Kim,

You're welcome.

I am glad it worked out as expected.

Lots of pear jam and pear preserves are canned in this country every year, often because people who haven't grown pears before let them stay on the tree endlessly, waiting for them to ripen, and then, of course, end up with overripe, mushy pears that have to be processed quickly in order to salvage most of the harvest.

It is such a leap of faith, is it not, to pick them at the full unripe stage and then to sit and wait for them to ripen up?

My brother, and a neighbor of his who tended to leave the pears on the tree too long, taught me about how and when to harvest pears long ago. Granted, the lesson I learned from them was that you cannot leave them on the tree to ripen or they'll be overripe, but even lessons learned from a negative experience are good lessons learned. Every gardening lesson that each of us learns is so much more valuable if we pass on that info and that experience to others.

That is a beautiful pear in your photo and I bet all that rain helped you get such nice, beautiful ones this year. I expect you're going to really enjoy that pear sauce.

Dawn

It is funny to have everyone tell you that you're crazy for picking them too early and too hard and then wonder why theirs are mealy and mushy when they wait for them to turn yellow. I tried to explain but they have done it that way forever and it works for them.
I have access to a large walkin cooler so I like to put them in there and the pull them out 3 or so days before I want to use them. Perfect.
I had a request for pear preserves so I will be trying that this year too. My grandson loves sauce so much that it is necessary to make some into sauce in case we run out of applesauce. I put up 5 gallons worth so far and probably will have another 5. But that may not hold him for a year.
kim

That is funny and goes back to an earlier comment by dbarron a few days ago that it sometimes is hard to teach old dog new tricks.

When I adopt a specific gardening practice for a specific reason, I try to explain to someone exactly why I do it that way and why it works, but some folks just don't care---they will do the same thing the same way no matter what, even if you can explain to them the research-verified reason that the new garden practice gives better results.

My experience with canning is that no matter how much of any item you make, you're going to run out of it (especially if you give it away as gifts like we do at Christmas time) . I started making Annie's Salsa when our son was in college, and he and his girlfriend loved it. One year he asked me how much I made, and I told him 45 jars or 55 jars (which sounded like a lot to me at the time because we had not yet started giving it to everyone at Christmas time) and he said "That's not enough". lol The next year I made 85 jars, but we gave away so much that we ran out of salsa to eat that winter or spring well before canning season rolled around. If I didn't lose track this year, I think I canned around 170 jars of salsa, and an equal or greater amount of pickles and candied jalapeno peppers. We'd better not run out! Some years I carefully write down every single jar of everything that I can in a canning log so I can keep track of what I did, but this year I totally failed to do that.

I do have several gallon freezer bags of chopped tomatoes in the deep freeze, with each bag containing exactly enough for one batch of Annie's Salsa. That way, if we run out of salsa in the winter or spring, I can make and can enough batches to keep us in salsa until the canning season of 2015 rolls around.

One year we had an awesome peach and plum year because the last freeze was very early so the flowers and/or fruit didn't freeze and fall off the trees. We got a little under 400 lbs of peaches and plums from our trees. Of course, it also was tomato canning time and I couldn't can fast enough, so I started extracting and freezing plum and peach juice for jelly and also froze the peach and plum fruit puree for jam. I also froze whole tomatoes to use later in cooking or canning. Even using those methods, I still found it hard to get all the canning done, and we ended up with hundreds and hundreds of jars of canned fruit and tomato products, with lots more raw 'product' in the freezer awaiting processing. It really was a horrible canning nightmare. While having a huge harvest sounds great, if you're the person who has to harvest and can it all, a year like that reminds you that there is only so much that you can accomplish in one day.

Later on, in fall, winter, or the following spring, I would take out the frozen peaches, plums or tomatoes and can whatever it was that I was using them for. It was pretty sweet to have the whole house smelling like peaches, plums or tomatoes when I was canning in the dead of winter.

Freezing some of the raw food product for later canning now is my go-to method to ensure none of the harvest goes to waste. This summer I got in such a bind with so many tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers all ready at the same time that even if I canned 5 or 6 batches a day, I still wasn't getting everything canned quickly enough. I had to resort to freezing some things for later canning. To me, having that extra stuff in the freezer is like having money in the bank.

Dawn