Show us your canned produce

OK, here are some pics of the cellar and what’s inside. The left section is the actual cellar, the right section is a wood shed were we keep a little bit of firewood, and some gardening stuff. My wife’s Dad built it about 25 years ago, it also housed the well pump, which no longer works. They used well water up until maybe 15 years ago.

The pump was removed last week to make more room for other stuff. You might be able to see the well casing in the background left. I am planning to drop a hand pump down it, to use as a backup water source, and to use for watering the garden down by this shed.

And, the inside:

In this pic, you’ll see a white temp sensor on top of the middle post. It sends a signal up to the receiver in our house so we can monitor the temp inside the cellar. Its main use is to tell us how cold it gets in there in the winter. It usually stays about 20 degrees warmer than the outside air in the winter. So, if the temp outside gets below 15 degrees, we turn on the heat lamp in the cellar to keep stuff from freezing.

As you can see, it’s getting pretty full, so we’ll need to clean out some more junk out of it to make more room. Per @JustAnne4 's suggestion, it might be a good idea to maybe put some restraining straps across the glass jars in case of any rumblers. Not common here, but they occasionally get them once in a while.

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Good job and so nice to look at.
It would be easy to nail in a little shelve ledge just where you store your glass stuff, or, use sturdy cardboard boxes like you have in the bottom pic. The weight in the box would help it resist sliding and the edges would prevent the tipping over and falling or rolling off the shelf. Only need this for glass.

We did our annual saucing last weekend. I use 100% mac, with nothing added. I don’t like macs much for eating unless it was picked less than an hour prior, but they make excellent sauce. Nice and tart, good flavor, and their propensity to turn to mush is actually a benefit for sauce making.

Only used one bushel for sauce this year since we have about 10 qts left over from last year (jars on the left side of the picture showing the storage cabinet). One bushel of macs made about 15 qts sauce.

I preheat the next batch of cut up apples in the oven while the current batch is cooking down in a pot. Once is cooked down enough, we run it through our Squeez-o, then boil it again in another pot before loading into jars and the canning kettle.

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Looks good. Looks like your little helpers are enjoying making the sauce. Are those Macs you grew yourself, or from a local orchard? They look pretty big compared to the Macs I’ve seen.

Thanks, @JustAnne4. Actually my wife gets most of the credit for it looking so nice and tidy. As you can see, we also like to stock up on canned goods from the store. Sometimes we’ll make a run to Aldi or Save a Lot and stock up on ravioli, beans, tuna etc. Wish we were closer to Aldi, they always have good prices for bulk purchases.

Very neat organized! So your cellar is actually all above ground, or some of it goes down? What is you regular summer temperature outside?

The cellar floor is a little below ground level. It would be best if it was buried deeper into the ground, but it is what it is. If it was deeper, it wouldn’t get as cold in the winter and warm in the summer. It was reading about 70-75 in the cellar on the hottest days, not ideal for canned goods.

I’ve only been here for my 3rd summer, but this summer started out warm and rainy, temps usually in the 80s, but for the last month or so, it’s been hot, in the low 90s, and very dry. We could use some rain, actually. But today may be the last of the hot days, as a cold front is coming thru tomorrow. The usual summer temps here are 80s daytime, 60s at night.

If we had more funds, I’d really like to have a new cellar closer to our present house, and dug deeper into the ground. That way the cellar’s temperature would be more stable in extreme weather.

I wish I grew those macs. I left about 18 apples on my young dwarf trees this spring. One tree got completely nuked by fireblight (opalescent) and took a few apples it had going with it. The other ones have so far all been partly eaten by squirrels and then knocked off the tree and promptly covered with ants and slugs. We’ve cut off the bad parts and eaten these but they were very far from being ripe. Argh!

Anyway, I bought that box of macs from Kimball Fruit Farm, one of the vendors who sells at the farmers’ market down the street from me.

The kids do enjoy making the sauce; their favorite parts are bobbing for apples when washing, and eating spoonfuls of hot sauce as it comes out of the squeeze-O.

OK, some pics of some cushaw squash we canned last week. If you don’t know what a cushaw is, it’s a large gourd wide at the bottom and thins up toward the neck. Its coloring looks almost like a reverse watermelon- white background with irregular green stripes. To process it for canning, it’s pretty much the same as any other squash, cut it in large chunks then smaller chunks and remove the rind. We cut it up into 1-inch chunks, blanch them for a couple minutes in boiling water, put them in quart jars, add hot water, seal them, and process them for 90 minutes at 10lb pressure. Here are some pics after they were removed from the canner and cleaned up:

We canned 7qt worth, and had enough left over for a nice cushaw pie! Kinda tastes like pumpkin, but a bit milder. Anybody here had a cushaw pie before? I never heard of this squash until I came up here.

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Nice. One question.
If you are going to process for 90min at 10# why do you bother to blanch them?

Processing book says to do it, maybe to help soften it up a bit before cooking it? Or maybe help preserve the color? I’m not sure why, but the book says to do it, may not matter. You don’t want to blanch it no more than a couple minutes because you don’t want to turn it into mush, you can’t pressure can pureed squash.

I can say it’s a whole lot easier to cut up and skin a cushaw compared to a pumpkin. Those pumpkin rinds are tough.

Hmmmm. I get it that you are following the book, but what doesn’t make sense to me: You don’t want to turn it into mush by keeping it in 212 deg water for only a couple minutes, yet you are going to pressure can it at 240 deg for 90 min and think that won’t turn it into mush?
Once again, JustAnne is missing something.

I don’t get it either. Maybe Mr Presto has the answers…

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@mrsg47,

I saw a couple of likes from you. Are you back in the States for a bit, or are you still enjoying France? Didya find a nice little orchard there?

I saw miles of beautiful orchards!!! I will have a back terrace with potted fruit trees. Pots are huge there so no problem with semi-dwarf trees! Back last night.

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Welcome back. Where in France will y’all be, if I’m not being too nosy? Is this a permanent move or just a little French vacation place to visit in the summer?

And, do you have any pics to share?

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Hi! I’ll be in Uzes, in the south of France. close to Nimes and Avignon. Provence. It is a permanent move. Can’t wait to post pics from my iphone once I learn how to do it! :heart_eyes:

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MrsG,

Make sure you take some photos of the French vineyard.

Tony

I use my I phone on this website all of the time. When you reply to a post there is an upload in blue on the lower right side , when you touch it it allows you to select where you want to upload the photo from.

Catching up on this thread, some pics of pickled jalapenos and other peppers

Pepperoncini

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