How We’re Preserving the Harvest (So Far)

Haven’t had much time to write lately cause the garden is hopping! For the last three weeks, we’ve been putting up the produce just about non-stop.

First, let’s talk jam. Remember all those strawberries I bought? Well I bought more. (I know, I have a problem.) But they were once again $.99/lb. And they were the most beautiful, sweet tasting and smelling strawberries I’ve ever known. They were begging to become jam. 

So I poked around on the internet looking for a simple, low sugar jam recipe that didn’t require me to hunt down or order some fancy pectin or other what-nots. I settled on this one. Three ingredients. Strawberries, sugar and lemons. The strawberry to sugar ratio is just the way I like it. High on the fruit and low on the sugar. The pectin comes naturally from the strawberries and the lemons. We love the flavor. Fruity, bright and just sweet enough. The consistency is sort of like a freezer jam or like a really thick syrup. Not all that thick. I may experiment with another recipe next year, but for now, we’re pretty happy with this simple goodness.

I made a little over 20 pints in a couple days. Yeah!

Moving right along to the beets. The beets are my mom’s gig. She’s tweaked a recipe for pickled beets that we are all quite fond of. Just enough sweetness, but not syrupy sweet like the kind you usually find at the store. We love ’em. Especially my 6 year old. Weird, I know.

And last, but certainly not least, we have the beans. Oh, the beans. They are an event, beans are. If you have them, they control your schedule for quite a while. Not that I’m complaining. I’m grateful for the beans. All 105 quarts of them…and counting. I think at this point, I’ve kind of got it down to a science. Wait till you see this set up.

Yes, that’s a turkey fryer under there. And off to the left, not pictured would be the propane tank. Sitting atop the high powered bomb, I mean burner, is the pressure canner. From the 1960’s–literally. It looks like some kind of nuclear containment vessel. Laugh if you want, but this little piece of genius (which we swiped from a Backwoodsman Magazine article) makes for some FAST pressure canning. The powerful burner can bring this thing up to pressure in about 3 minutes. No heating up the house, either. Downright awesome, if you ask me.

Everyone helps with beans. Even my little niece. She’s actually quite the bean snapper.

What else? Let’s see. I bought and froze about 6 gallon bags full of blueberries for smoothies and muffins this winter. We hope to have a large harvest of butternut squash in a few weeks. I’ll keep some in the pantry and roast, puree and freeze the rest for muffins or soup or whatever.

We’re still waiting to see what the tomatoes are going to do. Still haven’t eaten a single homegrown tomato. And it’s the end of July. That’s very sad, indeed. But the weather’s been crazy this summer (as in, I think WV just became a rain forest) and we’re not the only folks around here still waiting to pick that first tomato. I’m hoping we’ll have enough to can a good amount of sauce or crushed, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

All this makes for some serious hard work at times. But at the end of the day, I’m SO very grateful to be preserving all this food at it’s peak of freshness and flavor, not to mention saving some cash at the same time. There is something very satisfying to me about growing your own food, relying on God for the harvest and providing for the dinner table through hard, honest work. I never feel quite like that good after I leave Kroger. Just saying. 🙂

What are you preserving this summer?