Canning Time!

Whew, this is turning out to be a very busy week! I've been canning every day!

Our Asian pear tree set a ton of fruit this year; while the fruit isn't as large as last year, it is more abundant. I've picked approximately 1/2 of the tree which yielded 55 pounds of pears! I'll pick the rest of the tree in the next week.

So far, I've processed about about half of the harvest. I've made 8 pints of pear butter and 8 pints of pear pickles. I have another batch of pear pickles to put up tomorrow, which will yield another 8 pints.

This leaves about 1/2 the pears I picked still left to process - most of those will be pear butter. The pears I pick next week will be brandied pears, pears in syrup and possibly some pear mincemeat.

I also purchased 33 pounds of mixed yellow squash, zucchini and cucumbers from a friend who has a large garden, and today I worked to turn that into hot pickled veggies. I added some banana peppers and sweet peppers from our garden, some cauliflower and carrots I got at the store, some jalapeno peppers, garlic, onion - yum. I made 17 quarts of this today and it is still being processed as I type this evening.

Pictures will post soon, I've taken them but haven't had a spare minute to upload them.

More soon!