The produce continues to pour in. The garden has been a big success for two folks who hadn't had a "real" garden in years. But that also means that there's lots of preserving to be done.
Enter... Team Smith. Yes, Kent has been working on the canning and drying with me and we've become quite the well-oiled machine.
For example, canning tomatoes. Kent washes and scalds the tomatoes.
And puts them into the cold water in the sink to stop the cooking.
I slip the skins and quarter them.
So pretty! So much potential! Summer days ready to capture in glass jars...
When the tomatoes and jars are hot, I fill the jars and add the necessary items, such as salt and citric acid. Kent gets the bubbles out, wipes the rims and adds the lids. We can fill two canners in no time.
Which is good. Because then there's the zucchini to shred, the squash to dry...
And the peaches to prepare for the next canning batch...
Yes, the peaches from our own tree. We're still giddy about that. And they are so sweet and delicious!
2 comments:
Amazing! What are the little green things on the left, in the first picture?
That's a big tote filled with apples. We find we have several varieties of apples and about 12 trees. Those are fallen apples from the biggest of the trees. They are wonderfully sweet and a more soft-fleshed fruit. When making applesauce and applebutter we only need to add enough sugar to balance out the lemon juice we add. We figure it's about 1 tsp sugar per pint of finished product. Another tree has pretty red apples that look like Red Delicious. And my favorite, by far, are the sweet-tart green apples on the tree by our garden. I'm drying as many as I can process through the dryer.
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