Canning

Hi, my name is Josh, and I planted too many green beans.

Yesterday, we discovered our green beans were starting to be ready to be picked. But before I get to the green beans, let me start with what we did yesterday. We have been getting a lot of cucumbers the past few days so we decided it was time to can pickles. So that is what we did yesterday evening. Here are some pics that will show what we did.

First, I sliced the cucumbers. We do some spears and a lot of sandwich stackers (cut long ways in strips).


Next we packed the jars with the cucumbers.


Then, we filled the jars with our brine solution and then water bath canned them. We used a new brine solution this year so I hope it turns out good.


Here is the finished product. They really don't look good in this pic but hopefully they will taste good. They have to sit for a month before eating them.


Now, back to the green beans. We had to wait until today to pick the green beans because we were busy with the pickling last night. So, this afternoon we went out and picked green beans. I have 3 rows of green beans (40 feet long rows). We got tons of green beans and this is only the first picking. Here is Margo with our bushel basket full of green beans, we also filled half a 5 gallon bucket.


So tonight, we canned green beans. We basically ran out of jars tonight. I still have the jars that I do my spagetti sauce and salsa in but I used all my other jars for the green beans. We canned 17 jars of green beans tonight and only used half of what we picked. We are going to have to get more jars.

Here are some pics of the canning process. First we snapped off the end of the beans and then broke them into 1-2inch pieces. Next, we packed them into jars.


Then we filled the jars with boiling water and put the lids on and put them in the pressure canner to can them. This is our first use of this pressure canner. It was a Christmas gift from Margo's parents last year.


I don't have a pic of the final product because they are cooling down right now in the canner before I can take off the lid.

One other thing had to be harvested out of the garden tonight before it was too late, the garlic. I am going to cure it to save for use in canning my salsa and spaghetti sauce, general use, and to plant back next year. I am still trying to get the curing thing down, the last time I tried to cure garlic it ended up rotting so I hope it does better this time. I had already harvested about a third of it but here is the rest of it that I got today.


For any of you interested in canning. Here are some good links to sites that I use.

National Center for Home Food Preservation

homecanning.com

pickyourown.org

And if any of you want some hands on experience we will be doing lots more canning this year: more pickles, green beans, salsa, spaghetti sauce.