Another year for canning is upon us and we had a window of time to do it.
We love to make homemade pickles, in fact I have not purchased a pickle jar for several years.
We go to the local farm center and order up the cucumbers, buy the dill and find the jars.
This year the sale was buy one bag of cucumbers and get one free, so we ended up with many more than planned.
Oh and we got a large bag of already peeled garlic to add to the pickle jars.
The way to make really good pickles is to put the cucumbers in a cooler and cover them with ice overnight.
It not only gets them cold, keeps them fresh and really nice.
We have learned the hard way to do them close to the same day we buy them.
One year we had several boxes in our garage and they went fuzzy before we did anything with them.
Not any more. It is a job worth doing as fast as possible.
And not only that we did it all outside.
It was quite the challenge to find the lids to our existing jars so we purchased more jars that were complete.
I guess a lot of people are canning these days.
We ended up with 46 jars of pickles and 2 of the garlic.
Some of them did not seal properly so we ended up water bathing them for extra heat.
My husband had figured out a crab cooker works really well with the canning pot.
Now we must let them rest for 8 weeks before we can open them up and see how they are.
We also did a bunch of cherries a few weeks ago.
I pitted them and then we froze them in bags. They are really good in water, or just to eat.
I love to do these kinds of things, we don’t have a lot of storage space but it is worth the time and effort.
Another year for canning is upon us and we can mark off that item now.