Canning potatoes and, of course, more tomatoes!

Canning Crazy!

I am getting a bit overwhelmed with the harvesting and canning activities so what I am going to do here is just post some pictures that i took over the past several days and add captions to explain things.

14 quarts and 6 pint and a half jars of tomatoes that Katherine cleaned and I canned on Sept 4 evening

This is a picture of the cucumber relish (I think) that Katherine made on labor day weekend.  16 pints.  She didn't like the recipe so I won't post it.  It has way too much liquid in it.

 We made it up to the farm last Friday, Sept 5, in time for me to gather some of the rough potatoes from the potato harvest and can them!  We ate 3 of the jars shown below during the weekend to see if we liked them done this way.  Personally, i loved them!  Katherine cooked them in potatoes, eggs and onions breakfasts!  Used our own onions too!

This is the next morning immediately after taking them out of the PC.

Closer view

I didn't get a picture of them later that day, but I will state that the "clear" liquid in those jars gets thick and white with starch!  I personally did not work to get them out of the jars after canning so I don't know really how hard they are to dislodge.  Katherine said it wasn't too bad and she votes for canning more of the damaged potatoes.  They are convenient and don't take freezer space.

More broccoli and our first cauliflower of the season!  The cauliflower looks super good!

We haven't eaten it yet.  That's the problem when stuff comes in this fast.  We just finished eating the broccoli from LAST weekend!

I sorted the potatoes according to damaged vs non-damaged and color.  Looks like we got a total of about 175 lbs this harvest!

The ones in the bucket are next years seed potatoes

Brassica patch is looking quite nice actually!

Late cabbage

another late cabbage, heading up nice!

Quite a few late cabbages made it!  We might have to figure out what to do with all this cabbage!

The cauliflower and broccoli plants are still going strong.  Not sure if we will get enough to freeze or pickle though. 

Yep - that's my green globe artichoke!  Katherine says that they are perennial, so even if this doesn't produce this year, maybe next?  I just need to figure out a way of moving it - its in the center of the paw-paw patch!

Another artichoke.  I have 4 in all.

The kale!  Lots of green leaves!  I sprayed all the brasicas with BT.  I didn't harvest any kale this weekend.  I think i will harvest some and start drying it next weekend.

Smokey, checking things out!

Harvested the sunflowers (most of them) this weekend.  I put them on the garage floor to dry.  I thought about putting them in the red-barn on the trailer bed, but i was afraid that squirrels would help themselves!  The garage is a bit tighter.

Trying to get a record of the tomatoes.  I think we will just have to inventory them after we are all done at this point.

this shows 28 quarts plus 6 pint and a halfs

We brought 3 bus trays full of tomatoes back this time.  Katherine is already a bit punchy over the weekend canning activities and she thinks there is no end in sight.  We did give some of the heirloom "pink lady" tomatoes away to neighbors and friends at work.  She is going to put some of these in trays (after juicing) to try to get a thicker sauce going.  She did a bunch of sauce on the farm on Sunday night - it was very good!  It does take some cooking though. The idea is that on trays, in the oven, there will be more surface area for the sauce to evaporate faster.  We will see!

Buttercup Squash

Those green squash with the little cap on the end are called "buttercup squash".  We probably got the seed packets mixed up with "butternut" squash (since I don't have any of those - lol).  Well, we finally tried one and it was GOOD!  Wonderful flavor and a great texture.  Bright orange!  We will be saving the seeds from these for sure!

Labor day! Literally - lol

Well, i loaded up my little SUV to the brim with my new wine making stuff and took off last Friday (Aug 29, 2014) for the farm.  It was a rainy kinda weekend - not a lot of rain - about .5 inches all told, but it was on and off making it hard to get out to do much.

More mower issues

When it dried off enough for me to mow, I took out the Huskee riding mower (the one I had just replaced the spindle on last weekend) and proceeded to mow the front lawn.  Mission accomplished.  That was Friday, between showers, if I recall,  I did some food processing Friday night while it rained a bit on and off.  When it dried off a bit Saturday morn I took the mower out and started mowing around the paw-paw trees.  Didn't get far though before I broke a mower deck belt!  That's the second mower deck belt i broke this year on the Huskee!  i hope that it was just because the belt took damage when the spindle went to hell.... So mowing was done that day!  I decided to do some harvesting and preserving work,  Eventually I got up to TSC in Everett and got a replacement belt (and some slime for the front tire that kept leaking air - I couldn't find a leak - but it was consistently going flat pretty fast!).  I replaced the belt and filled the tire with the slime during rains.  Eventually I got back out and finished the mowing.  The tire leak seems to be ok now.  We will see how it holds out over the week!

Dehydration Mania!

I got my zucchini sliced up and in the dehydrator the first night (Friday night).  They continued to dehydrate nicely the next morning while i went and picked more pumpkins, squash and tomatoes from the garden.    I got quite a haul of tomatoes - and I already had a bunch on the porch ripening from last week!  In the meantime I noticed that some of the pumpkins needed to be processed due to spoilage issues.  So first things first, I decided to make "pumpkin leather" from risky pumpkins first.  I followed the recipe, but I substituted splenda for the sweetener.    That turned out to be a bad idea.  The leather turned into "paper" or hard cardboard!  You could seriously cut your mouth trying to eat this stuff!  I pulled the pumpkin leather off the "silpat" dehydrator trays and loaded them up with tomato leather mix (recipe on the same page as the pumpkin leather above).  While the tomato leather was drying i loaded up the rest of the dehydrator with tomatoes!  

Dehydrated tomatoes on the right!

tomato leather - it grows on you!

tomatoes - some saved pumpkin seeds there too, on the paper towels

more tomatoes
and
some dill - i saved about 1 pint of dill seed.

Anyway, I re-did the pumpkin leather by powdering it and adding it to a new batch (which used the recipe above with honey!)    This time it turned out very nice!  I will be making more of this!  No pictures of it though - maybe next time.

Onions Cured!

I checked the onions out in the red-barn., they are cured! So I trimmed the stems and put them in my new plastic crates.

Yellow seem in great shape.

the red seem ok - but the white may have issues.  Mom warned me about that earlier this year.  The white ones don't keep well - they will be used first.

More Tomato Processing

Well, with Katherine busy making cucumber relish this weekend down in the "city" house, I decided I would try using the vitamix to process some of these tomatoes.  The plan was to simply clean and then puree the tomatoes in the vitamix, then boil the puree/sauce and can like regular tomato sauce.  Well, it worked like a charm!  My only concern is the taste and if it gets bitter due to the seeds being ground up.    I did 2 loads of 7 quarts and then 4 pints.

Oh, and i made some more Mrs Wages salsa mix salsa - just did 6 pints (canned 5 - ate one!)

Potatoes - finally all picked!

Was hot as hell and barely got it done because of rain - but I did it!

Letting them dry and cure - then I will sort and process the rough ones.  Then i need to get moving on that root cellar!

Took back alot of tomatoes, some cabbages and pumpkins.  Whew

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!