garden 2015, ed 9: putting up.

"Putting up" is an expression used in gardener talk for preserving the harvest, whether it be drying, freezing, or canning. Growing your own food and learning how to preserve has been quite the adventure for me.  This is my third season of canning and I'm slowly  learning how to do it--but not without failures along the way.  I'm feeling a little more adventurous but rely HEAVILY on google and my canning friends (thanks Laura, Andrea, and Auntie Ree). So far this year, I've canned dilly beans, dill pickles, and whole tomatoes twice.  Those are my go-tos that I know are easy and fool proof.

I have peppers coming out of my ears.   I have jammed, pickled, dried, and frozen them.  I attempted pepper jam, but kind of failed.  It didn't jel.  I wasn't sure if it was supposed to jel before putting it in the jar or not.  I don't think I will attempt this one again until I've tried it with someone who knows what they are doing!

I bought a Sauce Master food mill thinking it would solve all my sauce making problems.

IMG_0902BUT, problem is, I don't know how to use it.  And all it did was separate out the tomato sauce I had cooked into tomato juice and a dried out pulp.  I think I need a bigger attachment to allow chunks to go through.  I'm going to have to do some research and learning about this sauce master and hope that it might come in handy when we harvest berries next year.

Since my sauce master didn't work, I just strained it, and pureed it in my blender. Looking for a good tomato sauce recipe if anyone has one!

All my other Garden 2015 posts:

Edition 1  Edition 2 Edition 3 Edition 4 Edition 5 Edition 6

Edition 7

Edition 8

Mary Hopper6 Comments