Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal

[greybeard]

@misfitmorgan the food safety people would disagree with you about not needing a water bath for canning pickles. I would prefer not to process them as they tend to not stay crunchy when they have been cooked but safety says otherwise.

Agree about the safety part.

Liming cukes in a crock will help a LOT with the crunchy issue.
I use this website quite a bit for canning and freezing garden stuff.
The 'W' and 'P' out beside the links stand for "water bath" and "Pressure canner"
http://www.pickyourown.org/allaboutcanning.htm#pickling
Main menu:
http://www.pickyourown.org/allaboutcanning.htm

Otherwise, it's Ball's Blue Book for me..

 

[babsbag]

I have been using the Ball's Blue Book since I was about 18 years old. I also have an old Kerr book if anyone remembers that jar company. The "Pick your own" is a good site too and I am very cautious about using any recipes off of personal websites as the processing times are seldom verified. Jams and jellies I am a little more lax with as it wasn't too long ago that none of them were processed.

I do use a steam canner instead of the water bath and it was just recently that a big study was done with those and they were given the official thumbs up. I think that it was done at a university in Utah. The USDA is still hesitant to approve them and they say that processing times are unknown using the steam canner.

 

[Mike CHS]

Do we have a recipe Folder somewhere on the forum?

Like everyone else this time of year we are eating squash in all manner of forms from, fried, to baked, to raw in salads. Teresa just made some fried zucchini

https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/ranch-fried-zucchini/468e0613-b816-434f-989d-706a0f771977#!

The garden is looking good and is proving to be the best we have ever had. The blackberry bushes are giving us a couple of cups of berries a day and is really loaded up. The raspberry bushes next to them were thought to have lost all of the buds from a late frost but when I was moving the netting on the bushes I saw that they are loaded up with flowers. I'm guessing that the little bit of berries we got earlier were from an early warm spell and these are later fruiting bushes than I had thought.

I'm learning really quick that I planted them too close together.

The tomatoes are really loaded so we are hoping for a good canning season. We took cuttings last week to plant next month for a fall crop. We keep a couple of plants for fresh tomato eating but we can mostly determinate tomatoes and they will stop putting on fruit here by mid July.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Everything looks great!

 

[Bruce]

I'm learning really quick that I planted them too close together.

Doesn't matter how close or far apart you plant raspberries, they send out underground runners and fill in any space they can including the open space to the side of your carefully planned rows. I have to use the string trimmer to make a path through the plants or most of the berries would be inaccessible.

 

[Mike CHS]

That's what I'm having to do. Fortunately the vegetable rows next to them were never meant to be permanent. I thought raspberries grew in a similar habit to blackberries but obviously I thought wrong.

 

[greybeard]

Blackberries (including domestic thorned and thornless varieties) send out underground runners (suckers) too and if you don't trim them back, will turn into a big unmanageable glob..they just do it more slowly than other vines do.

 

[CntryBoy777]

It looks and sounds like all the hard work in fertilizing it, is really paying off for ya. I remember raspberries growing in Maine, but have never grown them....much prefer the blackberries. I haven't had fried zucchini in yrs...sounds so Good. I still eat fried foods some, but have to stay away from them most of the time. Joyce brought in a mess of purple hulls the other day.

 

[Mike CHS]

I love purple hulls but Teresa doesn't. We harvested about 40 pounds last year and most are still in the freezer till we need the space. I'm going to plant some crowder peas so she can try them and then plant next year if she likes them. We have enough garden that we haven't bought any vegetables for a long time and we have already canned about enough for this winter.

 

[Bruce]

I just noticed something wrong with your garden. There aren't weeds and grass growing everywhere you don't have a vegetable or fruit planted!!!