Pears

Canning is a lot of work, but the food sure tastes good! When I lived in rural N.D. I had 144 pint jars, and I filled them every year. The first year I canned 144 pints of sweet corn. That was a LOT of work! In following years I branched out: Tomato sauce, soup (carrots, onions, & bell pepper, canned raw in a pressure canner, comes out soup), apple pie filling (apples & cinnamon, cooked to just barely soft, then canned). That last was gone by December!

I don't have a garden here in Spokane. I miss the fresh veggies, but not the work.

 

My mom used to can peaches and apricots from a few trees that my parents had in the back yard. We still have a few quarts that she did in 2004 (my mom died in 2005). Canning is a lot of work, but its worth it for the end result.

 

Yes, preserving your harvest can be a great deal of work, never mind all the weeding and pruning involved beforehand. Inviting some friends or neighbours over for a 'work bee' can be fun, and everybody gets to take something home in return for their efforts. With a production line of sorts, you can get an amazing amount done. It really helps to have everything ready to go - jars washed, sealing wax on hand, and more bags of sugar than you think you'll need. It's almost worth a whole day of prep before you start picking the fruit. One thing we've done with our grapes is to make juice with a steamer. It's an all-weekend effort, but there's nothing like a glass of summer in the middle of winter. I don't see why pears couldn't be juiced, too, and they make fantastic popsicles.

 

I love pears too. Dad's house has 5 large trees and he cans them every year. He's 86 and amazing.

 

Ok, that was pretty strange even by KITH standards.

 

...you can pick the fruit yourself, then turn South and skip Winter completely.

 

I can send you some fruit flies to get the process started. I live in one of the great fruit growing regions of the country. Market factors can make harvesting unprofitable, in which case the farmers shake their crops onto the ground. That happened this year with part of the cherry harvest. What it means for me is a bumper crop of fruit flies. The air is thick with the little buggers.

Tom

 

OMG free cherries? Where was this and how did I miss it?

 

Leelanau County - Michigan's "little finger". We are right across the lake from Door County.

If you want free cherries, the cherry trucks drop a few hundred pounds of them every season onto the street outside my building. It's a steep uphill with a corner at the top, and the cherries slosh out of the tanks.

Tom

 

When I lived on the farm, I had a huge garden and canned nearly every vegetable we used throughout the winter. Typical year it was something like 50 - 60 pints of tomato sauce, 20 - 30 pints each of green beans, peas, and corn, then of course the usual assortment of pickles, sauerkraut, etc. I cheated a bit on the peas and corn though, since our farm was literally on the edge of the "Valley of the Jolly Green Giant" I'd go to the local plant when they were canning, you could score a years supply of fresh peas or corn for a buck or two.
One thing I would recommend to anyone doing their own home canning is to score on a copy of "Stocking Up", it's really the bible of home food preservation http://www.amazon.com/Stocking-Up-Americas-Classic-Preserving/dp/0671693956 while you can be quite safe canning the high acid produce (most fruits and tomatoes), you want to pay attention when dealing with most vegetables, they need to be canned in a steam pressure cannier to get a high enough temperature to kill any potential source of botulism which will ruin anybodies day.

 

I just always used the little canning guide that came with my pressure canner. I never messed with open water bath canning. Even for tomatoes and apples (the only fruit I had enough of for canning) I used the pressure canner. Keeping the pressure right at 15 lbs was tedious (pints of corn require 55 minutes!) because you have to watch the gauge constantly and adjust the fire. And in the end, even home-canned food was nothing like fresh. Later I got a deep freezer, and frozen stuff was better, but considering the work involved, the best brands of commercially frozen veggies were almost as good and a fraction of the cost if I valued my time at more than twenty-five cents an hour.