Canning and More Canning

So this past Tuesday was designated as our revisit to canning and pear sauce. We had met the week before to start canning pear sauce only to find that most of the pears were still too green to do much good. We got a call last week that peaches would be coming in this week too--Monday. When it rains it pours. The fruit all gets ripe at the same time at this time of year.  So we picked up peaches Monday as did Beth, Helen and Karen, and even Angie who had a neighbor give her 1/2 bushel. I knew we had to get on those, so got 1/2 bushel done that night, and then got up Tuesday morning to do the other 1/2 bushel. These peaches (which were only suppose to be a 1/2 bushel--which is another story) were on top of the bushel plus that we got from our own peach trees and have been enjoying for a month or so. Crazy. I laid awake at night thinking, "how are we going to do all this?"  The ideas had been formulating about getting a utility sink installed in the garage, set up our tables and use the 1 propane burner. So we got those things set up, thanks to Doug's help and picked up some more propane. Tuesday morning the idea came to go get the 3 burner propane burner from the scout trailer--borrow it to help with the cooking stuff. So I got that and set that up too.  Now we were Cooking!!  It worked great.  4 cook tops.

Our garage became a great canning kitchen as we bottled pearsauce, peaches, and some applesauce. What a great place to make a mess and we pressure washed it all down at the end of the day to eliminate sticky floors. The socializing was fun, baby Abner even enjoyed sitting in this seat since it was kind of outside. The weather has been so perfect the last few weeks, so it was a pleasure to be outside. The kids got to run outside with some supervision.  Just the best of everything. Comments were:  We should do this every year, and this is so much more fun doing it all together, and this is a perfect facility.  Well, I don't know about all that--but it did save my kitchen that I could go back into at the end of the day and have it pretty clean. Way less stress. I appreciate that these girls want to put away food for winter and trying to make healthy food choices--I totally endorse that.  A fun day with a lot accomplished.  Applesauce Next??