Weekend update: potatoes and tomatoes

Just a quick update to try to keep the record keeping straight:

More Mowing Issues

Before I go off on the food preservation I want to mention that I replaced ANOTHER spindle on the Huskee (TSC's "brand" of riding mower/garden tractor).  Grass really needed mowing in the orchard - which I did once everything dried off a bit.

New (?) Hawk sighting!

I saw a Hawk out in the paw-paw orchard Sunday morning!  I hope he sticks around and that the insulators that the utility put up last week work!  I got some nice pictures!

Backhoe finally got picked up!

Saturday afternoon, Joe Hines and his dad showed up with a big truck and trailer and got the backhoe.  Joe asked if I was still interested in the Club Cadet zero turn model mower we talked about before. I told him that it depend on the bill for the backhoe!  I didn't tell him that it also depended on if I actually got the portable saw-mill this guy in Michigan keeps hinting at building and delivering for me!   I am hoping to get the needed repairs done on the backhoe for under $4K.  I haven't heard back from Hines yet.  

Last of the Elderberry

I picked the last of the elderberries for the season.  I got about another gallon.  I cleaned them and placed them in ziplock bag in the freezer for processing later.  We are too busy with canning tomatoes and other stuff to process them now!

Canned Chicken

Katherine got some chicken leg-quarters on sale at safeway last week.  They were $.80/lb so she bought 8 packs of roughly 4 lbs each.  We tried our first attempt at canned chicken!  I have done venison and pork before, but this is the first try at chicken!  We cold packed it in wide mouth pint jars, placing 1/2 tsp salt in each jar and adding water as needed to insure there were no air-bubbles.  Pressure canned at 15lb for 1 hour 15 mins.  We tried a jar the next day - the bones became so soft you could eat them (although the shaft of the bones aren't very palatable, the ends of the bones are good!).  We got 32 pint jars of chicken canned! The pressure canner holds 16 pints per load.  We did two loads.

Tomatoes

Picked many more tomatoes.  They are really getting gripe fast now.  Katherine canned 19 quarts of diced tomatoes this past weekend.  I don't think she took pics, but they all looked good to me.

Squash, pumpkins, cukes and sunflowers

Picked the last of the squash.  I pulled the plants and removed them from the garden due to Squash Vine Borer (SVB) infestation.  Still got a good 40 lb of squash.  Katherine wants to shred and freeze at least part of them so that she can make zucchini bread in the winter.  We already have 3-4 gallon containers full of dried squash!  I picked more cukes - they are almost done I think, but still have a bus tray full of them.  Katherine said something about making relish with them.  I picked more pumpkins.  They are about 2/3rds done I think.  I got a couple that were in need of processing - I want to try making pumpkin leather.  I need to take the vitamix up to the farm and do that next weekend. I need to look to harvesting sunflowers soon too, by the looks of them!

Potatoes

I finally got started digging the potatoes.  It rained Friday and Saturday so I wasn't able to get started until Sunday.  The driveway side of the front patch yielded some potatoes, better than the big patch last year by far.  However, the side opposite the driveway was EXTREMELY productive!  Since I was not able to de-weed and mulch or otherwise care for the potato plants this year the rows were hard to find to dig - I ended up just digging up the entire area where the potatoes were.  Ugh!  Hard work.  Here is a picture of the first bunch I picked.

Mostly white potatoes - i am not sure if these are Kennebec or Yukon.  I might have another variety too, but I am pretty sure I only have Kennebec and Yukon white potatoes

This is a potato fruit!  I never saw them as a kid.  I told mom about finding this and she told me that she used to pick them off as she found them on hers because she heard that leaving them on caused the potatoes to be smaller and less productive! 

Corn

I went over to mom's and picked sweet corn from my patch there.  It was a bit overripe so I decided to preserve it by drying!  The corn there was also seasonally afflicted - lol - it was too dry there!  Anyway, I got about 10 pints which I blanched, cut off cob, and put in dehydrator at 120F for 24 hours.

Almost exactly 2 quarts dried corn from roughly 10 pints (5 quart) of "wet" corn.

I got some recipes for corn casserole type dishes that I remember as a kid.  I don't know which one I liked though!  Or even if I liked mom's or grandma's  or which grandma's grrrr.

Here are some pictures from mom's recipe books:

Also, while over at mom's, we picked up some frozen black raspberries that mom and dad had put away in the previous years.  Mom doesn't eat them - dad used them for his cereal in the morning.  She was afraid they would get freezer burned if they didn't get used soon.  I took them and plan on making them into jelly.

Peach Jam

We brought back a bunch of peaches from PA (mom's trees) last weekend.  They were little and most gnarly, but they were perfect for making jam!  I cleaned them up while Katherine went shopping for jars, pectin, and lemons.   It took a while but I finally got them all cleaned and made up my peach jam!  I have never made it before so we were at the mercy of the Ball recipe on the pectin jar.  It worked pretty well, everything got jelly-like - maybe a bit too much!

I used:

4 C crushed fresh peaches
4 C sugar
4.5 Tbls pectin (Ball)
Juice from 2 lemons (about 1/4 C)


This will make about 7 half-pints.  While the canner can hold more half-pints, but I learned last weekend that making too large a batch of jelly/jam can be problematic if you have to load many jars because it sets before you are done loading the jars and things get ugly!

Total of 32 half-pints! That's 2 gallons of peach jam!!

Salsa from scratch

Well we are going to try using the ball book recipe for salsa.   We have everything we need growing in the gardens, even the cilantro! 

 

Update:

We did another batch from scratch using a few less jalapenos.  We got 9 pints more!  Total of 18 ball recipe salsa done so far.  Not sure if doing more since we have already a lot of salsa canned.

 

More food processing! Cabbages, Peaches, Elderberries, Tomatoes, Cukes

Elderberry Syrup

Katherine processed the elderberry "2nd"s into elderberry syrup.  Recipe is basically the same as for the jelly except that she used the 2nd's and only added 1/4th the pectin (she actually used 1 pack of the "no sugar needed pectin" to 4 times the juice they call for - so that would be 12 C of 2nd's).  Turned out very nicely!  Canned just like the jelly too.

She got 10 pints of syrup from 12 C of elderberry "2nd's"!

Salsa

We made another 12 pints of salsa from the tomatoes that were ready yesterday.  Again we used the Mrs Wages salsa (medium) mix.

12 Pints Salsa

Pickles

We did up the cucumbers using the Mrs Wages Kosher dill mix.  We "chunked" the cukes instead of making them as spears or sliced.  I like them this way - I guess they would be called "salad" pickles.

Total of 13 quarts of  Kosher Dills!

Corn

Most of  the corn is now off our patch.  We still have some to harvest from the patch over at mom's.  I want to try to dry and can some of the remaining corn.  We got a total of 30 pints frozen from our local patch.

Most of the corn has been harvested from my local patch now - about 30 pints frozen.

Kale, cabbages, broccoli

The real disappointment of this harvest is the Kale and Cabbages.  Besides getting a late start due to the heavy early rains that made many of the cabbages rot out (and removed needed nutrients from the soil) they were attacked by the dreaded cabbage worms!   I only have 2 broccoli plants that have produced anything - and then just enough for Katherine and I to eat at dinner!   The kale was so filthy with bugs that I only gathered enough to freeze 3 quarts!  I went out and sprayed 3 gallons of BT on the whole patch!  I trimmed a lot of the Kale leaves that I didn't harvest and threw them away.  

Kale in foodsaver bags - freezing them first make it easier
to vacuum seal moist/wet veggies.  

I did harvest what cabbages that were ready - many were split!  Sheesh!  Can't catch a break! 

After cleaning and shredding I only got 13 lbs of cabbage.  I used this to start a batch of sauerkraut.

Kraut in the crock!

Lid on and the water seal set!

Now just to do the peaches and the tomatoes... lol

Katherine will probably do the tomatoes as juice.

peaches are for jam!

Whirlwind of harvesting and preservation!

Well, last weekend we got to the farm and saw that pretty much EVERYTHING was ready to harvest!  This cool weather evidently has kicked everything in to ripening earlier than usual.  So, this is a list of what I have harvested so far:

• elderberries - as they ripen.  So far 25 jars (half-pints) of jelly canned!
• beets - all except "remote" patches - turned about 30 lbs of beets into 16 quarts of pickled beets! They are white/yellow beets!  I had forgotten what i had planted, LOL  See pickled beet recipe below.
• carrots - all except "remote" patches - going to pickle the rough ones today - about 30 lbs total picked.
• corn - about 2/3rds through what we have - i think.  So far I have frozen about 15 pints.  I want to try canning some and drying some.
• tomatoes
• cucumbers
• squash - preserved via zucchini relish, zucchini bread,  and dried A LOT of it!
• pumpkins 
• kale - just a little - but way more to come.  preserved by freezing and drying
• onions - red, white and yellow - curing in the red barn now.  Used some yellows in the pickled beets.  Mom says the white ones don't keep well so I should use them first.
• garlic (all 4 plants - LOL)
• peaches (off mom's trees - we only got one off of ours!)  Preserved by canning and jam.

Pumpkin coming in early!

About 35 lbs of beets!  Despite the red skin, these are yellow beets!

First corn from our patch to be preserved!

The Kale in SS produced well and so far has been the bulk of the preserved Kale.

Zucchini Relish.  Katherine made another batch after this one.  She modified recipe from last year to reduce sugar to 3 C.

The first and only peach off my own tree! (I ate it on my birthday!)

Cucks an tomatoes

Curing the onion harvest in the barn on screens on the bed of the trailer.

Kohlrabi!  

This Kale plant was with the kohlrabi!  I didn't notice it and it became Kale-zilla!

First tomatoes (that we didn't eat immediately) were made into salsa using Mrs Wages mix.  Elderberry jelly on right.

Pickled carrots - 9 pints.  There are more carrots to go, just pickled the nasty ones!

First corn off our own plants this year!  Corn took heavy damages from early rainy season - but we are getting ok yields anyway!

canning update

Peaches

I got the remaining peaches canned this morning.  I only had 6.5 lbs so I decided to can them in 1.5 pint wide mouth jars.  The peaches were not in the best of shape so there was lots of waste.  Here is a quick pic:

Zucchini Relish

Katherine is taking on the excess zucchini's by making relish.  She is using last years recipe but cut the sugar down to 3 C.  Interesting to note that the recipe is supposed to make 7 pints.  We doubled the recipe and only got 9 pints!  The issue is that the recipe tells you to remove "excess water" from the zucchini during the process but they never say what volume of zucchini you should have after removing said water!  We got 9 and a half pints from this recipe that should have produced 14 pints.

Pickled Jalapenos

I canned some of my jalapenos later in the day.  I used the recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, but I modified it a bit.

Pickled Jalapeño Rings - Modified

• 3 pounds jalapeño peppers
• 7½ cups vinegar (5%)
• 1¾ cups water
• 2½ tablespoons canning salt

I did NOT use lime!  I like the rings a bit mushy (and my experience from last year was that they don't even get that mushy - I don't know why they even bother with the pickling lime!)  Everything else is the same in the recipe and procedure.  BE CAREFUL: ALWAYS WEAR GLOVES HANDLING THESE PEPPERS!

I actually used about one and a half of the above recipe since I harvested 5 lbs jalapenos!

I used a mandolin to slice the 5lbs of peppers i picked!

TA-DA!  9 pints! (actually, 7 pints and 4 half-pints)

More beans, more ditches and finally some elderberry picking!

Elderberries

When I got there this past weekend I noticed how dry it was and that the elderberry area was probably mowable with the riding mower.  So I took down the electric fence and gave it a shot.  I was able to mow it down good and trimmed a bit too.  Some of the berries were ready to pick!  I picked one entire bush clean and nipped a few clusters off of the big bush.  I got about a half gallon all told.  I think I will be getting a lot more next weekend.

The first picking.  I got another lot like this later.

Squash

I picked the squash again this weekend.  They were prolific, as usual.  I dried the zucchini and yellow squash in the dehydrator.  I set the temp to 140F and then switched it up to 150F after about 10 hours.  I cut them thick using the mandolin.  These are almost crisp!  They are a bit sweet though, I don't think just seasoning them with salt and flavorings is going to make them palatable as a snack!  We will see.

My squash.  The ones on the left look kind of like spaghetti squash, but the skin color seems wrong.

Cucumbers

I picked the cucs again this weekend.  I got a few, then I saw some outside the garden fence - some vines had grown out on the fence.  So I went around to the pumpkin side to take a look.  Yep!  Big ones were there - overripe, of course, but salvageable.  Here they are:

I used some Mrs Wages Kosher Dill mix and canned these up in pints.  I got 16 pints (or 8 quarts!).  I don't need more pickles, but I am not wasting them!

Tomatoes!

It's been relatively cool this past couple weeks and I think its helping the tomatoes to ripen early! I like having them ripen now so I can get more (maybe - depends if it cools off even more later or if we just get a longer season out of this).  I used the ones shown below to celebrate "Lammas Tide" - the beginning of the harvest season - or as I have been calling it - "First Eating".

Back-Hoe Issues

I haven't heard anything from Hines about coming to pick up and work on my back-hoe and I would REALLY like to have a functioning backhoe to dig some of these ditches and my walipini!  I tried to take the front panel off to get to the leaking area.  Here are some pictures of what I was able to get to.  Nothing helpful.  I put it all back together and will call Hines again this week to see if I can get them out.

More Green beans!

I picked the green beans in my patch and pulled a few weeds (thats a joke - MANY weeds!).  I got about 2 quarts.  I stopped at mom's place on the way back and picked another bus-tray full of green beans.  A bus-tray full is about 12 quarts from past experience.  So all told I put up 14 quarts of green beans this weekend.  Mom also gave me some more peaches - these were a bit less ripe.  I will can these as well (I got 4.5 quarts from the last batch).