With the aid of a library book and some spare time on a Saturday afternoon, I just canned my first ever batch of anything!
I headed out to the blueberry farm early Saturday morning, and was able to pick eight pounds of blueberries in about an hour. From the there I went the farmers market and bought cucumbers and onions for pickling.
As this was my first attempt at canning, I learned a lot about the setup and having everything in the right order during the first batch. After that, it seemed to go quite smoothly. It just takes a little time.
Of course I will withhold total excitement until after I taste this stuff in the coming weeks and months. But the process is logical. Very much like a chemistry project where everything must be done in the proper order and at the precise moment (although with canning I think the timing is a little more forgiving). The tally for the weekend: 10 pint jars of blueberry pie filling and 4 pint jars of pickles.
Yay! What a wonderful milestone, right?! It might "ruin" you though....I won't really eat pickles from the store anymore....there is just not comparison.
ReplyDeleteMatt has done most of our canning since we started a number of years back, but just last year I did my first completely solo batch and I was so satisfied by the process.
Good work! I've never picked blueberries or even had a really fresh one. But, hopefully in a few years I'll have some on the bushes in the front yard.
You're in for a treat once your blueberry bushes establish themselves. Of course nothing "fresh from the store" compares to "fresh from the source," but blueberries are intoxicatingly sweet. And the best ones I think are wild blueberries. Perhaps I am just being nostalgic, but the best blueberries I remember were in the woods near my boyhood home in Upper Michigan. Little knee-high bushes produced the sweetest berries. The farm I went to this weekend was more like a vineyard with rows of 6 & 7 foot tall bushes. Still, waaaaaay better than the store, and not picked last week and shipped from wherever.
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