Summer Canning

I've been canning now for a few years.  Thanks to all my great friends for teaching me how now I can do it myself in my own home.  Here are a few pictures of what I canned this summer.

This was the first time I've ever canned peaches & they were a lot of work, but they are oh so good!!!

I will definitely be doing these again next year, but with some help.  These peaches are canned in a medium syrup & I'm sure that's what makes them extra yummy-sugar.  Click here for the peach canning instructions that I used.

This is what I made with the peach skins--Peach Honey.  After throwing away all the pits, I read the directions on how to make this recipe and realized that I should have kept the pits.  Oh well, next year.  This stuff is so yummy & you should totally try it out.  Here is the link to this awesome recipe by Gertrude Buchanan.

This was also the first time I canned pears.  As you might be able to tell in the pictures, I should have canned them a couple days before they got really soft.  But after canning the peaches I had to have a break, so I figured extra ripe pears would just have to do.  Here is the recipe I used for the pears.

I kept the skins from the pears as well and made yummy pear honey using the same recipe as the peach honey.  All I can say about all this honey is yum, yum, yum!  It's divine on toasted honey whole wheat bread.

This is the first year I grew pickling cucumbers & my plant took forever to grow cucumbers, so I only got 3 jars of dill pickles.  I have yet to know how these taste, because first off, I don't like pickles & second, they had to sit for two weeks before we could even open them.  I think my husband is waiting to open them because he knows he only has 3 jars & he'd probably eat an entire jar at one sitting. :)  Click here for this recipe.

I've been canning jelly for a couple years now and last year I didn't have to buy any at the store, which was so nice, but we used every last jar of it.  So this summer I had to make more to get us through another year.  We have raspberry bushes that provide lots and lots of raspberries, so I was able to make enough jelly and I even had some left over raspberry juice which I froze in case I need to make more.  I borrowed a food strainer from my friend and it was so much faster then using cheese cloth like I did the year before.  I definitely need to get me one of these.  The recipe I use for my jelly is from the Sure Jell pectin box found here. 

I know canning takes a lot of time and sometimes it's even cheaper to buy these products at the store, but it's something I really enjoy doing when I have the time.  Here is my pinterest board of canning recipes, some I've used and some I have yet to use.