Are you canning/preserving this season? If so, what's cooking?

[grasswire]

I have requests from family in Seattle for a lot of applesauce from farmers market apples, so I need to lay in some more jars -- it seems that almost all of my jars were given away last year!

Blackberry syrup is on my game plan. Bread and butter pickles. Dilled green tomatoes. Nothing too exotic there.

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. we've got spiced beets (5 pts), roasted sauce (14 pts) and tomatoes (21 qts) canned -

froze lots of blackberries, blueberries and cherries, froze some roasted sauce, and are dehydrating cherries, tomatoes and peppers (to make paprika). We are in pretty good shape. Got some more paprika to make as well as making some baked eggplant rounds to freeze.

[grasswire]

3. you make paprika?

wow. From what variety of peppers?

[NRaleighLiberal]

5. Easy! Take red, fully ripe sweet bells - mix in a few red Anaheims or Padrons -

seed and core them - cut into thin slices and put in a dehydrator, run at 135 for several hours until the peppers slices/strips are dry and brittle. Whiz them in a food chopper or spice grinder until as coarse or fine as you wish - just incredible aroma and flavor, puts commercial stuff to shame. Mixing in hot peppers to titrate to the heat level you wish is easy.

[Rowdyboy]

2. 2 gallons of dill pickles, frozen asparagus (only a couple of lbs-we ate the rest)....

and frozen squash, heirloom tomatoes and pesto. Still to come is muscadine jelly. And its a city lot!

[grasswire]

4. never tasted muscadine jelly

what's it like?

[watrwefitinfor]

11. It's like heaven.

Like nothing else you ever tasted. Especially if it's made with the wild black muscadines and the hulls are included. We call it grape hull preserves (or as my grandfather said, per-SARVES).



Wat

[sinkingfeeling]

6. I already canned blackberries, made perserves, cherry jelly, and canned

my grape tomatoes.

[Denninmi]

7. Boy, this is really my off year.

April freezes wiped out virtually ALL fruit here, and the summer heat and drought took care of the few survivors such as blueberries and raspberries, yields and size were very low. Nothing there to put up.

I put about 50 quart bags of sweet corn in the freezer last week/weekend. My earliest corn harvest every by about 3 weeks.

I am good on most everything else, just want to use the 2011 up. All I will put up is salsa and tomato juice. My tomatoes are about 2-33 weeks out from main production starting, which is actually fairly average timing, generally my big tomato processing period is the first 3 weeks in September. I've got the usual sweet and mild hot peppers and onions out there to go into salsa.

And that's it.

[grasswire]

8. black walnuts this year?

I fondly remember your telling of running over the nuts to crack them.

[Denninmi]

10. Ah, thank God, NO!!!!

They are completely alternate bearing. Bumper crop, trees groaning with the load in the "on" year (which is the odd # years here in my area) and not a single nut, not even a single spring flower or catkin on any tree.

They synchronize somehow. ALL of the trees in the area are on the same cycle. I don't know how it works, or how big the area is in which trees all synchonize. I know that as I drive around in my area, my normal 20-ish mile range, they're all either bearing or not from year to year.

And I'm so glad. That was a LOT of work.

[Major Nikon]

9. I've been making peach preserves

I started harvesting the first of my two peach trees a couple of months ago. By next weekend I should be done harvesting the last of them.

[Le Taz Hot]

12. Oh yeah.

I'm a serial canner. I'm WAY far behind this year because my air conditioner went out and I have to can in the middle of the night.

Anyway, either already done or planned this year:

Salsa
Marinara Sauce
Tomatoes
Carrots
Raspberry Jam
Blackberry Port Jam (entering this one in the fair this year)
Peaches
Apricots
Green Beans
Potatoes
Corn
Mexi-Corn
Pickled Peppers
Blueberries

[HeiressofBickworth]

13. I would can or freeze more but we have storage issues

So I usually make 8 pint jars of strawberry jam, 8 pint jars of raspberry jam, 8 pint jars of tayberry (local hybrid) jam and freeze a few bags of blueberries. Our yearly usage varies. We still have 4 jars of the 2011 strawberry jam so I didn't make any this year. The others should run out right about the time next year's crop comes on the market. We still have 6 jars of the 2009 applesauce so I haven't made that in the last couple of years. In early September, I'll be going to eastern Washington to get peaches and apricots. We eat those up quickly so I usually get 4 or 5 jars out of them. One time, we had some left-over grapes that I made into a freezer jam (no pectin) but no one has eaten it so I'll probably just toss it.

I tried to get my 17-year-old granddaughter to help me with this year's batches, but she found other things to do instead -- like go to the beach with her boyfriend.