Yvonne and I attended a class Friday on the Basics of Home Canning. It was in Monroe, NC, just down the road a ways. Sally McNeil of the NC Cooperative Extension Service (thank you, NC State University!!!) led the class. It was really fantastic. We learned LOTS and both feel like we can preserve foods using both the water bath and pressure canning methods. Below, I'm putting up carrots, a low-acid food requiring pressure canning. Sally said if we could put up carrots, we could can anything. Cool!
As part of the class we each got the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. It's got everything you need to know in there. The most important thing? Never skip steps. The teacher also recommended that we buy a new book every 4 or 5 years since knowledge of food science changes. But other than that it's a piece of cake.
Since Y and I were a couple, we agreed to donate one of our Blue Books back to the class. Sally gave us some extra goodies in exchange, including some liquid pectin and some half-pint jars and lids from Ball. We also got a funnel, a magnetic lid wand, two jars of jelly we canned during class, and a previous class's carrots.
And most certainly, here is proof of our new-found canning knowledge. I think this makes us Certified Canners or something.
I've started some more plants from seeds: another squash plants, as the squash bugs have pretty much killed what was in the boxes; 6 cucumber plants; and 3 Blue Lake bush plants, since those are really struggling this summer. Hopefully all will do better with mulch in boxes 1 and 2 now, and since we're using Dipel for the bugs. Yvonne has some basil growing in pots to send home with Rebecca at the end of the summer so she can start growing some in Florida.
A view of some of our tomatoes in our teepee-style bamboo stakes, and some of our beautiful okra plants (yippeee, I'm gonna have me some OKRA, horray!!!).
An okra blossom. Beautiful, ain't it?
The blossom with an okra next to it.
And yeah, baby, some Clemson spineless coming up and ready to be eaten, OR canned and put on the cupboard shelf for the winter.
~T
1 comment:
Fatastic! I love what you guys are doing. We can as well and it is so great to have. We also use a vacuum sealer and freeze as well. I find Freecycle can be a great resource for getting free stuff. Haven't looked for canning stuff on there, but it could be worth a try.
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