Filling the Cellar

Sure feels like fall today.  Wind is blowing, a drizzle coming down and temps in the 50s.  Sends a bit of urgency through me as I try to get the garden done and put to bed.  Today I've gotten the pumpkins and squash in the cellar. 

There are onions and garlic hanging from the rafters, sauerkraut fermenting in the crock, a bushel of apples and some potatoes put down there

The shelves are filling fast with home canned treasures.  My grocery store under the floor!

Beets and rutabagas, kale and cabbage are still in the garden.  Anyone have any advice as to the best way to store beets, rutabagas and cabbage in the cellar?  My cabbages usually dry out to a hollow, dusty ball.  Beets and rutabagas eventually rot, never lasting more than a couple of months. 

Happy harvesting.
.

Canning Leftovers

I have the canner simmering on the stove right now full of odds and ends.  I've been putting our leftovers into freezer bags and throwing them in the freezer.  Today I had to do something with the leftover ham and decided to can it up along with the collection I had in the freezer.  I'm canning everything at 10 pounds for 90 minutes, except the ham which is in pint jars.  They only have to be in for 75 minutes.

I now have turkey, ham, sloppy joe, chili, and turkey and rice soup added to all the jars in the cellar.  Heading down there is like going to the grocery store.  It's like playing store when I was a little girl, only now I can use real food.  (I'm grown up now.)  I feel so blessed, and just a bit giddy.

Doesn't take much.

Be blessed.

Canning Coleslaw

What do you do with your extra cabbage?  I know a lot of people make sauerkraut.  I do like homemade sauerkraut, but for a bit of variety, I also can coleslaw.  I thought I'd share the recipe I got from a blogging friend.

1 medium head of cabbage
1 large carrot
1 small onion
1 teaspoon salt

Syrup:
1 cup vinegar
1/4 cup water
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon mustard seed

Shred together vegetables.  Add the salt.  Let stand 1 hour.  Drain water from vegetables.

Boil syrup ingredients together for 1 minute, cool.  Add syrup to vegetables.  Pack into quart or pint jars and process in a boiling water bath for 20 minutes.

I drain this and add a tad of mayonnaise before I use it.

This year's batch has some purple cabbage mixed in.

Grocery Day

You can tell when the groceries are getting low at our house.  Kids are complaining about no snacks and I make a lot of trips to the cellar to get food.
Living out of our cellar stock isn't really that bad.  Today, for dinner we dined on home grown mashed potatoes with home grown hamburger gravy.  I opened some home canned corn, applesauce, rhubarb desert and pickled garlic scapes.  It was a complete meal made completely from what we've raised ourselves.
So now it's off to town to buy some groceries.  Just wanted to say what a blessing it is to have food in the cellar.  We're working on using up our reserves to make room for this year's bounty. 
God is good.
P.S.  My spinach is up and it's snowing right now!!

Apples

...about 70 lbs. of them.  A blessing of crab apples from a good neighbor.
I have some simmering on the stove.  They are soon to become juice, jelly and sauce.  The apple  juice has seen us through many times when we couldn't make it to town to get groceries. 
It's a good year for apples.  I hope the Harrelson's that I have in the front yard will be ripe soon they will be used for more sauce and some eating apples.
So back to the kitchen I go.  Check in for more installments of "As the Farmer Cans".
;o)

Harvest Time

Apples, squash, horseradish, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, beets, rutabagas, plums......Don't you love harvest time?  I keep quoting "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few"  to my children. ;0)  So many jars to fill, so much time spent in the pantry just loving the look.
Today I'm going to put up some pineapple zuchinni.  Just preserving zuchinni in pineapple juice is supposed to make it taste like pineapple when you use it.  I also like to put up a few pints of horseradish sauce.  My dad loves it. (So do I.)  I like to put up V-8 juice for him too.

The birds are starting to get to the apples, so I think that we need to pick today.  That will be a fun job for the kids.

Not a good shot of the appletree outside the frontporch window.  It is loaded with apples this year.

May your day be blessed.

That Other Season

It's Food Preservation season.  That season between summer and fall.  Very short and busy.
Yesterday I used up the last of the crab apples.  I didn't want anymore apple butter and we have plenty of apple jelly left from last year, so I made up some vinegar.  What I learned?  Crab apples  are drier than regular apples and it takes more of them to make juice.
I also dried a bunch of kale.  What I learned?  Kale dries very fast as compared to other vegetables.  I was able to dry it and package it within three hours.
We have a wonderfully cool morning-50 degrees.  The lawn has grown overnight.  I saw it last night and it looked fine, looked out this morning and it looks like pasture again.
Dear donkey Sadie had something spotted in the field at 5:30 this morning.  She bellers like a truck horn.  I'm sure the new neighbors have already developed a fondness for her. ;)

Dear Sadie

Have a blessed day.