Canning

We canned:

23 quarts, 1 pints applesauce
13 quarts, 12 pints peaches
24 quarts tomatoes
14 cups grape jelly
10 cups plum jam

I did not intend to do so much. I got carried away when I was picking, I guess. What are you supposed to do once you get home with a bunch of beautiful and expensive fresh produce and halfway through canning you realize it’s about double what you meant to get?

You just keep canning. You’re hot and tired and there is boiling water on every surface in your kitchen anyway. Why not?

Half the applesauce still has peels on – my hand was tired. The apples and peaches together weighed over 80 lbs. fresh. Didn’t mean to pick that much. Anna ate two enormous soft, ripe, juicy peaches while I was picking. She nearly fell over asleep on our way to the car and didn’t make it out of the parking area at the farm before she was snoozing.

Brian and I picked the tomatoes at a different nearby farm on Saturday morning… 48 pounds of them! I was shooting for 30. Turns out I did three batches of 8 quarts instead of just two. There are still a dozen tomatoes on my counter. Yummy!

We had a HAUL of grapes on our vines this year! It is amazing! We went out and picked them all on Saturday too. And the last of the plums. We picked 10 lbs. of the grapes off their stems for two batches of cooked jelly that took FOREVER and got enough leftover plums together for some plum jelly. The plum jelly is very pretty – it’s a dark purple with a few dark pieces of fruit left. It tastes like grape jelly.

Today I took a 3 hour nap. How? I don’t know. I don’t remember. But I have the most amazing, wonderful, loving, generous husband.