Let me start by saying that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a farmer. Neither am I Susie Homemaker. I buy food at the grocery store and frequent restaurants. My repertoire of recipes is limited. Canning is a new adventure for me. Several years ago when my father and I planted a small garden. My grandmother suggested canning to us. We laughed! Each year we had an overabundance of veggies because of the fertile soil (READ: horse poop). While we have the best of intentions when it comes to eating the crops, they continue to rot on the vine. Today, we finally tried our hand at canning tomatoes. Here is part of this year's crop.
While many would say it's relatively simple, there's a lot involved. Some of the items we learned to use quite laughably. I tried to use the jar thongs upside-down. Oops! And I had to squeeze lemons for the juice, since we forgot it at the store.
While most of our skill was developed by trial and error, in addition to a heavy reliance on the Ball recipe book. We also had a little help from another blog that I found, called
The Yummy Life.
This blogger is much more skilled than I am. Holy cow! It took both of us to successfully include everything in each jar and make sure we followed the steps. The last thing we wanted was to fail miserably.
Shortly after we began (Okay...it was actually an hour. That's really good for him.), my wild thing needed attention. He was no longer satisfied to hang out in his bouncer and watch as us fumble through blanching and peeling tomatoes. He wanted to be in on the action. I wrapped him up in my
Moby and wore him. He promptly fell asleep for the next 2 1/2 hours. :) For those of you who don't know...babywearing is awesome! I can satisfy my wild thing AND have the use of both my arms. (But I'll go into that another time.)
Jar, lemon juice, garlic clove, jalapeno slices, tomatoes, juice, remove air, measure space, sea salt, lid...repeat. Turns out we had way more tomatoes than we anticipated and ended up needing to do two batches. With a 40 minute processing time in the water bath, we took a lunch break and barely got motivated to finish our project. My dad is the kind of guy who likes jobs to be quick and painless. I think this was more than he bargained for.
Four hours and 17 jars later...
The jars came out of the water bath and we were so excited each time we heard the pop of a lid. Pop. pop, pop! They were sealing. Yay us! We proudly announced to my wild thing that we were skilled canners prepared to take on apples and banana peppers and jalapenos. Oh my!
Wish me luck! ;)
I think that is awesome!! You have done a fantastic job.
ReplyDeleteI have a question regarding horse poop. I was thinking I would get some from someone I know that has horses, but then I started thinking about all the seeds the would obviously come out of that end... and would be replanted in my garden. Have you had an issue with this.
I opted to get a bag of "organic" compost at Lowes, and consequently I had a bumper crop of grass pop up in my raised beds. grrrrr
Now I'm reluctant to use poop for fertilizer.
Since we have horses, and have for years, the poo is pretty much a natural part of the soil. That has not been an issue for us. We did give a friend a load of poo for her garden since she was having such a hard time getting her tomato plants to fruit. She has had an amazing crop this year. Although, she did have a strange-looking mushroom or two pop up. While they were gross looking, nothing major in the way of grass or other weeds has developed.
DeleteHope this helps.
I would love to learn to can! I'm not ready yet, but when I am, I'll come check out this post again
ReplyDeleteStephanie~
DeleteI would say that we weren't ready either, but we made it through. It's way more domestic than I normally am. :)
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