Beans and Peppers and 'Maters, Oh My!

I haven't posted in the past week.  The garden is on overdrive at present, so I've spent many hours picking and canning veggies.  The above picture is just a portion of what I've canned since Saturday afternoon.  There was more last week, however I didn't take the time to get photographic evidence.  ;o)

The above picture was just my pickled foods: 6 pints dilly beans, 3 quarts dill pickles, 8 pints pickled hot pepper chunks, and 6 pints sliced jalapenos.

On top of that was a mountain of green beans to process.  (Well, truthfully, I took these next two pictures before doing the dilly beans, so only half a mountain left--7 more pints of green beans).

Green beans in my largest colander, after being topped and tailed.

I watched Forrest Gump while topping and tailing them.

Yes, the whole movie.

It took that long.

It was a lot of beans.

My hand for size comparison; 

my 4" (ish) wide hand spanned a bit more than a third of the colander.

Did I mention that's a lot of beans?

In the first picture of this post, if you look again, you'll notice the tomatoes alongside the canning jars.  That was one day's harvest; about half a bushel.  They were Monday's project.

All 19 pints of them.  Boy, am I glad I have two water bath canners.  Otherwise, it would have taken way longer than the four hours start to finish that it did.

This brings my total of canned tomatoes up to 30 pints so far.  I'm shooting for 50, that would give me consumption at slightly less than one jar a week for the coming year.  With only three of us at home (once DD1 is at college), I'm really not sure how much we need per year in food any more.  I do know that when there were six at this little place here, we went through probably 2 pints a week.

Also canned, but not pictured, is 4 pints of tomato sauce.  I have more sauce tomatoes to do yet before we head out of state later this week to take DD1 to college.  Until I have all the diced tomatoes canned that I want, I'm only saucing the Romas.  Probably in September I will start saucing all of them.  We go through a lot of tomato sauce since I make all our spaghetti, marinara, and pizza sauce from scratch--and they all start with a pint of tomato sauce!

I also have a whole lot of corn to process, which I'm a bit intimidated by.  I've never had a good enough crop of sweet corn to need to process it; we always just ate it for dinner right out of the garden.  This year, however, I have dozens, maybe even more than 100 ears, still out there and all are dead ripe.  So, time to attempt some home canned cream corn, and decide if I'm going to can or freeze my whole kernel corn.

I also have more long slicing-type cukes than we can keep up with, so I'm going to attempt to make some hamburger dills with those.  Just as soon as I find a no-sugar recipe.  The only hamburger dill recipe I have uses a bit of sugar, and, for a household in which no one likes sweet pickles, the last ones I made were just too sweet.  So, some internet searching and experimentation tonight. . .

 
If I have time, I'll do a blog post on making the cream corn and the hamburger dills before I head out of town.  Otherwise, it might be a week or so before I get to it.  But I'll be back, I promise.  Stay tuned. . .