Canning or Preserving Your Garden This Year

[NE GA Pappy]

I was wondering how you are putting up your garden this year. We are leaning a lot more to canning than freezing this year. One reason is I don't want to have to worry about my food spoiling if we lose power for a long time. Another is our freezer is about full of beef at the present time.

We have started canning some pickles. We have put up 22 pints so far, Bread and Butter pickles, dill pickles, and spicy dill pickles. Our cukes are just now really starting to bear, so we will have a lot more in the next 2 or 3 weeks.

Our squash and zukes are over running us with fruit. We have frozen some of them, but we are going to can some tonight or tomorrow.

I hope our green beans do well. They are covered in blooms, but the dad blasted deer are coming thru at night and eating them down. I don't know if I will have any corn this year. Between the deer, coons, and crows, they have devoured my corn.

So, what are you puttin' up this year?

 

[jrickman]

I'm sort of thinking like you. Save the freezer for meat and can as much as possible. Right now though, we're eating it about as fast as I bring it in. We're treating fried squash and sliced maters/cukes as condiments the last few weeks, and have been throwing green beans on the blackstone with some onion and garlic a few nights a week. I've got a mini root cellar set up under a porch on the north side of the house that has managed to hold under 70 through this heat wave, and never dropped under 45 this past winter, so we're going to experiment with putting up taters the old fashioned way this year. I planted enough to get us through Christmas and plan to keep some going in a hoop house through the winter too. Going to experiment a lot with that hoop house and some water barrel heat retention to see what we can keep going in there. If we can keep taters, cabbage, turnips, and some peas going in there, we might add another one.

 

[NE GA Pappy]

Tell me about the water barrel heat retention... are you just warming water and letting the convection keep the hoop house warm longer?

 

[jrickman]

Tell me about the water barrel heat retention... are you just warming water and letting the convection keep the hoop house warm longer?

Everything I have read online says that if you keep a rain barrel or two inside the hoop house or greenhouse, it will typically give you as much as 3 degrees of temperature lag on the downside, since it takes longer to cool down. If you use darker colored ones and put them where the sun can hit them some through the door, seems even better. Given that it also helps with humidity, seems like a no brainer to me. I'm considering dropping in small aquarium heaters as well. I've got a friend out in Kansas who does this in almost a full acre of soft side hoop houses and says his houses that have the setup typically run a full 5 degrees warmer than the ones that don't, until mid-January, when nothing you do other than forced air heating will overcome nature. He runs 30x12 houses with 3 55 gallon black barrels each. He has a fancy system that pumps water from his barn collection system (that had to be permitted/certified by the county where he lives ) into them via his normal irrigation system that he uses in summer when the houses are down. I have a single 20x10, so I'm just planning to put one on each end and have my boys tote water over as needed.

 

[NE GA Pappy]

my late neighbor had a wood burning heater inside his hoop house. He would build a fire and would stoke it real well in the evenings and keep his house pretty warm all night long. I was just imagining that you could take a setup like that, plumb in a coil of copper and a small recirc pump to a couple of 55 gallon drums and really affect the night temps

 

[jrickman]

That gives me a neat idea for an old water heater I have out in the barn about 20 feet from where this house will be. I kept it because I was thinking of plumbing the barn later, but no need for pressure supply on an isolated system, and I can't imagine I'll have too many issues with one end being open if I'm just using it to keep the water around 80 degrees.

 

[B. White]

My wife is canning green beans, purple hull and zipper peas. I bought a used refrigerator a while back and have it in a barn. Keep a few days worth of picked stuff in it and she will can a couple of times a week. She will do a lot more cowboy candy and pickled okra this year. It was gone early last year. She did some pickles, but we still had some left, so cut back on those. Once the lettuce went to seed we started doing a cucumber, onion, tomato side salads plus the normal cucumber and vinegar salad. We also have been using a lot of sliced cucumber with eggs for breakfast.

We have a closet up against the brick of a chimney that stays pretty cool and we have our boxes of potatoes sorted by size and in there. It has a lot of shelf space and will still have some room for sweet potatoes. Our last batch of onions are drying and we have a couple of pantry/closets to hang the bags. I saved all the small onions and dried them for sets to put out in the fall. All of the doors in these areas are louvered, so we will see if everything stays dark and dry.

We have squash froze two ways. One is bags with 4 cups each that has been blanched. The other are smaller supper size bags for two with slices that already have some cornmeal on them and are ready to fry. We have only frozen a few quarts of okra. It has been producing, but with no rain just enough to keep us fed. We finally got some rain and what I picked yesterday was 3X the previous picking, so we will freeze it until we feel we have enough and then pickle some more. We will freeze cut corn and some on the cob. We have just started picking a little of the first I planted.

We are doing a better job of keeping records this year so we don't overproduce in the future, both by how much we plant and also how much we preserve. We are also trying to keep a variety of stuff growing year round that we can eat on.

 

[pjciii]

i can not tell you how bad my mouth was watering for the pickles, cowboy candy and pickled okra.its not that i can't do it is a matter of space in the house. i could get about at Osage and a couple of markets around clarksville. Also a market or 2 between Franklin and Clayton.

 

[Doug B.]

i can not tell you how bad my mouth was watering for the pickles, cowboy candy and pickled okra.its not that i can't do it is a matter of space in the house. i could get about at Osage and a couple of markets around clarksville. Also a market or 2 between Franklin and Clayton.

I haven't stopped at Osage yet this year. I do talk to them occasionally occasionally and they told me that prices are not too bad right now.

 

[NE GA Pappy]

We didn't plant any okra this year. My dad always grows way to much, so I am swapping field corn (hopefully it will make) for our okra. If the corn don't make, I can always swap him some ground beef or a steak or two.

How are you doing the squash that you are putting corn meal on and freezing? Ours always turns out real mushy

 

[leroy]

We have mealed okra and frozen like that with good results, but also canned some by blanching slightly with a little vinegar and water, rinse when ready and to me it tastes like straight out of the garden.

 

[Dustin Pate]

My vegetables are just starting to come in, but I do a mix of canning and freezing. So far I've canned pickles and sweet pickle relish. I'll usually freeze quite a bit of corn, beans, okra. I'll also can some beans and plenty of tomatoes hopefully.

 

[menhadenman]

I need to hammer on some jams... I've been doing the low sugar pectin last few years and it's great for apricots, blackberries, peaches, etc. Really simple and a few cases will belt out PB&Js for the kids all year long.

We've gotten away from pressure canning... hot water bath stuff is so much easier. Canned deer meat with a little garlic and jalepeno is pretty good though.

 

[B. White]

We didn't plant any okra this year. My dad always grows way to much, so I am swapping field corn (hopefully it will make) for our okra. If the corn don't make, I can always swap him some ground beef or a steak or two.

How are you doing the squash that you are putting corn meal on and freezing? Ours always turns out real mushy

This is our first year trying it, but slice it and shake it around in a bag of cornmeal. We use a big rectangular non-stick cheap pan about 3 in deep and add enough oil to put a thick coat on the bottom so nothing sticks. I usually pour it in, move it around and then add more if needed. Spray the sides with cooking spray. Start piling squash in. It doesn't need to be layered. Pieces can lay on each other. Put it in the oven at 350 for about 15 mins. Stir it and put it back for another 15 mins. Let it cool and freeze it.

It isn't really cooked, which is why I guess it doesn't come out as soggy as some other ways. After the first batch we thawed out a pack and put a little oil in the skillet and it tasted fine to us, so we did a few more batches. The woman I saw do it says okra will do good with the same method, so we will try some of that too in the next couple of weeks and test it out.

 

[B. White]

Forgot to add we planted a lot of extra bell pepper, since they are so high now. We slice them and then freeze individually with the vacmaster. We froze some gypsy peppers sliced in half to use for stuffing. She is canning banana pepper rings, cherry peppers and cherry tomatoes. She made 10 jars of pickle relish, but I will use cowboy candy in anything she puts relish in.

 

[B. White]

I think I have frozen about 35 lbs of maters whole so far with some more to do today. We'll probably pull them out as she has time to do more canning and then make big batches of stewed tomatoes.

 

[Paymaster]

I did not do a garden this year. Just not able physically to maintain one. Sucks to be old sometimes.

 

[pjciii]

I haven't stopped at Osage yet this year. I do talk to them occasionally occasionally and they told me that prices are not too bad right now.

not at the market stand. i bet they are making it in their dealings with the hig guys

 

[Lindseys Grandpa]

I am trying fermenting this year for the first time . Got a test batch of cucumbers going now . Gonna can some tomatoes, beans and freeze some other stuff .

 

[NE GA Pappy]

well, yesterday we canned 5 quarts of tomatoes. Today we have 12 quarts of veggie soup just starting in the canner. I bought some frozen veggies from the store to go in with our tomatoes, banana peppers, squash, zucchini and onions. It sure will be good this winter with a big ole pan of cornbread.

I still have a 5 gallon bucket full of squash and zucchini to work up this afternoon.

Our tomatoes are real slow about ripening this year. Hopefully we will get enough to put up 30 or more quarts in the next few weeks.

The blasted deer have just destroyed my green beans this year. I told Meeno the law allows me 12, and by jiminy I am gonna put 12 in the freezer this year. Rascals have about ruined my corn patch, eat all the tops out of my cantaloupes and punkins too.
You can't raise a pea around here. Just as they start to fill out the deer raid them in one night.