The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

We went to Yakima on our yearly pilgrimage for wineries, minor league baseball, and of course, fruit stands. We came home with way too much produce to deal with, including two boxes (20 lbs each?) of tomatoes. They sat on the counter for about a week, and finally we got motivated and got to work on them. We canned 15 quarts and 12 pints of stewed tomatoes, and what didn’t fit in our two huge kettles for stewing, we decided to dry in the new (to us) dehydrator. I am hoping this method works a little better than last year’s tomato drying experiment.

One again we found ourselves with a barrel of apples to process this year.  The blessing (and curse) of apples is that they can actually sit around for awhile.  This means that its easy to put off getting to them and begin to stress out and/or avoid them. Once we faced this procrastination we decided to do some canned apple pie filling, which we’ve done several times before.  We’ve always enjoyed it and used it fairly quick, but we also seem to be a little cursed by it.  Last time we did it we had problems ranging from broken jars to not enough head space.  This year that pattern continued.  We were using some very old canning jars and had two crack in the water, which of course leads to a huge mess of apple pie filing and broken glass in boiling water.  I don’t really know why this happened since generally in my canning experience its fairly rare.  Additionally our apple peeler/corer/slicer broke unrepairably.  After this we decided to switch to applesauce for the rest of the apples, which is easy enough.  Unfortunately, one of us (he shall remain nameless), forgot that you can’t really process the jars while the applesauce is cold (i.e. straight from the fridge) which led to even more jar breakage.  Overall we did manage to successfully can 6 quarts of pie filing and 4 pints of applesauce, but I have a feeling that next year I am going to procrastinate even more when it comes to processing any apples we acquire.