After the strawberries, I moved on to can a small batch of pickled beets. With no pressure canner, and limited freezer room, pickling seemed the way to go. I ended up with 6 pints and 1 quart. I thought it would be nice to have some family serving sized jars, as well as a couple of larger jars for parties and such. I should have had two quarts, but one of the jars burst in the canner! Very disconcerting and alarming, that. It’s just a small batch, but the beets look so pretty and festive in their little jars, I think the will make a nice addition to holiday dinners.

I then brought in the saddest garlic harvest in the history of cultivating garlic. In case you were wondering, the answer in no, garlic really won’t grow in the shade! It was a new bed and when I planted the garlic, in the fall, it was fairly sunny. In retrospect, I’m thinking the distinct lack of leaves had a lot to do with that illusion. My perfectly pathetic harvest is currently hanging to dry. Bah.

Next came the peas. Two quarts of snow peas and 5 pints of shelling peas, frozen, again due to a lack of pressure canner. Much like my feelings with the strawberries, I felt like I really didn’t take full advantage of this harvest. At this point I just kept telling myself that if I managed to put up a little bit of many things, then it would add up to quite a lot of food in the end.

If I felt like I failed on the strawberries and peas, well then, I surely made up for it with blueberries! First we did some picking, of the high bush verity at a friends house. That resulted in 5 quarts of berries, only…I had another in-canner explosion. Two in a row after never having it occur before. It was certainly starting to feel a little unnerving. I was starting to get jumpy anytime I was near hot glass. And, oh, all of those hundreds of berries so painstakingly picked, just wasted in a mess of glass and water. Ugh! I’ve since spoken to a friend about it, who mentioned that sometimes people just get a bad batch of jars. Since both of the exploding jars were from the same batch and I’ve not had a problem since, I’ve decided to chalk it up to that.

Blueberries Part II:
We got a fabulous price on bulk low-bush (wild), no-spray blueberries from a local farm. When compared with the price of even the most inexpensive fruits in winter, it was a deal, and wild blueberries are arguably the healthiest fruit around. Eager to take full advantage of this opportunity (and also to get the full discount), we ordered 100 lbs. Let me tell you, I was so, so grateful that My Molli happened to be up for a visit the week that we picked these up. It takes a lot of time and effort to get 100 lbs of blueberries processed before they start to go bad! We had many nights, up until 3 or so in the morning, just scooping up berries and plopping them into jars….letting them boil while we readied the next batch. Thankfully, Molli is the best kind of company at any hour of the day and we made it through it all laughing and talking and having a grand old time.

Final tally on the blueberries?

3 gallons, 8 quarts in the freezer

6 pints of syrup

24 quarts, 3 pints of straight berries in water

23 pints of jam

While I subscribe to a baby feeding philosophy, very much in line with the one expressed here, I had all of these berries! And knowing that they were going to last a while, I decided to make a small batch of blueberry puree for the wee one. I figure that at the very least it will be good for tossing in the diaper bag or for when we are eating something that might not be babe appropriate. So, 12 bitty jars of blueberry puree.

And a very new thing for me…thanks to a listing on Craig’s list for a free food dehydrator, we a have a jar of dried blueberries to add to trail mixes and granolas in the future! Yum!

With the advent of high-tech food drying technology, I decided that was the way to go with our surplus of beans (green, yellow, purple, and speckled…copious amounts from both our own gardens and our CSA). Dehydrating has it’s up sides. It doesn’t take any freezer space, for one. In fact it barely takes any space at all. The dried foods take up a teeny-tiny portion of their original mass. On the other hand, chopping and blanching and arranging bushels of produce and then only walking away with like a quart of food, is a pretty big let down. In theory, things like beans should resume there original size when re hydrated. However, my kids have deemed dehydrated beans “the best snack ever” so I doubt that many (any?) will ever make it that far. But let’s face it, my kids are begging for green beans, what am I going to do, say no?? No, I think that my job in this situation is to just shut up and keep on processing beans.

So far I have around 2 quarts of mixed dehydrated beans, with more to process today. I’m thinking of doing a bunch of other veggies too and making a snack mix.

To date I have processed 17 pints of salsa and 11 quarts of peaches…with a table full of tomatoes and another big box of peaches just waiting for my attention this week. Oh yeah, and those two big sacks of apples, must get to them too…

There are a couple of jars of pesto in the freezer, just leftovers from whenever I happened to be making it. I had plans for two big batches of both traditional pesto and purple pesto, but my food processor died the very week that I came home with my two big bags. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to it before the frost gets to the plants.

Between this and the sewing and knitting (did I even mention that we started school work again??), and trying to get the house and gardens all set for winter, well, I’ve rather had my hands full!