Canning and Rambling
Jul. 23rd, 2010 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluesgardenAfter town and whatnot today, managed to pick 6 pounds 1 ounce of green beans before the storm rolled in. It took a while to snap the ends and to snap them into pieces, but I can watch TV and do that at the same time, so it's actually pretty relaxing. I will note that I have developed a strong preference for Empress over Fin de Bagnol. Fin really isn't a good canning bean, which I suspected would be the case when I selected it as the substitute for the out-of-stock Provider after the first bean crop was washed out this past spring. The catalog says that Fin is best when picked young and is a good variety to grow for local market, which may well be true, but my problem with it is that it's producing much less than Provider and tends towards the stringy side.
(By 'stringy', I'm referring to the fibrous string that used to be in all snap beans, which were then more exclusively known as 'string beans' for that very reason. When you snap one, instead of snapping cleanly, a string peels down along the seam of the pod. Mostly it's just an inconvenience, but gardeners have been breeding that trait out since the late 1800's so it doesn't crop up near as often. For me, when you're dealing with however many pounds of beans every other day, stringless beans are considerably easier.)
Today, 4 pounds 10 ounces of the total was Provider while just 1 pound 7 ounces was Fin. Fin will (hopefully) produce a bit longer since it has more young plants (germination fail where I went back and filled in the gaps with a second planting... well, third, in my case) but I didn't have to do that with Provider to begin with. Not to mention that I'm canning these beans in a pressure canner and I'm now leaning towards a heavier duty bean that can stand up to being cooked at roughly 240°F for 25 minutes followed by a half-hour, in canner cool down process. There are 5 quarts hanging out on the counter until tomorrow when their seals should be all nice and snug on the jars.
I also started a batch of bread and butter pickles tonight after picking just over 8 pounds of cucumbers yesterday. They're soaking in a lime and salt solution overnight in the fridge which is an experiment in following the recipe directions for 'crisper pickles'. What really makes this exciting is that I sliced the cucumbers too thin (I found the 2 mm slicing disc first and was tired enough that I wasn't rummaging through the box for the other one), so how useful the end product will be is in question. I suppose you could just spear three slices instead of one, yeah? They'll be finished up tomorrow, which consists of draining and rinsing several times, boiling with spices and vinegar, then ladling into jars and being covered with the hot brine before being canned in a hot water bath.
There's also some zucchini and squash to shred and freeze, turnips and beets to plant (assuming it's not raining), bed linens to change, laundry to put away, pups to wash, pork chops to cook or freeze, seeds to water (because I want it to rain so therefore it won't), whatever else I'm forgetting...
(By 'stringy', I'm referring to the fibrous string that used to be in all snap beans, which were then more exclusively known as 'string beans' for that very reason. When you snap one, instead of snapping cleanly, a string peels down along the seam of the pod. Mostly it's just an inconvenience, but gardeners have been breeding that trait out since the late 1800's so it doesn't crop up near as often. For me, when you're dealing with however many pounds of beans every other day, stringless beans are considerably easier.)
Today, 4 pounds 10 ounces of the total was Provider while just 1 pound 7 ounces was Fin. Fin will (hopefully) produce a bit longer since it has more young plants (germination fail where I went back and filled in the gaps with a second planting... well, third, in my case) but I didn't have to do that with Provider to begin with. Not to mention that I'm canning these beans in a pressure canner and I'm now leaning towards a heavier duty bean that can stand up to being cooked at roughly 240°F for 25 minutes followed by a half-hour, in canner cool down process. There are 5 quarts hanging out on the counter until tomorrow when their seals should be all nice and snug on the jars.
I also started a batch of bread and butter pickles tonight after picking just over 8 pounds of cucumbers yesterday. They're soaking in a lime and salt solution overnight in the fridge which is an experiment in following the recipe directions for 'crisper pickles'. What really makes this exciting is that I sliced the cucumbers too thin (I found the 2 mm slicing disc first and was tired enough that I wasn't rummaging through the box for the other one), so how useful the end product will be is in question. I suppose you could just spear three slices instead of one, yeah? They'll be finished up tomorrow, which consists of draining and rinsing several times, boiling with spices and vinegar, then ladling into jars and being covered with the hot brine before being canned in a hot water bath.
There's also some zucchini and squash to shred and freeze, turnips and beets to plant (assuming it's not raining), bed linens to change, laundry to put away, pups to wash, pork chops to cook or freeze, seeds to water (because I want it to rain so therefore it won't), whatever else I'm forgetting...
