the winter stash

We've been busy canning the fruits of our garden labor. This seems like such a never ending project & I'm so glad to finally put away all of the stuff & have a kitchen again. I am terrible at writing down our totals and then we can never remember how much we made. The stuff on the top shelf is all we had left from 2012. Not bad! Our beans had a rough year. We had a tough time getting them to grow & then when they finally did we would only get a few at a time. We decided we would much rather do a few big pickings and be done versus picking an ice cream pail full every couple of days and dragging it out canning a few jars at a time. I got a little confused when buying tomato plants and ended up with 14 which was a few more than we needed...

 Here's what we put up this year. We started out with 175 empty jars & ended up bringing another box of pints & quarts back - so I'd say our total is very close if not over 200....aye aye aye.

• Carrots (from the neighbor)- 9 pints
• Veg soup (beans, carrots, onion, green onion, corn) - 7 quart
• Green beans (& a couple of yellow beans) - 42 quart
• Pears (3 boxes) - 8 quart & 16 pints
• Peaches (Jessi & I did 5 crates & we kept probably 3-3.5 of them....doing mostly quarts saved us so much time with this) - 8 pints & 21 quarts
• Salsa - 15 pints & 10 quart (umm, that's a lot of salsa - but Erik puts it on everything)
• Pizza sauce (first time trying this) - 8 pints
• Spaghetti sauce - 37 quarts (....hmm some of these totals surprised me...)
• Halved tomatoes - 7 quart
• Applesauce - 4 quart & 30 pints
• Corn - 50 bags in the freezer (12-dozen ears!)
• We also had potatoes & onions which have been harvested.

This is pretty accurate since we also eat stuff fresh during the summer & buy fresh fruit when it's in season. The boys can blow through a can of peaches/pears/applesauce in no time & I use applesauce quite a bit for baking. It's a pretty good deal since all we have invested is our time & the lids (the jars were all give to us!). The boys had fun with the garden this year but I had the most fun pulling it all out the other night. We still have pumpkins & squash out there & I have about a dozen peppers to deal with, but other than that - we're done! [Sidenote: The small herb garden was a huge fail. Oh well]

I spend a lot of time complaining about the garden during the summer because it seems to take over life for a bit, but it's so nice having all of the food on hand for the winter & not having to buy it. Also, I really can't complain as this year I was not in the 1st trimester of pregnancy/have a newborn/working full time like I have been for the past 4 summers so I had more energy!

Taken after declaring the end of canning...then we did 9 pints of carrots.