It's the 30th of August in Ohio and there is a nip in the air. We are getting ready to enter into my favorite time of year. The garden is winding down...I have 36 pints left to fill with tomatoes and then all of our jars are filled. This has been a bountiful year for us. Corn, broccoli, cauliflower, and chopped green peppers and zucchini have been frozen. We have canned carrots, green beans, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, peas, relish, corn, ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and BBQ sauce.
We have been canning (putting food by..as they put it in the "old days") for years. I used to use the water bath method until my mother-in-law, Irene, taught me how to use her pressure canner. What a difference that made! I went from 3 hours of boiling 7 of quarts green beans to 25 minutes! After getting over my initial fear of the pressure canner blowing up I became a pro. You just have to follow the directions and use common sense. The shortened times allowed me to do more than twice the usual canning in a day.
My instruction book has taken a lot of abuse over the years, so this year I copied the necessary pages and laminated them. Now I have my handy, dandy, 2 sided chart hanging on the front of my frig for easy access. Once you have a system down, you can can a lot in just a few hours. And the feeling of seeing the cupboard full of food that my husband grew and I preserved is really quite satisfying.
Out in the barn hanging from the rafters are bags of onions my husband harvested at three different times. He dried them on boards and then he put them in net bags I got from the store. There are still butternut squash, watermelon, and honeydew melons to be picked. We are getting zucchini about every day...still...and I have made bread, mock apple crisp, fried, baked, and casseroles out of them. I even made up a side dish putting buttered french bread slices in the bottom of a pyrex dish then mixing cubed zuchinni, onion, green peppers, eggs, and cheese before pouring it over the bread. Topped with yet more cheddar and baked at 350 for an hour or so...it was delicious (if I say so myself) and the bread absorbed the natural liquid from the zucchini and toasted on the bottom.
All in all we have had an amazing harvest. Like everyone else we live week to week and having all of this food will save us a ton of money in the months to come. We have truly had a "Garden Victory"!!
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