Don’t Think That You Can’t

After we worked nearly six hours canning these peaches my wife said: “I’m not giving these to anyone… after all that work!” All that extra syrup will make for some good peach tea. My wife adds it whenever she makes herself a cup of tea.

Summer is over; mere hours gone by. Nothing says the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn better than the final WORS race in Sheboygan. The sponsor’s name keeps changing but nothing beats the roots and inclines of Quarry View and Evergreen Parks on this renown mountain bike course. The colors are usual fantastic.

Ball is a standard bearer in home canning. They have an automatic home canning system. The advantages of the automatic system are that it has a locked top and is insulated. If someone touches it or if it falls over no human harm done. You can only can small batches but that may be preferred for the home gardener without lots of time. It is $300. We saw one up close at Boston Store in Mayfair Mall. The Container Store just had a grand opening at the mall.

The automated home canning system is the equivalent of canning with a pressure cooker, where the jars need not be covered in water. My mother shakes her head at our water bath canning. I don’t think she trusts it, as her mother always canned with a pressure cooker. My wife bought a rack that fits on the bottom of our pressure cooker so she can use it for canning; it wont fit quarts. You have to keep the jars off the bottom of whatever pot you are using when canning. You must follow proven recipes and they vary by process. Ball or the USDA Canning Guidelines are a good resource.

For half the price of Ball’s automated system you can get their electric water bath canner + multi cooker. You have a greater canning capacity with this appliance and it is more versatile. If I had seen this before we bought our traditional Granite 21.5 quart water bath canner I may have splurged for the electric bath canner. But for $14 and some change that water bath canner was a real deal at Farm and Fleet. (or was it Fleet Farm?) Their adds had the canner marked down. The Internet and price listed on the shelf had it marked down, but they didn’t have any out on the shelves. They got one from the warehouse for me. The price was unusually low.

Then we went to Menards and bought the canning tools for $6.

We made peach jam before we canned the peaches in syrup. I did most all the work on this one, and a whole lot of work on our previous endeavor. Ball makes an automated jam maker appliance. The Cranberry Festival is this weekend if you’re looking for cranberry jam.

Making jam was easier. Of course processing, cutting up, fewer peaches was the biggest difference. When the peaches are heated up in the canner you can see how all the peach pieces rise to the top. A lot of people on YouTube have a problem with the peaches floating; it bothers them. I don’t know why. Only ten half pints fit into the old style Granite water bath canner so we just put the extra in a pint jar. The large bottle we did not can. The peaches did not rise to the top. I do an extra test on the seal. I hit the tops with a back of the spoil. On one jar we got a thud rather than a ting so we put it in the refrigerator with the un-canned pint jar. Or you can freeze it.

I would say, outside of buying new jars, it cost us less than $1 for each of those half pint jars of jam; all other costs including energy included. The jars were something over fifty-cents each. My wife realized she has seen them at Good Will quite often.

Jammin….

You need no longer simmer the lids in very hot but not boiling water. We do anyway, not really really hot water but warm, because our first attempt at canning the peach relish was minimally successful. There are many YouTube videos about canning. A large percentage are put out by preppers. And when a prepper finds a change in canning lids… you can be sure many more videos are due to follow.

There are over forty peaches in that box. Those and the smaller ones in the basket I picked yesterday. There are still a dozen or so on the tree but I will not need the ladder to reach those. I picked them all; just some more examples of the work I don’t do, or rather money I am not making. It’s not work if no ones paying you to do it. A sad commentary on modern society?

We lost two branches. The fruit from the first, which never quite completely ripen we made into peach relish. We cooked up some brats with the relish and it was delicious. The apple cider vinegar was a bit strong. I should have used the white vinegar the original recipe called for and it would have been to die for. The peach flavor really comes out nicely when you cook the peach relish with the meat.

Much of the fruit from the second broken branch did ripen and we are turning that into jam. More to come. The better of those we canned just as peaches in sugar syrup.

We will be giving away and eating the best tree ripened fruit. With all the losses I think I can safely say we harvested two-hundred peaches that will end up being consumed by humans in one fashion or another.

Our tree is a “resilient peach” tree. It should grow fine if you’re not to far from the lake and it is shielded from the north wind.

Some are frightened by the supposed dangers in canning your own food. Well, if you fear the dangers of riding your own bike you can get $25,000 of riding insurance covering thousands of fun rides across the country with a $50 annual ride membership to U.S. Cycling.

I receive no financial benefit for mentioning or linking to any of the products I may mention in my posts. If you’d like to support this and my other blogs, or simply my family in general feel free to purchase one of these books. If you should choose to buy one or more of my books, then the years of effort I put in writing them will cease to be years of sloth and will be transformed into a whole lot of hard work.

The Saris Gala is this Friday in Madison. There will be a live auction and Gary Fischer, always the best dressed, will be there.

The $115 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.