It's Canning Season

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Now that the school year has started, things have become a lot quieter at the farm. We are nevertheless extremely busy keeping track of all the fruits and vegetables that now need to be harvested...and somehow preserved. It's clearly canning season.

Canning is tedious and can be messy, particularly if you attempt to process bushels of produce at a time. However, it is also a very fulfilling activity. Once finished, you can be proud of your work. It's also great to know that the results contain no artificial preservatives, flavours or colours.

In our case, we've been collecting a lot of pickling cucumbers from our vines. We've also harvested our garlic and we already have some well established dill in our raised bed. The first canning of the season had to be a Kosher style pickle.

Just about everything we need to start pickling.

Creating a tasty pickle is a rather easy thing to do and we would highly recommend it for anyone wishing to start canning.

The first step is to clean your pickling cucumbers and cut the ends. The flower end of the cucumber contains certain enzymes that make the pickle wilt or go soft..not a good thing for that great crunchy taste.

The small pickling cucumbers need no further processing. However, you can be certain that some of the cucumbers will be large and oddly shaped. These we simply cut into strips no taller than our canning jars.

We sanitize our jars and lids by boiling them for 10 minutes (time needs to be altered if you are processing at an altitude well above sea level). Then we begin to pack our jars. In each jar we first insert a clove of garlic and a few dill blooms.  We then pack as tightly as possible our cucumber spears. We top this with another garlic clove and more dill blooms as well as a couple of pepper corns.

Spicing is really up to one's imagination here.

On the side, we prepare enough brine to fill our jars and cover the ingredients. In our case, we made 3 litres of brine which consisted of: 1 1/2 litres of vinegar, 1 1/2 litres of water, 8 Tbsp of Kosher salt, and 4 Tbsp of sugar.

We use Kosher salt because it does not have any additives. Conventional table salt has some additives which will turn your brine cloudy when packing. Alternatively, you can use a salt specifically marketed for canning.

Since Kosher salt is a large grain salt, recipes using conventional table salt should use half the quoted amount.

We bring the brine to a boil; pour into our jars; and seal them. The jars are placed back into their water bath for another boiling period of 10 minutes and we're done.. It's that easy!

The finished product....the"industrial" size jar is for the Polish member of the family.

This time of year, great deals can be had on bushels of vegetables of all kind. From market stalls to farmers' markets, there is an abundance of local fruits and vegetables waiting to be processed.

One local market offering a lot of Ontario local produce is Gallagher's on Highway 20. There, we were enticed to buy a bushel of pickling beets. These always make a great side dish and can liven up a salad.

Pickling beets is a bit more work but nevertheless worthwhile.

The first step in the process is to peel the beets. To do this, we first cook the beets by boiling them for some 15 minutes (they should  be easily pierced by a fork, and the skin should be easy to "rub" off with one's fingers). If you are faced with dramatically different sizes of beets, the small and large beets can be boiled separately.

Although not necessary, we cut the ends (root and leaf end) of the beets prior to boiling. We do this because the "knotty" leafy end tends to collect dirt and is difficult to clean. Since we will be using the beet juice from our boiled beets, we want this juice as clean as possible.

Cleaned beets ready for cooking.

Once cooked, the most tedious part of the process begins: peeling. Technically, you should be able to "rub" the skins off by applying pressure against the beet with your fingers and thumb. We found the most effective means of peeling is by rubbing the surface of the beet with the back blade of a knife.

We like our pickled beets in large chunks (allowing us to slice or cube them for whatever application). So at most, we will halve the larger beets to ensure we can pack as much as possible into each jar.

Peeled and ready for packing.

On the side, we prepared our brine. In this case, we used 2 1/2 litres of vinegar, 1 litre of the beet juice (drained from the cooking process); 1 litre of sugar, and 8 Tbsp of Kosher salt.

Again spicing is up to taste. In our case, we like the light taste of cinnamon with our beets. So we pack a bit of cinnamon stick into each jar.

Canning beets

We bring the brine to a boil and pour it into each jar until the beets are covered.

The final step is pasteurization; as before we seal the jars and boil them for another 10 minutes.

Will end this week with an odd sight.

Herons are often present on the farm. We always see them fishing in the ponds of the property.

This week, a Heron actually came much closer to the house and perched himself on a pine tree next to our kitchen.

We don't often see something like that out of our kitchen window.