Category: canning

That Time of Year Again

In the fall of 2023, we harvested six bushels of Yukon Gold and six bushels of Kennebec potatoes. They are wonderful and big and tooooo many!!!

Crates and crates of potatoes and I’ve been canning them too.
The bin in the floor is full of white Kennebec potatoes. I’ve been canning and freezing them!
There are twelve milk crates in the floor stacked full of the Yukon Gold. We’ll use some of both the Yukon Gold and the Kennebec for seed potatoes. Hope maybe we can sell some too.

We have an underground cellar where we store all of our canned goods and potatoes. The temperature from fall through early spring ranges from 40* to 50* in the cellar. When the outside temperatures rise above 70* for more than a couple weeks the cellar warms slowly as well but usually never more than 65*. The warm temps will cause the potatoes to sprout and shrivel. We save a bushel for seed potatoes of each type each year unless we need to buy new seed.

It’s during this time that I can some of the potatoes. I dice some for canning. I slice and chunk some as well for canning. This past week Eddie and I used two apple crates full and canned 16 pints of chunks, 16 pints of sliced and 24 pints of diced potatoes. My pint jars are wide-mouth, and eight pints will fit in my pressure canner at one time. I processed them by filling each jar to the rim, then filled it with hot water after adding a teaspoon of salt to each jar. Then I placed lids and rings on the jars after wiping off the rims of each jar. Each canner was processed at ten pounds of pressure for thirty minutes.

This year I also tried my hand at freezing my own French fries. The cost of those things in the freezer case at the grocery store is unreal!!! They were easy to process. All I did was peel and wedge the potatoes, parboiled the wedges for five minutes, dipped them out of the boiling water into a large bowl of iced water, chilled and laid them out to dry on paper towels. While on the paper towels I blotted them dry, dropped them into my vacuum sealer bags and sealed them. They’re in the freezer, all twelve bags! We like fries and the kids do too, so I think I’ll do another 15-20 bags since we have the nice potatoes.

2024 French fries

You might ask “why, would you can them?” I do it for the convenience and more importantly I hate throwing out good food. When potatoes sprout and shrivel, they’re nasty!! Normally, it would take 35 – 45 minutes to cook a pot of potatoes; canned potatoes are fully cooked. All you have to do is heat them up and when we’re super busy outside on the farm until it’s dark, I want to fix a dinner that’s no trouble and quick.

In the winter months, I spend more time in the house and kitchen and have plenty of time to cook and experiment with different meals. From mid-spring through late fall the farm keeps both of us busy from daybreak to dark. During those days a quick nourishing meal is a must and I’m usually too tired to spend time in the kitchen. If last minute guests arrive (and they do in the country) you’re covered. If you have a summer draught and the garden doesn’t fulfill our needs, the bounty from previous seasons has got us covered.

I can’t can all of them!! We will use a couple bushel between now and next harvest. What’s leftover will hopefully sold to friends and neighbors wanting to have their own gardens or can them like I did.

Canned Tomatoes To Pasta Sauce

Summer 2022 was not as productive in our garden as we would have liked due to late frosts and freezes and draught late. We planted about twenty different tomato plants, Mr. Stripey, San Marazano and some Virginia sweets. They didn’t produce like they normally do but I did get enough to can 15 jars of Mr. Stripey. They are normally a very large yellow with red streaks and very little acid. Neither of us can tolerate the acid in tomatoes but these do the trick. 

Canned whole Mr. Stripey tomatoes.

I don’t use a lot of canned tomatoes except in soup, but I do like to have barbecue sauce, pasta sauce and pizza sauce on hand. A few weeks ago, I brought the fifteen pints of canned tomatoes out of the cellar and made pasta sauce. 

It’s really simple to make using Mrs. Wages Pasta sauce mix. I poured all of the tomatoes in a large stainless-steel pot; added some finely diced onions and pressed garlic cloves, salt and pepper and heated to boiling. I stirred it several times to make sure the tomatoes didn’t stick. Then I ran it through my food mill into another stainless-steel pot. From here I followed the instructions on the Mrs. Wages envelope which meant pouring the package into the pot of strained juice and put it back on the stove stirring frequently and letting it cook down until it was the perfect thickness. This left me with ten perfect and delicious jars of pasta sauce.

Homemade pasta sauce can be adjusted to your taste as it’s cooking. When I make a pasta dish, I usually add some meat such as ground venison cooked thoroughly.