Apricot/ginger jam - I didn't follow a recipe, just pitted and cooked the apricots, ran them through a food mill, added a bit of really good quality powdered ginger, and just enough sugar to take the edge off. There was so much pectin in the fruit I could stand a fork up.

Yesterday was the first 8 quarts of dill/tarragon/organic unfiltered, un-pasturized cider cucumber pickles. This will never win a beauty prize, but, boy, are they good. The raw vinegar makes the jars all cloudy - but the flavor is extraordinary.

Next will be pickled French Fillet beans - really slender, 1/4 inch dia beans with lots of tarragon.

I'd say the onslaught starts here pretty quick. I've got 2 trees worth of peaches that are a couple days off - then the plums, and apples are really coming close. Seems early, but then the birds will hammer them if I try to leave them fully ripen on the trees. Tomatoes, peppers, onions, and all are now coming in.

It's always fun to see my electricity bill for September - big spike, what with the dehydrator running pretty much non-stop for the month, all the electric elements for canning and prepping...

I've canned 40 pints of cherry sauce for pancakes, waffles, ice cream and yogurt, etc. from farmer's market bing cherries. Also canned 30 pints of peach sauce (like apple sauce except with peaches). My daughter eats it right out of the jar. I also just finished canning 23 pints of peach jam. The peaches were also from the farmer's market. I'll be canning bread and butter pickles next week. I'll also be picking some blackberries down at a Penrose farm and making jam as well...

David, I'm not near experienced enough, and I've spent enough time over on the Harvest forum, that I'm way to paranoid to try to can without and "approved" recipe, but I admire your expertise. The Ginger Peach Jam recipe I used, called for finely diced candied (crystallized) ginger, which I just happened to have on hand.

Karen, that peach sauce sounds pretty interesting! Do you just follow a regular apple sauce canning recipe, and sub the peaches for the apples? I wonder if I could use peaches that have been frozen? I bought a case of peaches last weekend at the farmer's market, and still had a few left over after all of that jam making, so I stuck them in the freezer.

Bonnie

Hi Bonnie,
In regards to the peach sauce, I didn't use a recipe...my kids also can't wait till apple time when I make more apple sauce so I decided to make them a little "peach sauce" as a side dish one night instead and see how they liked it. Both my kids love it! I only add enough sugar to take any real sourness off and add some lemon to help retain color. I started canning some this year and it's been a hit. As I said in the original post, my daughter (17 years old now) eats it straight out of the jar. We also use it as a base for smoothies...and considering using it as a substitute for vegetable oil in baking muffins or tea bread...
I don't see why you couldn't use frozen peaches to make some...just make enough to try...let me know how you like it : )...
Karen

The family picked strawberries at a patch...challenging with a 21 month old more interested in jumping on the plants and very few ripe fruits. Somehow we ended up with a bit over 8 pounds.

My goal was to make Christine Ferber's Strawberry Raspberry Balsamic Vinegar jam. Not sure if I followed the correct recipe, as I used one I found on the internet, but now I have a bunch of expensive syrup; since jam didn't set. I even poured it all back into the kettle, reheated and added pectin. Still syrup...

And the family hates the flavor - even on ice cream...never thought my kids would ever turn their noses to ice cream - UGH.

But, the color is amazing.

As I heated water, on multiple burners, for almost an entire day, I wondered how the canning process becomes cost effective. Thankfully, for the utility bill, I had turned off the air conditioning.

Soon, I'll can crushed tomatoes and salsa.

I forgot, we made 6 quarts of plum syrup as well. Over the years, the most reliable fruit at least we'll get some seems to be plums - so we make plum jam, I attempt to make plum jelly, and when that fails, we got plum syrup. This year, we cut to the chase and just made the syrup - :-).

Bonnie, far be it from lil' ol' me to question the denizens of the Harvest Forum, although you might have picked up from my infrequent posts over there that I do think they occasionally err/stray over into the ridiculously over-cautious - as in advising someone who used a large onion instead of a medium onion in a salsa recipe, they should slap on a hazmat suit, triple bag the jars of salsa, and drive carefully to the dump to throw them out - :-)

In practice, in any of the recipes for jams and jellies and general fruit concoctions, you can substitute the fruit w/o any risk - just like Karen does making 'peach sauce' - and if you wish to be super-safe, add a bit of lemon juice or something.

And for pickles, the tried and true, Harvest Forum Approved method of mixing up a 50:50 solution of vinegar and water will work for pickling just about any vegetable safely. For my tarragon green bean pickles, I'm going to pick several sprigs of tarragon and a dill head, rinse those off and stuff them in the bottom of a quart jar, add some pepper corns and a teaspoon of salt, then pack the jar with rinsed green beans straight from the garden, fill the jar with the solution, and water bath it for 15 minutes. Which is the same thing I do for cucumbers, except I add more dill.

Dear Austinhanasmom,
I'm so sorry to read about your vinegar jam experience. I've certainly had days like that myself and I can't even figure out how to suggest making lemonade out of your lemons for this one.
However, I did want to add that once you have cooked down the sugars in anything you're canning, trying to reheat the concoction and adding pectin (or more pectin) just won't work. When the concoction is heated, the sugar molecules begin separating. As the sugar breaks down in the heating process, the pectin bonds to those sugar molecules as it cools down to create your set jam. Once you've passed this critical point, you can't set it with pectin or anything else. I hope that makes sense...: )
Karen

Well, I have been advised to throw out the pickles I made yesterday. I broke the 50/50 rule.

Currently, the jars are sitting in the refrigerator, while I decide what to do ...

Here is a link that might be useful: Harvest forum thread

You can borrow my hazmat suit. :-).

I couldn't tell - did you process/water bath can them yet? It seemed to me that they had plenty of vinegar, but what do I know? I make stuff like sauerkraut, fermented green chili, and all these good things anyway. I'm sure they'll keep in the fridge just fine, and your odds on getting botulism, if you can them, are about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Yes, they were processed in a BWB for 20 min.

Karen - totally makes sense!! I always appreciate the food science. THANKS:))

In the future, I'll only try jam recipes that include pectin from the start.

WHAT a waste of a weekend...but a lesson was learned.

I hear ya on that waste of time, but lesson learned thing!!!

The whole Lemon Cucumber Pickle saga was pretty frustrating. The jars are in the 'fridge, and we ate two whole pints today. Whatever we don't finish tomorrow, I'll throw out just to be safe. I'll let you know if any of us develop botulism ...

Bonnie, (and all)
I personally think your Lemon Cuke pickles will be just fine. You will know when you open a new jar if they have gone bad. Trust me...

Also, I think prolly the most important thing to remember about canning all veggies is to use the correct method and processing time for the altitude where you live. Silt is at 5438 feet, just a tad higher than Denver, so a pressure canner MIGHT be a better choice if you are going to do a lot of canning. Less apt to over cook the food.

Here's a list of CSU publications; scroll down to Food Preservation and choose your topic. Most are downloadable in PDF format.

Here is a link that might be useful: CSU Extension

I've never considered learning a lesson a waste of time, particularly if you can share those lessons learned on forums such as these! I think these sorts of lessons we might have learned from parents or grandparents if we still lived in an era where we worked on the farm or in the kitchen with older relatives. Unfortunately, our society, for the most part, doesn't work that way anymore. So forums such as these are fabulous for reconnecting with that canning experience. Bravo to us for venturing into this and finding each other to learn from and thank you for being willing to share your frustrations, Bonnie! I just wish my kids were more interested than they are in learning what I've learned while canning. They just hit the road when the kitchen gets too hot (all puns intended) but come back when the final product is ready to consume : )

Hi Irisgirl, good to hear from you again! The fact that botulism is colorless and odorless, is what makes me nervous, but I agree I think the pickles are safe ... for a few days in the fridge anyway. I do use a pressure canner, but follow the instructions for a BWB for jams, pickles, and salsa. The only difference is you don't put the weights on the lid, and I add the extra 10 minutes to the processing time, as the canning book instructs you to do.

Karen, I agree, these forums are such a great resource. I have no relatives close by, and would have never had enough nerve to try canning without the encouragement and advice from the folks on the Harvest forum (even if they are very conservative in their views). Being able to read others experiences has helped me avoid a lot of newbie mistakes ... not all of them obviously, LOL.

Before picture:

The infamous 'Lemon Cucumber Pickles':

It was my oldest son that talked me into learning to make pickles, but he was out enjoying his last days of summer while these were being made.

Bonnie

Oh, don't throw that out. They look wonderful.

I'm in the middle of making my French Fillet Tarragon / dill beans - I hit it perfectly and was able to pull out the whole row of bean plants and get a 3 gallon bucket of green beans, none of them bigger in diameter than a Bic pen. This is a whole, whole lot easier then crawling on my hands and knees trying to keep the plant alive after the picking.

Washed 'em, picked off the stems and flowers, and I'm now letting them dry a bit. Have a dozen qt jars each with a seed head of dill, 4 or 5 sprigs of tarragon, and now I'll add salt and a bit of sugar, stuff the jars, and process.

The other day, I used the search engine on the Harvest forum, and there were something ridiculous like 180 threads on botulism. Given that the incidence from home-canned vegetables is less than what, 20 jars a year, and the millions and millions of jars of stuff being canned every year, and probably 99.99% by people who never heard of the Harvest Forum, is something to keep in mind.

And they always fail to tell you just what they did that caused the botulism, like canning green beans in some old plastic mayonnaise jar, filling it up with hot water or something, skipping the processing part.

Honest - if you have a funky jar of something, you'll know it.

I should add that the Harvest Forum is a wonderful source of recipes, ideas, and information on what works and tastes good, and what doesn't. Plus, as always, fun and entertaining people to meet.

What a beautiful looking batch of pickles!...eye candy...Don't throw them out. I would think a big neighborhood pot luck party would wipe those out really fast... then, if there was a problem of botulism no one would know who's food caused the problem LOL...no, really, they look beautiful and are probably just fine for awhile in the fridge. Jam that doesn't seal is fine in the refrigerator for at least three weeks (recommended time on the pectin box) before you're supposed to start worrying. I would think anything with vinegar AND lemon (which we all know is also an acid) would last even longer than jam that only has a tiny bit of lemon per batch. I hope your son enjoys them ; )...
Karen

I have an apple tree with red fleshed fruit. Unfortunately, the copper tag that had the name of the variety disappeared, and I'm still researching to find out what it is.

Anywho, the apples are ripe, tangy, great flavor. So we made apple sauce with a bucket of them, and dried that in the dehydrator. Then made another bucket of apple sauce, and dissolved the fruit leather in that, added three tablespoons, one each of three different kinds of Penzey's cinnamon, and made 10 pints of apple butter. No sugar, just an intense apple taste.

DD11 helped. DD11 licked the spoons, pots, and so on and is now rather full and went to take a nap.

Congratulations on your apple harvest! I am confused as to why you dehydrated the apple sauce? I'm not a fan of fruit butters, it's a texture thing, but I can't wait to make some applesauce. I like it on the chunky side, with a handful of Redhots thrown in to make it a nice rose color.

I've got 4 pints of Dill Sandwich Slices in the canner right now. This is the recipe I made last year, so at least I know I'm doing it right this time! I didn't have enough National Pickling and County Fair cukes to make a whole batch, so I used a Poona Kheera, and a couple of Chinese Yellows. I used the Chinese Yellows when I made the Lemon Cucumber Pickles this past week, and they tasted fine, but when I took a bite of the couple left over slices today, they were bitter. Is pickling them going to make that worse or better? Guess next time, I should taste them before I put them in the jars, huh?

Bonnie

Bonnie, the 'traditional' way of making apple butter was to put seeded apples in some huge copper pot that hung over the fire place for a few weeks or something, simmering away, turning it to mush, and removing a lot of the moisture. The end result is a really thick sauce - say triple thick apple sauce. By dehydrating half the apple sauce to begin with, it just saves a lot of simmering. My great grandmother used to make it with some enormous stock pot on the back of her stove, and it took at least a week. Some folks now make apple butter in a crock pot and add sugar. This just tastes a whole lot better.

We're having a huge fruit year, the best we've ever had. I'll have several bushels of apples still to come. Now we're working on peaches. Small peaches. Lots of them.

Ah, bitter cucumbers. Cut the ends off before you eat them. In a lot of varieties, and depending on some other factors like when you picked them, the flower end has some weird enzyme that makes it bitter. But then, I can never remember with 100% certainty that its the flower end, .... or the stem end?...., so I just cut both ends off. :-)

David, have you ever made peach butter? Same kind of idea as apple butter but only with peaches...found the recipe a few years ago in one of my canning cookbooks. The process for cooking the peach butter down in my recipe requires that you spread the mixture over jelly roll pans and cook it all down in a 250 degree oven for several hours, stirring every once in awhile. I haven't bought a dehydrator yet but am considering it for preserving apples this Fall. You may have just given me another reason to buy one... I haven't made my peach butter in a couple of years since the process was so time consuming and, not to mention the uncomfortably warm kitchen factor...thanks for the post...

Kareng, this peach butter concept is in the works - a first time to try it. I have a bushel of small peaches that are just now ripening up. I did a trial run yesterday - pitted, cooked, ran the peaches through a food mill. The result is way too watery for the standard dehydrator trays. They're way too small to pit without going crazy, so I need to cook them first and then squeeze the pits out. I will try to chop them up in a food processor instead of a food mill, might work. Or, actually, the oven with a low temp and shallow dish might work just fine, or I can use shallow dishes in the dehydrator.

Will keep you'll posted.....

Update - another 3 gallons of gallons of peaches washed, de-stemmed, and cooked down to two-something gallons, meaning they got soft, and waiting to cool so I can pop out the pits. I dehydrated the first batch into fruit leather, and it tastes pretty darn peachy, but there is this, I dunno, bitter, peach-pit-kinda taste in there that needs dealing with. Something like vanilla might knock it out of there.

Back to work......

Well, I didn't do any canning today, but I did freeze 20 cups of grated zucchini (in 2 cup portions perfect for breadmaking), and 2 quarts of green beans. All of this was courtesy of fellow gardeners at the community garden. I think everyone feels a bit sorry for me, since I got such a late start on my plot, so everyone keeps offering up their extras.

I'm extra super busy with work and not having much time to play lately. I have a new nephew who was born at the beginning of August and have another nephew due early October.

Bonnie, keep the pickles in the fridge and they should be fine :-) If they feel slimy then toss them, but I wouldn't worry. Bitter cukes will probably not improve with pickling, they would still be bitter. Sorry!

David & Karen, Let me know how the slow oven cooking method works out because I've been thinking about trying it too.

David, try almond extract with the peach leather - they go fantastic together!

Austinhanasmom, Christine Ferber's jams can take a lot longer to set than traditional pectin-added jams, sometimes at least 4-6 weeks before you get a set. Don't give up! If it still doesn't set you can always use it as a glaze on pork roast or chicken.

About a month ago, Sunflowers had apricots and peaches on sale for $0.67/lb. I made 4 pints of apricot jam and a dozen 1/2-pints, two 4-oz jars and a pint of peach jam for cold mornings. I have berries in a neighbor's freezer for later jamming. I have tons of recipes I want to try but have a hard time convincing the rest of the household to try the "weird stuff". I'm planning a trip out to Miller Farms in sept/oct so will hopefully be canning more then.

Happy canning!

Jen

Just canned 17 pints of strawberry jam yesterday. My daughter used the little extra to make homemade pop tarts and had the rest of the little bit on buttermilk biscuits last night. Fabulous flavor...Costco had a real good price on strawberries when we went Monday. Also considering making orange marmalade...never made it before...any hints or thoughts on that? Also wondering if Meyer lemons would make a good marmalade...saw a good price on those at Whole Foods...still getting up energy to do my bread and butter pickles. They take so much work. Jams and sauces are so easy I've gotten spoiled.
Dafygardennut, the slow cook oven method for butters works well it's just time consuming, heats up the kitchen, and requires that you're home multiple hours to babysit the mixture. I'm a taxi mom beginning around 3:00 most days so I really need to start early to make the mixture and then can it all...I don't have the space to store a big batch of peach butter to can another day...

Just pulled the last 3 of 12 pints of peach butter out of the canner, and they are cooling, and the swamp cooler is on because its a freakin' 92ºF here.

I made peach fruit leather from slightly over 2 gallons of peach purée, and I added that to a gallon 1/2 of other peach purée, heated that up, let it sit over night for the leather to soften up, stirred it all up this morning, and canned it. Rather thick it is.

Peachy it is, also. I can't describe the color, sort of grey, isn't very attractive. Tastes great, and the kids like it, so we'll see how it mellows out.

These were from 'cling' white peaches that really weren't all that flavorful. I still have a tree of bright orange free stones that should be ripe in a few weeks. Those will be dried, maybe a chutney.

I asked over on the harvest forum about pickling onions, and was told I needed hunert' percent vinegar. Which would make them inedible and peel the enamel off my teeth. Oh well.......

David, if you really want to pickle those onions, you had better keep that hazmat suit :-) - I am envisioning the noxious fumes I had when I pickled garlic.

There are two recipes in the new Ball book, Onion pickles which is pearl onions, canning salt, sugar, mustard seed, horseradish, vinegar, hot peppers and bay leaves - this would be more of a spicy bread & butter type pickle; or there is Vinegared Red Onions which just has red onions, garlic and red wine vinegar. The onion pickles has the option ro make them "Sour Onion Pickles" by omitting the sugar and bay leaf.

In any of the pickles you can add or remove as much sugar as you like to counter the vinegar, but you really do need to use all vinegar in this case because of the low acidity in the onions (they have a lot of water); but you can use any vinegar you like as long as the vinegar is 5%. I think the red wine vinegar would be much mellower than straight up white vinegar.

Jen

I'll probably pass on pickling these green onions, its probably one of these things that the taste I have in mind isn't what I'd end up with - I'm after that taste you get with a finely shredded fresh onion thats left to marinate in vinegar and spices, and then you eat it along side a curry, or on a hot dog, or something like that. I should just make a whole bunch of that and keep it in the fridge.

More like a 5-minute pickle then.

In an attempt to control the fruit fly population in my kitchen (yuck), I canned salsa and hot sauce yesterday.

I used too many cherry tomatoes in the salsa and the lemon flavor was overwhelming. Thankfully, I did not waste another Saturday canning, as I figured out that if I add a hot pepper or two to the opened jar, flavor is better balanced - YEAH!!

The hot sauce recipe, no tomatoes, was not necessarily supposed to be canned, but the pH was 4, and the temp was 190 degrees, so I processed away. This sauce is not one that I would slather onto a taco, but it should be good for cooking. In search of a tomato based taco sauce I think...

Since I have 60 tomato plants, I know my recipe search will soon yield FANTASTIC canning results...what a journey!!

I must admit, I am a bit burned out on the whole tomato gardening. I toiled for MONTHS, eight in fact, and now that the fruits are ripe, I've lost interest. What's up with that??

"MFS", austinnhanasmom. 'Mater Fatigue Syndrome. The disease progresses from your current burn-out, to throwing them against the fence, and the final stage of the disease is putting grocery sacks full of tomatoes in the UPS guy's van, when he isn't looking.

There is some discussion in the medical literature over the best cure, with results varying widely.

A BLT will often to it, if its good bacon. Or, and this is my favorite, a huge bowl of chunked up tomato, basil, salt, shredded onion, and diced pepper, sprinkled with loads of parmesan, and snorked down with crispy Italian Bread. Snaps me right out of it.....

I'm looking at several bushels of green tomatoes on the vine right now, so I feel your pain.

Yippee! Spotted my first half ripe cherry tomato on one of my 38 plants today. Hopefully, I too, will be in the same boat as you all...
By the way, a friend told me a great trick for getting rid of fruit flies...quickly...Put a quarter inch of red cider vinegar in the bottom of a quart sized canning jar (hopefully you have one or two left after all your canning). Anyway, you then get a piece of 81/2 x 11 paper (preferably scrap so you're not wasting a clean piece on the @#$%ing things. Twist the paper into a cone shape where there's a pretty small hole at the point end (small enough for the flies to go only one way...in) and tape it into that cone shape. Stick the cone small end down into the quart jar until the paper fits snug inside the jar. The flies are attracted to the vinegar, go down the funnel and are too stupid to figure out how to get back out. Works REALLY well! It's also really cool watching the stupid things trying to get out. I rid my kitchen of ALL the fruit flies in two days that came home with the farmer's market peaches. I have also placed it right next to my compost on the kitchen counter and I no longer have ANY fruit flies around my compost bin when I open it up to put food scraps in.

David and Karen - THANKS!!

I picked a bunch of paste tomatoes today to make tomato based taco sauce.

I will prevail with the tomatoes and will definitely build the fruit fly trap when my 4yo is up tomorrow. He LOVES stuff like that.

I have a wine glass, a bit of red wine, with saran wrap (holes in it) covering it but I doubt I've caught any fruit flies. Seems I catch more in the glass of wine I'm drinking...

Happy Gardening -

I do a lot of jams, jellies and butters along with some fruit and some pickles. Don't can like I used to with just the two of us.

Raspberry Jam
Strawberry jam
Strawberry Rhubarb Jam
Nanking Cherry Jelly
Nanking Cherry Jam
Pie Cherry Jam
Jalapeno Jelly
Peach Jam
Plum Jam
Huckleberry Jam
Serviceberry Jelly
Chokecherry Jelly
Elderberry Jelly
Apple Jelly
Apple Pie Jam
Apple Butter - made in the oven in largest roaster for about 3-4 hours cooking down in the winter. I first make and can applesauce.
Pear Butter - done same way
Orange Marmalade - a lot of work but husband's favorite
Canned zuchinni bread and butter pickles, Bing cherries and pickled beets so far. Will do pears and peaches later and dill pickles and probably sweet pickle relish.
Bonnie I would like to try the Carrot Cake Jam recipe.

WOW margaretmontana - toast must be amazing at your table!!

I canned some AMAZING Five Pepper Ketchup today, found the recipe here, - can't wait to have tacos now!! My fingers are burning from the spices but what a flavor!! No more store bought hot sauce for me.