I grew up watching my mom canning tomatoes and I was completely disinterested.

This year I ended up in a house with a plum tree, and for the first time in my life, I made jam and canned it! I will never get into it in a big way, but it was fun.

Next year maybe some strawberries. . .

I grew up watching my aunts and grandmas (mostly rural, some small town) can everything they could gather. I had one aunt who lived in such a remote rural area that she only needed a few staples from the store in winter, otherwise, whatever she needed was in her freezer or cellar in a jar.

From the childhood farm I've done blueberries (Grandma planted that bush and it yields berries like you wouldn't belive); blackberries (my favorite). Jams, much prefer those over jelly. We used to make it an annual tradition to can tomatoes but my mom's not up for the work and my sister and I can't seem to find time. I'm down to just a jar or two and am going to miss it enough that I'll do more. It's a staple in spaghetti sauce, soup and beef strew done in the crock pot.

My tomatoes (I grow strictly low acid heirloom) are just now ripening. I love going out to the garden and picking a sweet, juicy red or yellow and slicing it. yummm!
Love watermelon too. This year I'm growing Sugar Babies (not quite soccer ball size). My first time growing those. Vines are thriving, loads of blossoms, but so far no sign of fruit developing. They better hurry up, the sun is weakening & season will be drawing to an end here soon!

Oh, and I grow lots of herbs. I don't use salt or pepper to season. Just herbs. Love them fresh in summer on everything from pasta to roasts. Rosemary, marjoram, purple leaf basil, lemon thyme, French tarragon, cilantro, etc.

I had grand hopes of canning salsa, tomato sauce and stewed tomatoes but it does not look like I will have a good enough yield to do as much as I like. My fruit trees will need a couple more seasons before they produce enough to make jam.

I will be making several batches of pesto to freeze in ice cube trays. For red bell peppers and poblanos, I usually halve them, take out membranes and seeds, grill them, place in a plastic bag to steam and then peel them when cool enough. Then I either puree them and freeze in ice cube trays and some I coarsely chop in the food processor to add to dips, make chunkier sauces, etc with.

I bought a hydrator for making dehydrated zucchini chips but it looks like the plant is about to bite the dust.

I grew up as a city girl and never canned. Once I tried to make grape juice, but that was horrible. I've had better success freezing fresh veggies & fruit.

DH tried to get me to do canning but I refused. Primarily because we never had a sufficient enough garden! Ours this year is pathetic. Got two...TWO zuchs. A handful of green beans, and about a gross of teeny, tiny, green tomatoes. I picked about 20 ripe ones, together they'd maybe make a cup and a half of puree.

I just don't have a green thumb...except for roses & lilies!

But our pear tree is doing great this year, so I may have to do up a bunch of pear desserts and freeze them. I've not tried to preserve pears before.

I don't like the taste of much canned produce- oh, jam is fine but I eat about one jar of jam every three months at most so I'd rather buy it.
I have come to prefer fresh vegetables over most frozen too although I will make spaghetti sauce to freeze if we have tons of tomatoes.

Bumblebeez - where are you located? Of course, we too, PREFER fresh, but we don't have there here year-round. I do have a wonderful farmers market who will still have some items even this winter, but tomatoes, etc. - no.

I'm doing the pasta sauce today - so won't know until later this winter about how it will end up - but the produce my mom and grandmother put up tasted wonderful - I'm sure there is a method, or maybe they just have that touch. I can only hope mine will turn out as well! LOL

tina

When we first moved here to our acre we had a huge garden. I'd always can green beans and new potatoes, and I'd sometimes mix them in a jar. Talk about GOOD!

We have an orchard too, and I used to can jams.

I think you can freeze the peppers, since we buy them already frozen in the store. I haven't read the replies yet, but do a Google search on "how to freeze peppers."

We built four raised beds (square foot gardening) for vegetable gardening this year. Planted tomatoes, three types of peppers, zucchini, beans, cukes, yellow squash, basil, oregano, sage, Italian parsley, thyme, and a few other things. Will plant some spring vegs, like spinach, this fall.

I don't can but we always go to a farmer and buy sweet corn to freeze for the winter. Depending on our freezer space, I either freeze whole, after blanching, or cut the kernels off (again, after blanching) and pack in freezer bags.

There's nothing like eating good sweet corn in January. :)

I have been making jam for years. It all started with a pick-your-own farm near me when I lived in NJ. I drove by early in the summer and the first sign they put out was for gooseberries. I merrily went out and picked a big mess of gooseberries, only to get home and discover they were really too tart to eat. I decided to make jam and proceeded to make 16 separate batches of jam -- all kinds of fruit -- that summer. :-)

So far this year I have made the following:

Strawberry Rhubarb
Strawberries preserved in Cointreau
Seedless Red Raspberry
Seedless Black Raspberry
Red Raspberry and Chocolate (unreal!!!)
Four Berry
Black & Blue (black raspberries and blueberries)

This coming week, I plan to make more of the Raspberry Chocolate with a bit less chocolate and Blueberry Orange Preserves. Peaches are coming in now, so there will be that, probably next week. I also have 10 pounds of sour cherries in the freezer that are destined for the jam pan when I have the time.

I haven't done much with pears or apples, so this Fall, I will play around with those two. Oh, and I want to make a hot pepper jam when my serranos turn red.

I had high hopes of canning tomatoes this year but I am in the Northeast and my plants have succumbed to the blight. I managed to salvage seven small 'maters, but I think it is all over. I will freeze corn, as I always do. And I may try my hand at pickles this year if I have the time.

This is my first summer with a veggie garden and I haven't had quite the output I expected. Of course, we had only a handful of sunny days in June and the first half of July was no better. Finally, Summer is here, but it is late and it has been a bad year for everyone.

Tina, you can freeze sweet and hot peppers. Cut 'em into the size pieces you would cook with. Early in the season I had a small harvest of pimento peppers and Anaheims. What I didn't stuff I roasted and then froze to use for soup this winter. Roasted red bell pepper soup is incredible! I figure the Anaheims will add a little heat.

I played around with canning about 6 or 7 years ago. Made hot pepper jelly, strawberry jam, and blueberry conserves. But I ended up giving most of it away, because we just don't eat it. A jar will last a year in the fridge. Also made salsa -- tomato & peach -- (that's a lot of chopping), bread & butter pickles, and canned tomatoes. But to be honest, other than the pickles I really don't care for canned food. You have to use too much vinegar in salsa unless you're pressure canning, and that changes the fresh flavor. Same with canned tomatoes and the long processing time.

Wish I had thought to freeze corn this year. Maybe next.

Parma, you can plant a fall garden in zone 6?

Natal, spinach will come up in the snow. :)

When I lived in Wisconsin, I planted my spinach in March and then again in the fall.

Parma, I know it survives a light freeze, I just never thought about it being grown in the north late in the year. Learn something new... ;) What else do you grow in the fall? I'm guessing you're getting ready to plant now. I'll start sowing bush beans in a couple more weeks, then beets, chard, arugula, lettuce, parsley, dill, burnet, and more thyme.

Thank you guys for all the info.

I did the pasta sauce today and it turned out DELISH! Yum!!

I will try freezing the red peppers.

I will be doing frozen corn - cut off the cob and also plan to put up green beans. And that will be all folks! LOL

Amy - your jams sound yummy! Parma - I wanted to do raised beds, but my hubby didn't quite agree. hehe I'm hoping next year to bring him around. Also, I had read a good bit about the cucumber *teepees* and after having cucumber vines take over a couple of the tomato plants, I think he will be doing teepees next year.

tina

Parma, we have a square foot garden too. Right now I have 7 beds plus other things in containers. We are expanding over time and eventually everything will be moved and I will use the SFG as the foundation for a potager garden.

Sorrel and kale do really well in the fall as well.

Green peppers, I just cut up, put in small freezer bags and freeze. I use them all winter for spaghetti (extra flavor) and in chili and anything else that I might need them for. I don't do a thing to them before freezing.....have done this for yrs. and yrs. Another good thing is start them like you usually do to make stuffed peppers and blanch a couple of min. then stuff with your usual mix into the peppers and freeze them. In the winter when you want them for dinner, defrost, then cook as usual, sometimes I put some shredded cheese on the top too. Very tastee and nice to have put aside, you can do this for several dinners if you have many peppers from your garden. If peppers are huge I cut them in half then proceed the same.

Amy - I live in CT too (you're in MA?), our tomato plants are growing like a jungle, lots of fruit but nothing ripening! Told DH I had a recipe for green tomato pickles but he didn't think that sounded good. We planted Sweet 100's and Early Girls. Plus a couple of butternut squash (hope those do well) and lots of lettuce hoping for a salad garden. The lettuce I started from seed at Mem Day is about an inch tall, the seedlings I got for free from nursery a month ago just got very tall and have started to flower, hardly any leaves so I haven't picked - we've been eating grocery store salad all summer!

We have wild blueberries and blackberries, about 2 cups of each all summer long (blueberry bushes are growing well since we've cleared around them, but hardly any fruit - not enough sun). We're going to try transplanting some of the ones that are far back in the woods to sunnier spots along edge of lawn, maybe we'll get more next year.

I'm making blueberry buckle (my grandma's recipe) for reunion this weekend, probably make a blackberry crumble tonight. I'd love to get recipe for raspberry chocolate jam so when the rest ripen I can try that.

My dad gave me a couple huge (as long as my forearm) zucchini, I made 2 batches of bread/muffins on Friday, threw another 3-4 cups of shredded zuch in the freezer for later - might make more this w/e while I have the oven going for buckle. Made stuffed peppers last night, but with grocery store peppers. We had some of my dad's green beans too. Kids don't eat them, so we won't plant them.

It's been a bad year up here - haven't checked farmer's markets (usually more $$, at least in the 2 affluent towns near us - I'll have to check more modest town on Friday). But grocery stores haven't even had very good prices. Corn just now getting knee high (a month late!), and *some* people have started 2nd cutting of hay, but not us (we just did 1st cutting 4th of July, other people were even later). Too much rain, no sun for all of June.

We have continued my DH's family tradition of canning vegetables, mainly tomatoes, but we also can marinated eggplant, and we freeze beens. One year we had 1400 tomato plants. We have downsized to 3 or 400. We make close to 500 jars of tomatoes.
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OMG, judiegal, where do you live?

I picked a handful of lettuce leaves today, have 2 grape tomatoes and 2 Early Girls that are almost ripe. This is off 1 EG plant and 3 Sweet 100s, about a dozen lettuce seedlings and 2 whole packages of lettuce seeds.

We live in MA, (with Italy in the back yard! lol)

Wow, you live in MA and your tomatoes are healthy and ripening??? What, is it the only sunny corner of NE?

DO you sell at a farmer's market? I'm willing to drive for those delicious-looking tomatahs!

Those are last years crop, like most everyone else around here the garden this year is very sad looking. We are eating zucchini and eggplant but the tomatoes are not ripe yet. Looks like we'll be having our salads in September!

Oh, and I was so excited that *somebody* around here had good-looking tomatoes :-(

I'll have to get some of my dad's romaine to go with our Early Girls. For some reason his is developing into heads, while ours just got spindly and started going to seed. I am holding out for the leaf lettuce I planted from seed - if Sept stays nice, maybe it'll get big enough to pick.

If all our tomatoes ripen at once, I'll be making sauce too - we probably have 3 dozen EGs of decent size on the one plant right now - they're just all (except for 2) green.

Can you make sauce out of grape tomatoes? I've actually only ever used plum for sauce, thought EG was possible but we've got 100 or more Sweet 100's on the 3 plants.

I have ONE pathetic grape tomato plant -- which has kindly yielded about a dozen tiny wee tomatoes. Poor spindly thing! LOL! ((although my rosemary plant and some of my herbs are still in the land-of-the-barely-living!!))

Here in Dallas -- even our gardener-type friends next door had a terrible year in their garden!

Judie -- my DH is so amazed -- he wants to move into YOUR house! LOL! He adores tomato sauces!

Jan at Rosemary Cottage

You have been in a drought haven't you Jan? We've experienced that the previous two years, but this year we are actually AHEAD on rainfall (unheard of!). Everything is lush and green this year. We have I think nine tomato plants and are getting 30+ tomatoes at least every other day. My husband also used compost this year (from the big city near us) and I think that has made a big difference. However, while we've had plenty of days without rain, we've had more overcast days than usual and less long stretches of hot, sunny days without rain, so I am afraid my cantaloupes may not turn out sweet. We'll see, they are getting bigger!

Judie - I too am amazed at all those tomatoes!

tina