Oooooh no, I would be we've all had those days.

This past weekend I was canning tomatoes and applesauce (all by myself), I had to wear gloves because my hands were so nicked up from last weekends marathon canning that the acid was BURNING me up. I do all my canning on the back porch and Monday, when i was trying to put up 3 bushels of tomatoes by myself, mother nature decided it should be in the upper 90's. About 2pm I found myself peeling and cutting up tomatoes while sitting in front of a fan that was in my family room window blowing out the cooled air from the house...we won't tell anyone that though...

I only had one jar break on me in the canner, which happened on my last batch, but one of the two propane tanks I was using decided to run out early in the day. Then at the end of the day, i was HOT, stinky and exhausted and trying to bring all my jars in that were cooled enough, and was putting them on a table, I pushed too hard and knocked off a jar of apple sauce that I canned on Sunday, what an ever loving mess. I couldn't even let my hoover dogs clean it up because of the glass!

I look around and see watermelons and cantalopes all over just waiting to be cut up and put in the freezer and know that i still have two very large pawpaw trees and two large pear trees plus apple trees all over that are dripping with fruit that I won't be able to stand seeing go to waste...

Overwhelmed is putting it mildly! Is it winter yet?

So, don't feel bad, I think alot of canners are feeling the same pain right now!

Sheri in KY

Then late that day

OK, I finished with the nectarines today (with my mother's help). 12 quarts yesterday and 18 today... but still had siphoning problems, topped off with a steam burn on my right hand. Sigh...

Not looking forward to the plums (Italian Prunes) and pears (Bartlett) - they are sitting on my back porch looking at me accusingly, lol...

When the Elberta peaches are available I will try hot packing them - none of the raw-packed nectarines ended up looking very pretty, and some will need to be eaten pretty soon. :-(

Yep, I've felt that way too on lots of occasions. I live in a house once inhabited by hubby's grandparents, and I look at all the modern conveniences I have to make life easy, and think of all the garden work and canning work and dusting (house EXUDES dust) and laundry and this and that without those conveniences and still get SO tired. How did they ever do it? I guess just be grateful for the bounty. Starving isn't in our future.

I have never been as grateful for my new kitchen (well, 2-year-old kitchen) as I am right now - I shudder to imagine doing this "canning thang" in the old one.

Today my mom and I did the pears (14 quarts, hot packed, with very light syrup w/vanilla) and the plums (12 pints), so I get to take a break until the peaches arrive. :-)

No injuries or mishaps today - the Goddess of Canned Goodness was smiling on me!

The GCG was definitely in a pissy mood again this morning. I uncovered a few gallon bags of last year's raspberries in the freezer, so I thought I would make jelly.

Picked up the 10 lb. bag of sugar and the bottom seam failed and dumped all ten pounds into the dishwasher (which DH had just opened to get a clean coffee mug out of, which also contained all my freshly washed jelly jars on the top rack). Sigh, I hate vacuuming sugar out of the dishwasher...

This is just my own theory, mind you, so I could be wrong. I think that there are 2 of them. The Goddess of Canned Goodness and her evil polar opposite. Not sure of her name yet, but she is definitely a witch sent from canning Hell.

I wondered why my tomatoes seem to be drying fine today. So far, no mishaps. Well that explains it! She was at malna's house.

Egads, y'all are making me feel like I've got nothing to whine about!

Sheri in KY's overwhelmed with bounty and her hands are thrashed...

Malna's sucking 10 pounds of sugar out of her dishwasher (shuddering)...

and Gran2 and never-give-up obviously have experienced the wringer a time or two...

I think that the GCG's "evil polar opposite" was that guy named Murphy, whose Law doomed us for all eternity.

My mom and my best friend both volunteered to help with the peaches, and I feel much calmer now. :-)

Well, I personally think somebody needs to sit down and engineer a canning and preserving Biorhythm chart and that might save us all from canning days from hell.

I have always called "putting by" my ritual of summer and I'd be like a marathon runner who is house bound and can't get their endorphine rush if I didn't do it each year. I've taken lots of ribbing for when I insist on canning enough food to last through a nuclear winter. Survivalist is one of the kinder names I remember used. Worst year for the verbal abuse was the summer before Y2K. LOL. I've kindly informed the disbelievers that the next time they sit at my table they really don't need to eat that blackberry pie or homemade noodles because they came from my stash.

Of course we have all had 'one of those days' and the perishable nature of our bounty turns all of us into Silas Marners. I really feel for you all..been there and done that with siphoning and bursting jars, nice finished jars I've broken after the fact, kitchen thermostats reading one hundred and two, and all nighters.

This year has been on one of the easier ones so far. (Can you see me knocking wood and crossing myself?) Only one meltdown. I was being so proud of the way I was scheduling my canning and freezing so that I'd catch each fruit and vegetable at its prime and still have time for a life.

It didn't help that the pumpkins came on a month early, right when I was getting into the grapes..... or that all ten apple trees of ten different varieties hit their fruiting puberty at the same nanosecond. Add to that my late peach tree in golden-fruited splendor and I am having the hubby check it each day as he rides past it on his tractor, because that is my mother load of summer. Well, the morning after the night before......I goes up to get my peaches armed with two bushel baskets and find the tree nearly empty and a two bushels of deer poop under it around the still wet and sticky pits. Can you hear me crying? I am so obsessed I literally count the number of seeds on the ground so I know what I missed out on. I came away with seventy peaches, and two hundred and eighty sticky pits.

Given that, I am in a foul mood. So, deciding not not let it ruin my day/week/month I come back to the kitchen to do up more apple drops. I had a couple bushels of them I had picked earlier and my poor spouse thought he was being helpful by gathering ANOTHER bushel and dumping them in the kitchen. So, I work up his and then ask him to dump the ones I had picked through and didn't want, and he thinks I am asking him to dump the ones he picked. Sigh. I get a lecture on 'wasting' my time working up the ones I picked and then dumping his. Uhm, I think I used the word "clueless" in my reply and we had our first argument in ages. It's all better now and today I did salsa. And tomorrow back to apples. And the next day more apples and the next day ever more apples

I feel your pain.

Note to self: Relief = No Deer. My god, Calliope, yikes!

I had a fun one today. The next door neighbor has a big old pear tree that's begiining it's annual littering, so I asked if I could pick some "if he wasn't using them". He said he was, which is fine, of course. Anyway, I mentioned that I'd just finished canning a big box of pears, which he finds interesting.

Then he proceeds to say.... get this....

"Can you can my pears for me?"

To which I reply "If you care to pick them, bring them over along with jars and lids, I will teach you how to prep and can them. We'll need an afternoon, since they need to be peeled, cored and the bruises/worm holes removed. When did you have in mind? It'll need to be soon, since some of these are going to be past their prime before long."

"Never mind."

Aren't neighbors wonderful? I'd be willing to bet money a good many of those pears rot right there on the ground. What a waste! Isn't it common to share canning/produce for halvsies?