SLIPPING INTO SEPTEMBER

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Canning & Preserving, Fall

Tags

apples, beets, canning, cherry pitter, cherryplums, dill pickles, pickles, preserves

TWO BODIES OF WATER AWAY TO THE WEST are the Olympic mountains and on the south side of Mt. Jupiter there is a week-and-a-half old fire, about 1,100 acres so far. Since the Labor Day weekend we have had smoky, red sunsets. As we move towards fall, the sun sets a little earlier every day; this week around 7:30 p.m. Summer is so short!

WE CAN, CAN, CAN, BECAUSE WE CAN!

Speaking of the Labor Day weekend, my neighbor and a friend of hers spent the weekend canning. They filled 210 jars with blackberry jam, tomato salsa, bruschetta topping, dilled green beans, pickled beets, and more. On Friday they offered me some of the 25 pound (!) bag of beets that they had bought, so I made pickled beets too (six pints).

My friend Betty makes dill pickles. Tom says they are the best he has ever tasted, so Betty gave me the recipe given to her by a friend around 1970. Nothing like sharing recipes and canning to cement friendships. We went to the Pike Place Market on Saturday of the Labor Day weekend and bought around eight pounds or so of pickling cukes. I am pretty sure that I had never made dill pickles.

These are the finished pickles, ten quarts worth. Betty says not to open them before Thanksgiving. Time will tell whether or not I succeeded in matching Betty’s pickles.

CHERRY PLUMS! One of our daughters has several old cherry plum trees growing on the property where she lives. Two years ago they were rather plentiful and none last year. Last week we managed to gather up a little over four pounds (we were a week too late for the best ones).

This quirky looking gadget was a birthday gift this summer from one of my sisters. I forgot all about it when I pitted pounds of cherries in July and August. But I remembered to try it out with the cherry plums. The pitter sits atop a narrow mouth jar and is fixed in place with a screwband; the pits drop into the jar. Worked pretty well.

Cherry plums make some of the best preserves when flavored with star anise, vanilla bean, and a couple of fresh bay leaves. The yield was seven half-pints. Since the pickings are slim these preserves are highly coveted.

This year the apple harvest from our tree was a paltry 6.5 pounds. Just enough to eke out eight half-pints of apple butter over the weekend.

Pears will be filling jars this week in some form and probably tomatoes too, since they are finally ripening.

GARLIC & PICKLES

22 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Canning & Preserving, Vegetable garden

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

garlic, harvest, pickles

AFTER 18 DAYS AWAY FROM HOME we returned to garlic ready for harvest and zucchini ready to be pickled.

GARLIC HARVEST was later than normal but there were still plenty of green leaves left on most of the stalks to insure good wrappers when dry and only one variety had started to fall over. I harvested Inchelium (26), two types of hardneck (50), an unknown softneck variety from friends (28), and a dozen Itlaian White, which after three generations are finally to golf ball size. Still left to harvest is Chesnok, (another hardneck type) that looks like it needs another week or so. I lay the garlic on the potting bench for about two weeks to cure before completing the cleaning and trimming for storage. The potting bench is on the north side of the house and protected from rain by wide eaves.

Here’s a look at the vegetable garden; the lettuces and zucchini plants seem to be most vigorous, but everything is doing pretty well in spite of the mixed-up weather.

This is where the zucchini pickles begin. Yesterday I picked enough zucchini from three plants to make the first batch of Bread & Butter style pickles. The variety is Costata, a firm fleshed, ribbed type that held up well for pickles last year.

Step one is the sliced zucchini and onions, salted and covered with cold water and ice cubes for two hours.

This little slicer is the simplest form of a mandoline and is still sharp after forty years of use and a must have to make quick work of slicing zucchini and onions.