Wait a minute …Doesn’t canning happen with harvest? Like fall time? Yup. But it also happens whenever a surplus of empty jars coincides with a big sale on frozen chicken breasts. Jess had me pick up some meat on Monday, and when I got home on Wednesday there were 25 quarts of canned chicken (and …

But you really should have sent some of your snow our way. If everybody goes outside right now (you’re all home from work and school anyway, right?), takes a deep breath, and blows as hard as they can, it should push the storms all the way to, say, Ohio.
We’ll have to make do with our …

Remember the giganto-pumpkin that was hogging up the mud room floor? Jessica attacked it the other day. She sliced it into chunks as big as her hand, boiled the chunks (in three separate pots), skinned ‘em, and gave them to her trusty assistant (me) to mush ‘em up. I did so, because most of the …

Well, there it is. When Jess was putting this year’s cider into the root cellar, she had me bring up these two jars—the last of last year’s cider stash. It’s kind of funny that our quantity of cider from last year lined up so tidily with what we produced this year, but there you are. …

Well, I’m back in the office. And on Monday, I actually got the GLASS onto the GREENHOUSE! It was the second hardest job I’ve ever done (besides being a parent) since the pieces were over 7’ x 4’, had no edges to grab, weighed about 200 lb. eeach, and had to be lifted at least …

It’s a homesteading blog, so you knew that come fall, a lot of the posts would be about canning. And you were right! So last week it was pears, and here they are fresh from the orchard. (We’ve already eaten the plums, or turned them into canned plummy-garlicky sauce we eat with egg rolls). Here’s …

Okay, here’s what Jessica canned last week:
91 quarts of nectarines45 pints of salsa33 quarts of diced tomatoes30 quarts of tomato soup11 pints of nectarine jamWith help from the kids of course. Natalie ties on her apron in the midst of the chaos. Middle left you see our satellite-dish-sized bowl with the latest batch of tomato …

So we took the kids out behind the Church on Friday and picked apples. The branches were loaded down and the neighbor said they were ripe, but I’m having my doubts. Anyway, Katie, Abby and (temporarily) Natalie got up in the tree and threw apples down (not at the rest of us, of course); Jess …