam. I ended up with 5 large jars of jam and 7 regular sized jars of jam.

Raspberry- 2 quarts is enough for a batch of jam. This year I did 10-12 regular jars, 4 large jars and two small jars.

Salsa

8/18/10- canned 5 jars of salsa using recipe from Ball book- next time do double batch?

Pickles, pickles, more pickles and relish

We planted three plants this year and the cukes are coming out of our ears! Here is what I have done so far:
8 jars dill on 7/26
5 jars dill on 8/2

Dill- watch for height of cukes, some jars did not seal because the cukes were too high. The dill were easy to do piecemeal, because the brine is super easy to make. Next year- try fresh dill from the garden.

Bread and Butter: 2 double batches this year= 14 jars(ish, I already gave some away so I'm not quite sure)

Sweet pickles: ~12 cups of cukes yields 6 jars of sweet pickles. Tried the recipie from the ball jar book (blue one) for unbrined pickles. Cut cukes into chips using bread knife to make ridges. Will report back later on taste :)

The zucchini relish we made a few years ago was great, but with all the extra cukes I did have to make cucumber relish. The Ball book recipe yields a lot of relish, and I had to refrigerate some because it didn't get processed. The food processing took a LONG TIME. Must get a bigger processor for next year.

Green Beans

This year: I have put up 36 pints of green beans as of Aug. 9


Notes for next year:
Four quarts of cut green beans provides more than enough for a "batch" in the pressure cooker- 9 jars.

Watch the pressure... keep oven on 8/9 until you reach 11 pounds then decrease to 5 slowly. This helped keep the water in the jars :)