I come from a family of gardeners & preservers. We like to grow food, preserve it, & eat it! It’s about that time in the garden to start saving produce for a colder day, so I thought I’d talk about preserving the harvest. My dad’s grapes are also ready & I’m going to show you how I made them into juice for jelly. As you’ll see below, this has been a light year for me in the preserving department!
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Preserving the Harvest
My mother’s parents always had a huge garden {mini farm} in their back yard. For some reason, my Pepaw always liked growing peas & beans & gourds. Oh – and potatoes! I’m sure he grew other things, but those are the things I remember the most. He would always let the kids dig the potatoes out by hand after the row was turned with a hoe. I thought this was a load of fun, but he just didn’t want his potatoes cut with the hoe. ; ) These kind of memories are what drive me to continue preserving the harvest!
Jars are the number one thing on my list when it comes to preserving produce & storing dry goods. I prefer a quart sized jar for canning tomatoes & dill pickle spears. Smaller pint & half pint jars are perfect for sweet pickles & jelly – especially for giving them as gifts! I store flour, sugar, rice, dry beans, etc. in the larger half gallon jars to help keep out ants & bugs.
Two summers ago, I put up a ton of vegetables, both canned & in the freezer. This included squash, corn, cucumbers & tomatoes. My grandmother & my husband’s grandmother kept me busy all summer long!
My husband’s grandmother has brothers that are all farmers & always tip here off to awesome produce deals at the local farmer’s market. They had a farmer friend that let her {and me} pick over their already picked tomato field. My goodness – there were tomatoes everywhere! We filled every nook & cranny of her vehicle with tomatoes. I had plenty to put up on my own, but she went back several times & managed to can over 100 quarts of tomatoes! There is one jar of crushed tomatoes left in my pantry, but most are tomato juice. Those tomatoes were tasty & juicy!
I made right at 10 cookings of pickles – sweet, dill, & hot – which is quite a process from start to finish. This picture is only showing maybe half of what I canned because most of the sweet pickles went to other people.
You can see a few peaches hiding in there as well. There was also a watermelon to the right because every time I go to pick up produce for canning, the farming brothers always add a few extras!
Jellies & pickles make awesome gifts at Christmas time! Last Christmas I use some green Ball jars to hold scented bath salts for the ladies. My husband is a hunter & he likes to make jerky in our dehydrator, so that made great gifts for the guys – although the gals like it too!
Last summer I put up a lot of cantaloupe & peaches in the freezer. Grandma’s brothers called & a peach vendor was selling boxes of bruised peaches for a $1! Most of them were perfectly fine & for $1 we couldn’t pass that up! Her brothers also made sure I took home plenty of cantaloupes as well. ; ) This summer there have been no calls from the brothers, but my dad’s grape vine is fully loaded & ready for picking. That means it’s jelly making time!
Muscadine Grapes
In last month’s gardening post I showed y’all a couple pictures of Dad’s grape vine….
Well, he called last week & said they were ready for picking, so I headed over Friday after class. The grapes were huge & it didn’t take long to fill two 2 gallon buckets! One went to my grandmother-in-law & one came home with me. I’ll be back over this Friday to pick more. : )
These grapes are a variety known as muscadines that are native to the southeastern & south-central United States. All the rain we’ve had here this summer has made them nice & plump! I’m not too fond of eating these raw because they have a thicker skin than table grapes & a big seed in the middle. I’d rather make juice & jelly with them!
Making Juice for Jelly
The first thing that needs to happen before preserving any fruit or vegetable is washing them. I just put mine in the sink and rinsed them with cool water while running my hands through them. Remove any debris, stems, & bad fruit you find.
I posted a close up of the grapes after I washed them on Instagram & many people thought they were Christmas ornaments at first glance! : D
After the grapes were clean, I dumped them into my canning pot & just covered them with water. Adding too much water will dilute the juice. I brought them to a full boil & let them boil about 5 or 10 minutes before turning the heat down to medium. Then I covered them & let them cook for about 30 to 40 minutes.
I turned off the heat & left them in the covered pot over night to cool. Then it was time to squish them! I didn’t use my feet either! You may or may not want to use gloves when doing this. Grape juice can stain hands & clothes. You also may want to do this in an area that’s easy to clean if you’re a mess maker like me…..
I told you those grapes were juicy! After I was done squishing the grapes {& cleaning my mess} I used a basic colander to strain out the big bits. Make sure to squish them against the side to get out all the juice.
I eventually had to put the colander over another pot & pour the juice over it to get out the seeds in the bottom.
This can be made into jelly at this point, but it would be more like a jam since it has so much pulp in it still.
I’m going to use a sieve to scoop out most of the pulp. This did have a handle when I started, but one knock on my trash bucket & it broke off! I need a bigger one anyway – and a stronger one, apparently!
When my juice was free of as much pulp as I could manage to remove {or because I was tired of doing it}, it was time to put it in a container.
Storing the Juice
I scooped the juice out with a measuring cup & poured it through a funnel into an empty & cleaned milk jug. I’ll be storing this in the freezer until I have time to make jelly, so I left some head room at the top.
I wound up with a gallon jug plus two quart jars of juice. The quarts jars are going in the fridge for fresh juice drinking! These will be good for about a week, maybe two, so I would freeze anything that needed to last beyond that.
I grew up with a vinegar smell permeating the house while pickles were being made by my mother. There was almost always a platter of cut tomatoes & cucumbers sitting on the table at supper time during the summer. Meals were also accompanied by hot, homemade biscuits & Mayhaw jelly. This is why I continue to grow, preserve, & eat homemade whenever I can. It’s an experience that really connects you to your food!
Make sure to check out the sale at Fresh Preserving, they have some great deals going on jars & supplies! Hope y’all are having a wonderful Wednesday & I’ll see you here on Friday for my monthly roundup! : )
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