Preserving the Harvest

Please excuse my brief bloggy break, as you can see, God was faithful and gave us a huge bounty this year.

We did tomatoes. (The girls even helped for about 5 minutes!) LOL! I canned 21 quarts and 6 pints of tomato juice. I will probably have enough ripe to do again Monday afternoon.

I also canned green beans and made Claussen style pickles. I hope these turn out because those are the only pickles my family will eat and they just went up another dollar a jar at Kroger.

I dried some zucchini for winter use in soups and such and shredded some for quick breads. I chopped peppers and froze for salsa that I'll make later this week and for over the winter use.

Shayla and dad harvested the pumpkins. It's hard to believe they came from the same packet of seeds. They are all different sizes!

Today we picked some more grapes and apples. I will probably be making juice with them, maybe apple cider vinegar for cleaning, too, but tomorrow's another day......

We're already planning next year's garden. Were planning on making it much larger. We're trying to figure how much we need to plant to last our family a year.

What do you put up for your family? Do you have any time saving hints? Please share if so because I just can't seem to find time for everything that needs to be done.