Anyone else canning this year?

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(Apologies to mods if there was a better place for this.)

Is anyone else canning this year? I was worried back in May whether pick-your-own would happen this year. Thankfully, it has.

Our favorite local place to PYO fruit (Tougas Family Farm in Northboro, MA) is allowing picking on a reservation system; masks required for all, hand washing stations before entering, groups guided to well-spaced assigned rows, no picking bulk to be weighed at the end (2- or 4-quart boxes to pick in only), etc.

Last week we picked 4 quarts of tart cherries and 4 quarts of sweet. I jammed the tart, and DW and DD ate the sweet. Tart cherry jam is one of my favorites; I leave it quite tart.

Today we picked 10 quarts of blueberries, of which 8 have become jam. Yum. Another of my favorites.
 
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Canning: pickles and strawberry jam.

Freezing: blueberries (soon) and (earlier) rhubarb.

There might be some raspberries this week; not sure yet. I can't leave to pick, but people have been exchanging produce as a thank you for IT help.
 

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Mmmmmm, pickles! What kind do you make? I need to see if I can get cukes locally to pickle...
 

mccardey

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I will be canning later (it's midwinter here now) - tomatoes, and corn, and all sorts of berries and whatever else is in surplus in the garden. But honestly, my dehydrator will be doing more work - dried squash and zucchini make a lovely soup-thickener in winter ;)
 
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Bumping this thread…

We picked cherries last Thursday. Sweet and tart varieties. Yesterday I cooked and canned the tarts into jam. Lovely fruit, tart cherries.

Cherries are low in pectin so I have to add it to get the jam to gel. Still trying to get the amount right; yesterday’s batch set harder than I prefer. Won’t stop me from enjoying it. 😎
 

Brigid Barry

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I'm a hack and have a couple of cookbooks that I follow the recipes. Already made two gallons of strawberry rhubarb jam. I tweaked the recipe for the gallon of rhubarb BBQ sauce that I made.

Husband has a garden vs us doing PYO. I have a pressure canner that I plan to use to put up spaghetti squash and probably some potatoes - we have a LOT of spaghetti squash this year, and husband planted a ton of potatoes because last year's were fabulous.

When the cukes and zucchini come in, they will probably end up as relish because I'vehad to give away the pickles. I have a yummy pickling recipe for the beans but some will get frozen, along with the broccoli. The only thing we don't seem to have trouble using are the hot peppers, but I can make those into pepper jelly.
 
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mrsmig

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I usually refrigerate or freeze rather than can. I picked up a big box of tomato seconds at the farmers market yesterday, and combined with some tomatoes out of my own garden, made tomato sauce this morning. My husband and I invested in a big, powerful food mill earlier in the year, mostly for sausage-making, but the mill came with attachments for processing tomatoes. Boy oh boy - it's so fast and efficient! I had ten quarts of sauce in no time flat.

The other, much more low-cost change I made this year was buying a strainer ladle and using that to dish the cooked tomatoes into the mill's hopper. By straining out the juice before milling, I had a much thicker sauce that I didn't have to cook down. (I only just learned this by watching tomato processing videos on YouTube - such a simple step that I can't believe I didn't think of it on my own. Duh.) I put the juice through a fine mesh sieve to catch any remaining solids and put those through the mill, too. The filtered juice I'll use as a base for tonight's minestrone soup.

It's only been a couple of years since I used to hand-mill cooked tomatoes through a chinois to make sauce. While there was a certain meditative quality to that process, I can't argue with the speed and end results using the big electric mill.
 
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