Pickling Produce

Pickling Produce 

Our summer crop is finally starting to come in, so we’ve spent the last two weekends canning everything.

I haven’t shown a picture of the garden in a while, but this is what happens when you are over ambitious and plant WAY too many tomato plants in a small space. Also, when you are busy and wait too long to build tomato cages to hold your tomatoes up. You get a garden of beautiful chaos.

 It started out with a bunch of banana peppers, but more produce started rolling in. 

So far we’ve been able to pickle sliced banana peppers and pepperoncinis.

We picked a ton of jalapeño peppers. Most of them were mild jalapeños (grown for me), and we turned them into pickled slices and pickled whole jalapeños.We also made Sam some roasted green tomato salsa! He loved it!! 

We also spent a good deal of time canning pasta sauce. Let me tell you, it takes a LONG time, and you have to have a lot of tomatoes! We a actually got this handy little propane stove (which we love!) to water bath can with. Technically, you aren't supposed to can on glass stove tops because its too much weight and can break your stove. Also, we aren't skilled enough to line up the timing of all the things we are pickling or making, so we often have to have the water boiling for an hour or so to can multiple batches. This stove works amazingly in that we can pop it outside and keep it hot and ready. Last night we ended up canning in the screened in porch because my spaghetti sauce took three hours (or more) to reduce to the right consistency. I'm going to have to try a new method. 

The popcorn turned out BEAUTIFUL! Though it doesn’t look like the pictures said it would. It was supposed to be called “Glass Popcorn”. I think it should be named either “Strawberry Shortcake” or “My Little Pony”.

You can see the normal corn in the background! We still have more corn coming in, thank goodness. We’ve only frozen one bag of corn so far.

The pinto beans have been super productive this year! You can see here the jar of black eyed peas, the two jars of pintos, and the small vial of black beans. All but about six of the black beans we grew in our garden last year. Such a big improvement in production!

In other news, the kittens are doing well (this is Rose). They will be getting fixed soon, and Sam and I are counting down the days until we can start letting them outside. Litterboxes are so messy! We will train them to go to the door when they have to go to the bathroom once it gets cold enough for us to leave our doors open...November, probably. 

Jacks and Lily had their fist birthday a week or so ago! They celebrated it by digging a hole in our wall and chewing a hole in our couch cushion. We found ourselves with bored, anxious puppies (and jealous of the kittens) who weren’t getting enough exercise because we’d been busy and who didn’t have enough chew toys because they’d eaten all of them or hid them under the couch. Poor little puppies.