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So. We have an apple tree that produced a lot of apples this year, after nothing last year. The apples are kind of small and tart, but not crab apples. We've also had a bumper crop of rhubarb - have harvested it three times this year already and on Saturday we harvested about another 26 cups (diced in one-inch pieces). So, I decided to try something new.

I made apple-rhubarb jam. Well, I set out to make that. What I actually ended up making is more like apple-rhubarb pie jam. ...

We canned forty-two quarts of tomatoes today. We started in the garden picking what needed to come to the house. We got cucumbers, squash and honeydews. The melons are delicious. This is our first time growing them. Then we started canning. It was a long day at the end of a long weekend. We decided to do what we could today so we would not have to do any during the week. We will have maybe ten to fifteen more quarts after all of the tomatoes ripen. That is great since it matches with the ...

I picked and canned twenty-four pints of beans today. For those of you playing along at home, that brings the yearly total to ninety-one pints. I am closing in on my goal of one hundred. What made today a major pain is that someone dug into a major water line and I had little to no water. It is amazing how much water you use canning. The water flowed at a trickle so I constantly had a pan filling. I filled all the pans I could in the event it stopped completely. Oh yeah, my phone was out ...

I was asked, in response to a previous blog entry, if we had canned much before this year. I said we had canned for fifteen years. As usual, my wife corrected me. We started canning eighteen years ago. We made and canned pickles in the tiny kitchen of our apartment at the time. All we had was a big pot and a few jars. I used a pair of kitchen tongs to place and remove the jars from the boiling water bath. I still don't know how I did it. We soon learned we really don't eat a lot of pickles. ...

This has certainly been a busy weekend. Saturday was finished up the beets. We canned sixteen pints of beet and froze twelve quarts of beet greens. It was a long day. Late Saturday afternoon we checked on the peaches. Our early variety was almost ripe. It was ripe enough to attract unwanted attention from wildlife. We picked most of the peaches that were almost ripe. They will ripen in the safety of the basement. Early this morning, we picked what may be the last of the blueberries. I ...