In over our HEADS!!!

Well, I thought that when we did apples and green beans that canning was pretty much over for us, but we weren't! So yesterday we started out the day helping my mom and Keith pick apples at a friends house here in Shelley. Keith (my little brother) was a lot of great help. We ended up picking 5 potato boxes and 3 buckets full of apples in 2 hours. Keith and Kurt climbed into the trees, my mom on the latter and I stood below Keith as he threw apples down to me. It was a little chilly, but nothing compared to later in the afternoon!


After we picked the apples we decided we would go and pick pears and plums at Kurt's parents house. Kurt really said he likes plum jam (I have never had it) so since we knew it was getting so cold we thought we better go pick things. Unfortunately when we got there it started snowing like crazy. So here are Kurt and I out in the snow picking thousands of plums! Literally we picked a full box full of plums and 8 grocery bags! There were still a few plums left on the tree! Kurt and I brought home a full box and 3 bags thinking that it would take a lot more to make jam than it did. More on that in a minute.

So after picking plums we took them in the house and went to pick pears. We had to switch gloves because our gloves were so wet we were squeezing water out of the gloves and our hands were freezing. I wish we would have had our camera to show you how crazy the snow was! Anyway, so then Kurt went and picked pears on the ladder. Luckily, Kraig (Kurt's brother) picked half the bucket before we went back there. Thanks for the help Kraig!

So with our hands overly full we headed home. First we started by freezing our crook neck squash and potatoes. This took a a good 2 hours. Thank heavens Kurt and I were able to do it together we ended up cutting up 11 quarts of potatoes. I will give you a full list of all the stuff we have done this year in a minute, but first the plum story.

So at 8 pm Kurt and I started the plum jam! I had heard this was going to be easy so I didn't think much of starting that late! Oh boy I was wrong! As we started to pit them plums we found they aren't that easy to PIT!!! At one point we would just squeeze the plums in our hand and get the pit. Our hands were a mess and stained yellow! After pitting only 1/3 of the box it was a full 6 to 7 quarts of plums (only 1/3 of our box :( so sad). Then we realized that, that amount of plums makes 4 batches of jam, and we had only bought 4 boxes of pectin. So we began the cooking process. During the middle of it all, my math smart husband realized that we weren't going to have enough jars! So he made a run up to his mom's and luckily she had a few more jars we could use (he also figured out that if we made all our plums into jam we would be making 162 1/2 pints). It was a long, long night. After cooking the jam with all the special directions, we had to bottle it, and seal it! We got done with it all at about 11 pm or 11:30 pm. We have lots of pictures to show our adventures from yesterday. All and all here is our list of all the produce we have done this fall:

16 quarts of Crook Neck
4 quarts of cabbage
11 quarts of potatoes
19 quarts of peaches
34 quarts apples
24 quarts of green beans
26- 1/2 pints plum jam
7 pints of plum jam

We are also going to bag our spaghetti squash and freeze it and we will probably have a good 10 quarts of that. So as you see our freezer is full our cabinets are full and hopefully it will all help in the winter with both Kurt and I in school and a baby. We still have a ton of plums to do something with we thought about trying to bottle a few so that we could use them for the baby, but if anyone in the area that looks at our blog wants some plums let us know. It was a crazy Saturday and we were both really really tired.