The End Of Another Week

The end of another long week of canning and an upcoming holiday weekend. Think I could use a day or two off  : ) The first of the week started with fish from O Wise One's  Sunday fishing excursion. 

We continue to pick and freeze okra. It's a long time till next summer! Right now we are picking daily and getting a bucket a day! With the temperature predicted to go back in the 80's a couple days next week we hope to get as much put up as possible knowing that it will soon slow down drastically. That "make hay when the sun shines" dilemma : )

Remember for weeks how those green tomatoes lingered in the cool summer weather. We were picking tomatoes to quote my mother "like lawyers going to heaven". Translation..far and few between! We are picking some whopper Brandywine and Oxheart tomatoes now though. Those Oxheart are huge paste tomatoes with a great taste. Sure glad I have found and saved those seeds! They were such scrawny and spindly young seedlings that  O Wise One wanted to throw them out at first. I think that maybe that is just the normal growth habit of the plant. ( note to self for next year) 

Tip when you are getting tomatoes just a few at the time freeze them. I throw mine in plastic Walmart shopping bags and put them in the freezer. When I have enough for a roaster full of tomatoes then I run the frozen tomatoes under warm water and that peel just peels right off with your fingers. Core and slice and cook down as usual. Some say this changes the consistency a little in the sauce but I personally think it is so slight that you never notice in the final product.  

And since we have both tomatoes and okra right now why not combine the two for some stewed okra and tomatoes for those gumbos.

And 6 pounds of seeds for next years bean patch. 

And I am still freezing red beans. This Saturday afternoon I have just half a bucket of red beans left to shell and that is the last of the red beans for 2013. I also have half a bucket of horticulture to shell to finish off my Saturday afternoon and then I only have 1 more row of younger horticulture beans in the garden and then they are done. These will be my fall beans and we hope they will turn before frost. I also have a last row of Jade beans hanging on the bushes for seeds. We are waiting for those to fill out and dry before frost.   

And the leftover dry pea seeds will become dried beans. Just enough for a pot for New Years Day : )

I am so thankful to be replenishing my stock of horticulture beans because we got very few last year in that drought and my supply in the pantry was getting really low.  

And we have started saving horticulture bean seeds for next year. This is Lina Siscos Bird Egg heirloom beans.  That makes the corn and bean crops for the year ( other than one row of horticulture beans )  just about finished other than seeds drying on the bushes. Okra is probably half done and we are concentrating on knocking out tomatoes. Corn seeds are drying on the stalks and O Wise One is feeding finished corn stalks to the goats daily.  My compost piles are filling fast. 

Still in the field:
cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, okra, tomatoes, peppers, carrots and potatoes...

Note...We are still picking broccoli from that hybrid Premium Crop planted the first of June..Wow that variety is a workhorse for all of you in my zone ( 5 A ) !!!! 

Fall crops in the field:
green peas, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, turnips, spinach, brussel sprouts 

And I have a patch of the prettiest watermelons you have ever seen. THEY ARE HUGE!!!

They may be ready by Christmas : ( 

This Weeks Canning Tally:

8 quarts frozen fish fillets

6 bags frozen sliced okra

12 quarts canned stewed okra and tomatoes

5 quarts canned stewed tomatoes

2 pints canned stewed tomatoes

2 quarts frozen red beans

7 quarts canned horticulture beans
7 quarts frozen breaded okra

Seeds Saved

3 pounds dried red bean seeds frozen

3 pounds dried purple hull pea seeds frozen 

tomato seeds fermenting

cucumber seeds fermenting
horticulture seeds drying

Produce Sold

14 pounds Jade snap beans sold

60 pounds pickling cucumbers sold

Next Weeks Projects ( God Willing )

Chicken broth and meat canned (roosters)
Tomatoes  ( canned )
onions ( frozen/dehydrated )
Potatoes  ( canned/dehydrated )
Peppers ( frozen/dehydrated/stuffed )
Okra (ongoing) 
carrots (dehydrated )

 So as another Saturday draws to a close I wish you all a peaceful and safe weekend and an enjoyable Labor Day. I will see everyone back on Tuesday morning. I am taking both Sunday and Monday off. Who knows I might go fishing with O Wise One but I think not in this heat : )

O Wise One will be sitting in a field with a shotgun hunting doves. Season opens tomorrow ( Sunday ).  

Blessings from The Holler

The Canned Quilter   

Looking To The Future

For the last several weeks I have been taking advantage of the warm weather and looking to next years gardens. As I pick most crops I either leave some of the fruit in the field or save some to plant next years crop. 

You've seen them in my garden pictures before. Onions plants with flowers on top waiting for the seeds to dry and be gathered. 

Tiny black onion and chive seeds at the bottom of a dishpan waiting to be cleaned and bagged.

Bags of seeds going on the freezer to preserve them. Especially onion seed which can be very temperamental !

Bowls of dried dill seeds waiting to be used in pickles but the remainder will become next years dill patch.

With each bean shelling a tray or two of seeds allowed to dry for next year

Trays of pea seeds drying in the afternoon sun on the old picnic table with me watching the sky for rain clouds. 

And the odd collection of jars and bottles holding my priceless collection of seeds that you see me drag out each year come spring. 

O Wise One and I have decided we are just getting too many seeds for all those little bottles so we are changing the way we do things. 

So as the beans and purple hull peas thoroughly dry we are starting to put them in vacuum bags  and seal them. Our plan is to keep a box in the freezer for all the seeds and we hope that this will take up much less room than all those bottles and jars in the pantry. 

Now for those of you living off grid it's okay! I have saved seeds for decades without freezing them. You don't have to. Just keep them dry and in the coolest and darkest place possible and you are fine on most things. They say they last longer frozen though. Since I have never done it this way I will let you know.     

For right now we remove the red beans and purple hulls from trays and vacuum seal them in bags. Each bag holds 1 pound (16 oz.) of seeds. Purple Hull pea seeds sell on average for $1.85 an ounce. A pound runs about $14.99

Red bean seeds run about the same if you could find this kind. So you have about $89.94 worth of seeds there if I were to have to buy them. 

This is just one of the reasons I save seeds. 

Yesterday I shelled horticulture beans and today I have 3 trays of beans drying on the picnic table.  

And the greatest thing about it is that any beans or peas that I don't plant next year I can cook as dried beans.

With the amount of gardening I do and the size of the gardens that I grow I save hundreds of dollars every year by finding an open pollinated variety that I like the taste of that grows well in my area and saving the seeds from year to year. 

I also have to admit that it has taken me at the least two decades to experiment with varieties to find the ones that I like that grow well in this area and it's climate. If I were to move I would have to start all over again. And I still experiment with varieties adding and changing varieties each year.   

Right now I have seed corn drying in the field and tomato seeds and cucumber seeds sitting in water fermenting. As I do each crop of seeds I will try to post how it is done for those of you that have requested more information on seeds saving. 

Just curious to know how do you store your saved seeds?

Blessings from The Holler

The Canned Quilter

Canning Okra And Tomatoes

We had beautiful weather in late July and early August with daytime temperatures in the 80's and night time temperatures in the 50's and 60's. unseasonable COOL for us. My warm weather crops languished in the fields! Nothing ripened nothing set fruit. Not the tomatoes or the okra. The sweet potatoes look like they are a month old. They will never recover. But in the last 2 weeks the mercury has soared and the temperatures have triggered ripening of both the tomatoes and the okra now has to be picked every day. 

The downside is not a drop of rain in sight. 

But Oh what a crop of tomatoes these are turning out to be! Huge pendolous tomatoes. 

Softball size paste tomatoes.

It doesn't take many of these to fill up a roaster full of tomatoes to cook down. Once peeled with boiling water and cut up they are cooked down to reduce some of the water in them and then I ran my wand shredder through them to chop up any super large pieces. Then I just let them simmer while I get my okra ready.

I have a days picking of young cowhorn okra already washed, dried and ready to be sliced.

My mandolin chopper makes short work of that then it is ready to be blanched.

Simply run it through the microwave covered for 3 minutes to precook. 

Heat jars

Hot okra in hot jars with 1/2 teaspoon of canning salt

Warm lids ready to go

Now add hot stewed tomatoes. remove air bubbles WELL with bubble tool. Leave 1 inch head space. Wipe rims and add 2 piece lids and rings. Pressure cook quarts at 10 pounds pressure for 35 minutes.

The left over tomatoes I just throw in jars and pressure cook with the okra/tomato combo. It will not hurt them at all to pressure cook them. That batch made 12 quarts of okra and tomatoes and 5 quarts and 2 pints tomatoes alone. 

Greatest thing in the world to make a gumbo with or if I was In Louisiana and had a good mess of shrimp make a good roux, throw in some onions and peppers and a can of this okra and tomatoes and you have a wonderful Shrimp creole. Served over a bed of white rice, some crusty french bread to dip and oh my gosh I am making myself hungry : ) 

Just another way to use that okra!

Blessings from The Holler

The Canned Quilter

Canning Corn

Canned corn is one of those things that most people either love or hate. I personally think it is because they expect it to taste like the canned corn that you purchase in the store and it does not in my opinion. If you are going to put corn in jars and can it  for the first time remember that the processing time is long. I have heard many say too long to justify doing it that way. If you are trying to preserve corn without requiring electricity then this is the way to go unless you want to dehydrate it.  

As for me I do put up some canned corn occasionally for the convenience to use in soups and such. My husband loves corn in his taco soup. 

When I have lots of corn I wash it all and separate it. The best ears are simply washed and frozen on the cob. I do not blanch my corn on the cob. My husband does not like the taste of it blanched. It's a rather simple process of putting them in vacuum bags and sealing then freezing. I limit the corn I put up on the cob because it requires a huge amount of freezer space for the actual amount of food you get from it. If you have plenty of freezer space then the sky is the limit. Most years though my freezer space is at a premium.  

The remainder I blanch for 6 minutes in boiling water. Then Immediately remove and place in ice water to cool. As soon as it is cool to the touch I remove it from the ice water. 

Then spend hours cutting kernels off the cob. There are tools out there for this but I just use my plain old trusty knife.

Once your kernels are removed then some I place in bags for whole kernel corn.

My vacuum bags are frozen and then sealed. 

What is left I can into jars. This is done by placing the corn in hot jars leaving 1 inch head space. 

Then filling the jars with boiling water to again 1 inch head space.

Then remove bubbles, wipe rims and seal with hot lids and rings. 

Pints are processed 55 minutes and quarts 1 hour and 25 minutes at 10 pounds pressure. 

It never hurts in my opinion to have one vegetable in different forms. This year I put up corn on the cob, whole kernel frozen corn and canned corn in jars. If I happen to lose my freezer I still have corn in my pantry like many other vegetables I grow.  

How do you put up your corn?

Blessings from The Holler

The Canned Quilter