Sad Strawberries

Our strawberry harvest was very sad this year. Last year it was wonderful. This year, we've made one batch of strawberry jam, a double batch of lemon strawberry marmalade and one batch of strawberry sauce. I think we may be done.

Kansas Dad thinks the June-bearing strawberries were hit rather hard by the bitterly cold winter and the drought-like spring.

Our apple tree gave a huge batch of apples last year, most of which went to the chickens because they had the audacity to be ready to be picked the week Second Son was born while we were a bit busy. This year, it didn't even blossom!

I was too tired and pregnant last year to really enjoy canning. This year I'm ready and there seems little available to can. Anyone around Kansas have luck with strawberries? Or anything else? I have an awful lot of pectin and jars I'd like to use!

My Small Successes XLII

1. We made our first batches of strawberry jam! So far we have four pints of strawberry jam and seven pints of strawberry lemon marmalade. The harvest is later than last year, but hopefully we'll still have a good one. Last year's was great, but I was too tired to can as much as I had liked. I tried a new recipe for pickled watermelon rinds, too, just because we had them. Kansas Dad is outside picking strawberries today so hopefully we'll have some strawberry sauce soon! (We also had strawberry smoothies for breakfast. Yum!)

2. We ordered a Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board. So far I've managed at least 30 minutes of exercise on all but one day. (That's 12 of the last 13 days. I didn't exercise on my birthday, more because I was worried about getting four adults and four kids to Mass on time than because it was my birthday.) I haven't noticed a difference in tone, strength, size or weight yet, but these things take time, right? I have been sore, so something must be happening. At the very least, I haven't exercised this much since I was playing basketball in high school.

3. I bought something for myself just because. I've wanted a Kindle for a long time but have never wanted to spend the money on something I so obviously didn't need. I had just enough birthday money for one, though, and my parents were encouraging me to order it. After consulting with Kansas Dad, I did. It should arrive tomorrow. I'm posting it as a success because it's the first time in (probably) years I haven't spent my birthday money on something for the kids, something for the kitchen or something for our homeschool. Not that I don't like spending money on those things, but Kansas Dad thought I was due to buy something for me. Now I'll be downloading all those classics I haven't read that are available for free. (Recommendations welcome.)

Head over to Chocolate for Your Brain for more Small Successes.

What I Learned About Canning Strawberries

Grow your own strawberries, if you can. Varieties you grow will be much tastier than anything you can buy in the stores (since they don't travel well). From what I can tell (Kansas Dad being the real expert), they aren't incredibly difficult to grow and you can certainly grow a lot of them in a small space.

Do a little research to decide if you want June-bearing (one big harvest in the spring), ever-bearing (smaller harvests, but in both the spring and the fall) or a blend. (We have about half June-bearing.) The first year (or spring, for ever-bearing), you'll want to pinch off the flowers so they plants put their energy toward roots rather than fruits. Strawberries are on the "worst" list for conventional fruits and vegetables, so growing your own or buying organic is probably worth the effort or the cost.

We invested quite a lot of money in jars, cheesecloth and pectin (mostly jars). We also bought sugar, lemons, corn syrup, and apple juice for some of the recipes and used some of our precious maple syrup for the smooch. The jars, of course, we'll be able to use again next year (if we don't give them away, which we'll do with some). We have lots of pectin left that will be good through next year's harvest. I did not count in our expenses a water bath canner (a gift from my mom last fall), canning utensils (like jar tongs) which I bought last fall, Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving where we found the recipes (many of which can also be found in the inserts for Ball pectin), or a stock pot (which I bought last year using some gift cards we'd saved). I highly recommend you have these items on hand if you intend to make quick or traditional jams (basically anything besides freezer jam).

Did we save money? Well, we think so, if we compare our costs (even including the jars) to that of buying quality organic strawberry jam without high fructose corn syrup. (Even the corn syrup we bought for the strawberry syrup didn't have high fructose corn syrup in the ingredients.) I'm assuming, of course, that our jam is high quality. If anyone in the area has canning jars they don't want, we'd be happy to take them off your hands!

We tried a variety of methods and recipes. You can read more about what we canned here.

The whole process for a quick or traditional jam or jelly in a water bath canner takes about two hours from starting the water bath heating to taking the jars out after they've been boiled. There's a good thirty minutes in the middle during which you cannot walk away or be distracted because you're stirring your jam or pouring it into your jars. Therefore, we only canned when both of us were home, during naptime (when the girls were safely tucked away) or after bedtime. I often started the canner simmering then got the kids in bed, so I was ready to heat my jam right when I came out after stories and prayers.

Overall, the canning process was much easier than I anticipated, especially using pectin and the quick jam recipes. Even the clean-up wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Most of it can be cleaned while the jars are boiling in the water bath.

My Small Successes XXIV

It's  Thursday and time for more Small Successes! Oh, wait, it's Friday. It's so nice to be reminded that even someone who seems as together as Danielle Bean is a bit late every once in a while. (At least she only forgot to post Small Successes yesterday. I lazed rested in my chair most of yesterday, neglecting the Thursday laundry schedule which now much be made up today.)

1. I made my first angel food cake (using a recipe in The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution) and it was a success! Now I just need to try to make some creme brulee so I have a way to use all the yolks. We'll also be increasing the protein in the chicken diet so they'll continue to lay in the hot weather. It takes eleven to twelve eggs to make angel food cake so those hens need to step up production.

2. I have frozen 24 burritos and one night's worth of tuna noodle casserole to eat after the baby is born. My stash was officially started with a dinner from a friend (mmm...enchiladas), but I'm glad to be adding to it myself as well. (Kansas Dad has eaten some of those burritos for lunches this week, but I'm not complaining because he also made a double batch of spicy penne casserole last night so we could freeze another dinner.)

3. I wiped all the jars of strawberry jams, jellies and sauces clean (see them here) and stored almost all of them under our bed until we need them. (Some people stuff money under their mattresses; we slide jars under them.) I have a few sitting prettily on the hutch until we deliver them to some friends and teachers who should have received gifts much earlier.

Read more Small Successes here!

Final Strawberry Tally for 2010

Over the course of a couple of weeks, we picked 96 pounds of strawberries from our garden. (Kansas Dad spent a lot of time on his knees picking strawberries.) This number does not include any that our friends picked and took home or the ones the kids ate right off the vine or out of the bucket before they made it inside. (Seriously, once First Daughter grabbed one of the buckets, plopped herself down on the log and munched away until they were all gone!) It also doesn't count the ones we lost when Kansas Dad was out of town and I didn't even try to keep up with the picking. I would guess we could have almost doubled the total picked, if we had wanted. (We like being able to invite friends to come pick berries.)

(We have a lot of strawberry plants. Kansas Dad planted 150 last spring, about half of which were June-bearing, I think. Many of those put out shoots that he stapled with garden staples so they would put down their own roots. We'll be planting more next year or so and I'll try to post then on what we learned about strawberry plant placement for maximum ease in picking.)

So what did we do with all of them? We ate a great many (yum!) and froze quite a bit (over 40 cups, mostly hulled and whole; we've already been digging those out for smoothies).

We also used a bunch right away:

• strawberry soup (I used a recipe online that was ok but not great so I didn't even save the link. Mostly it tasted like melted smoothie.);
• 4 loaves strawberry bread (I decreased the oil in the recipe because it was almost too moist!);
• strawberry shortcake (from The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution);
• sour cream strawberry muffins (substituting for the blueberries in a recipe from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains, very tasty!);
• strawberry crumble bars (substituting for raspberries in a recipe from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains, very good but next time we'll have to make them for a party - it was too many to eat before they went bad);
• strawberry pie using oatmeal nut pie crust (Both of these were delicious, especially that crust! I pressed the crust into the pie pan, refrigerated for 30 minutes, baked for about six minutes, then cooled and refrigerated again before putting in the strawberries.);
• strawberry compote (which is just strawberries and sugar, to use on my very first angel food cake);
• 2.5 pints strawberry-banana freezer jam (which only First Son really liked; we're probably going to use it up in smoothies or something); and
• 2.5 pints strawberry freezer jam (which we don't like as well as the canned jam we made; freezer jam seems to have a stronger taste and we prefer it a bit more mellow).

Then, there was the canning. I'm planning a separate post on what we learned about canning strawberries and a few tips, but here's a picture of all our jars (minus one we already gave away):

I particularly like that pretty strawberry jelly on the end:

Here's what we have (all recipes from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving):

• 17.5 pints strawberry jam (the original quick recipe, some with liquid pectin and a variation with some lemon peel so it's "lemony");
• 6 pints strawberry jelly;
• 11 pints quick strawberry lemon marmalade (We love this recipe. Next year we'll be more ambitious and try some of the traditional marmalade which should be more caramelized.);
• 3.5 pints strawberry syrup (for pancakes and waffles and other such yummy fare);
• 2 pints strawberry sauce (for ice cream and other desserts - very yummy, but a bit harder to make than the quick jams with pectin because I had to stir boiling strawberry goo for 15 minutes. It's a good thing we have one of those plastic mitts to protect my poor hands - I still had to switch hands every few minutes because they'd get too hot!); and
• 3.25 pints maple strawberry smooch (a very good dessert topping option for those who prefer maple syrup to sugar or who happen to live somewhere that has a lot of maple syrup. You know who you are.).

Some of the pints I tallied are actually canned in half pint jars. We have more than enough strawberry jams, jellies and treats for the year and plenty to give away, too.

I highly recommend the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. Many of the recipes can be found inside the Ball boxes of pectin (including the marmalade recipe), but the back of the book has an extensive "tutorial" on canning with lots of tips and explanations that make following the recipes a lot easier. There are also a bunch of other recipes (many of which can be made with a simple water bath rather than a pressure canner) that we want to try with tomatoes and other produce. If you have excess garden or CSA produce, you're sure to find something intriguing to try.

Now I can save this post to read when the harvest gets overwhelming next year. I'll remember how wonderful all these treats were throughout the year and how satisfying it feels to look at that table full of jars! (We've also been even more inspired to get some other berry plants in. Perhaps we'll be able to plant some next year.)

For those that are wondering, we still have a few fruits on the ever-bearing plants, but it's not enough to even make it into the house.

Small Successes XXIII

1. I'm posting some Small Successes! (Ok, I won't really count that.) Kansas Dad has been handling a lot of the meals around here. Mine have mostly been peanut butter and jelly or left-overs (from something Kansas Dad made). Now that the strawberry harvest is pretty much over (the June-bearing anyway), I've found a little more energy. Right now I have bread in the machine, two pounds of dried beans cooking and a potful of brown rice simmering. (Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be making some burritos. Perhaps we'll eat some, but the majority will go in the freezer for quick meals before and after baby is born.) Last night, I made some maple strawberry smooch with some of the most recent harvest. Kansas Dad has been picking about five pounds every few days (instead of 16 pounds every other day), so it's more manageable. Cake flour is on the grocery list for tomorrow so we can try some over pound cake.

2. Yesterday the kids and I put away the clean clothes that had been accumulating in the master bedroom. At least they were folded...the piles just kept growing!

3. I pulled out some zucchini from the freezer and plan to make chocolate chocolate chip muffins with it tomorrow (or Saturday, if the whole wheat flour comes home from the store after my energy is gone). First Daughter will be pleased as she's been begging to help bake.

Check out more Small Successes here!

Canning Strawberries

I cannot believe how much sugar we use when canning - seven cups is not unusual! Here's the sugar for our first batch:

Here are a few of the berries. Later daily harvests have easily been four or five times this amount.

And here's the first batch of strawberry jam. We used the very first recipe in Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

The next harvest included a double batch of strawberry jelly and some lemon strawberry marmalade (oh, so yummy!):

All on my own last Wednesday I canned a batch of strawberry jam using liquid pectin (I did not find it superior to the regular pectin, which is cheaper), but I forgot to take a picture of it.

Last night, a friend and I made seven half pints of strawberry syrup (with a bit left over for pancakes this morning). There's nothing like a bunch of sugar and corn syrup cooked with strawberries! I don't have a picture of these either, but they are still on the counter so I may get one before we move them to the hutch. (I'm gathering them all together for a big picture when the June-bearing harvest is over. I'll need it as a reminder of the end results when harvest season rolls around next year and I get exhausted!)

Kansas Dad was out of town for a conference for the last few days (which I can tell you now that he's home). We had a few people come pick, but there were a lot on the vine still. He hit a few this evening (maybe three pounds or so) before the thunderstorms moved in and will have to pick them all clean tomorrow. I think I'm actually looking forward to some more big harvests after a welcome respite. On the schedule so far: strawberry sauce (mmmm....ice cream) and strawberry freezer jam.

Unexpected

Fifteen years ago, as I was finishing up high school (and now you all know how old I am), I never would have believed in 2010 I'd be standing barefoot in my kitchen in front of a hot stove, 7 months pregnant with my fourth child, stirring jam made from strawberries my husband had picked in our own garden. In Kansas.

But I wouldn't have it any other way. (Well, maybe it would be better if someone else did the actual stirring for the one minute of boiling jam bubbling all over.)

Flower and Harvest Update

Probably no one out there cares, but I wanted to have a little record (since this blog serves as my garden journal in addition to my baby books) that the irises are officially no longer blooming. We have a few fading flowers at this point.

The daylilies have sent up their flower stems, so we're hoping for blooms soon. We're pretty indifferent to the flowers out in the garden, but learned last year they are quite wonderful as daily cut flowers for the kitchen. (Eventually we'll probably plant something other than orange ones.)

The wildflowers have gone crazy with all the rain (and still no one to mow; anyone have a tractor and want to mow a couple of acres for us?). The plains larkspur have bloomed all over the yard and they're lovely. We also have lots of sweet little yellow flowers all over. I'm not quite sure what they are as I didn't take any pictures yesterday or bring any in and there are a bunch of possibilities. According to our paper, Kansas is one of the  most prolific states in wildflowers and I'd have to say our bit of the Range is living up to their expectations.

Oh, and Kansas Dad picked 16 pounds of strawberries yesterday morning. Instead of mopping, I spent the entire day dealing with berries:

• made 2.5 pints of strawberry-banana freezer jam (incredibly easy with the freezer pectin) which First Son thought was good but the girls both hated,
• hulled 24 cups of whole strawberries, cooked and crushed them, then let them sit in cheesecloth overnight to drain juice for jelly (a double batch scheduled for this morning),
• hulled and crushed 6 cups of strawberries for strawberry lemon marmalade, also scheduled for this morning,
• we ate strawberries at lunch, dinner and breakfast...and there are still a few sitting out.

Anyone want to come pick strawberries? You can take home whatever you can fit in your baskets! (I'm not kidding. Really.)

Strawberry Update

From the 11pounds of strawberries Kansas Dad picked on Friday:

• 7 pints of strawberry jam
• 4 cups frozen strawberries
• ate about 4 cups with whipped cream.

From the 11 pounds of strawberries Kansas Dad picked yesterday:

• 2 loaves of strawberry bread (very yummy and very moist)
• strawberry shortcake shared with Grammy and Paw Paw (Kansas Dad made real shortbread and real whipped cream)
• 10 cups of frozen strawberries
• some we ate fresh

We didn't pick any today, but Kansas Dad is going out in the morning so I'm sure we'll be doing something with strawberries tomorrow. We also stocked up on some lemon, cheesecloth, pectin, jars, extra lids and freezer containers so we can try even more recipes from our Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. There are a lot of strawberry recipes in there, so we shouldn't get bored too quickly.

The chickens are probably in heaven. Not only are they eating strawberry hulls to their hearts' content, they even got the sugary foam from the strawberry jam. Today, they thanked us with seven eggs, the most we've gotten in a long time!

By the way, I do have some pictures from our strawberry jam. I've just been too tired to get them off the camera. Hopefully I'll get to that tomorrow. You know, because our jars of strawberry jam are going to look very different from anything you've seen before. Or not.

Kansas Dad also planted a bunch of tomato plants yesterday and today. I think the pepper plants will go in tomorrow. I know I'll be thankful when it's salsa time!

My Small Success XIII

It's hard to believe it's Thursday already, and time for more Small Successes.

1. My mom and I made these lovely jars of applesauce and tomatoes. It was my first time using a water bath canner and it wasn't as hard as I thought. It was also much harder than I thought, but we were had ambitious goals for the day. We also sliced some apples for the freezer, so an apple pie is in order...as soon as I've recovered. By the way, my mom brought her Pinzon Apple and Potato Peeler, Corer, and Slicer and it's amazing. I told her that's what I want for Christmas. I also finally chopped and froze the growing pile of hot chili peppers on our counter. Let's not think about the hundreds still out on the plants.

2. First Daughter's birthday party was a success! I hate birthday parties, not attending them (that's great), but hosting them. I'd much rather declare our family a non-birthday-party-family, but Kansas Dad says they're required. He planned the games (apple bobbing for preschoolers and a pumpkin hunt) and I managed some cupcakes and an apple cake decorated with cut-out apple cookies. First Daughter's favorite part was when the Bob cake-topper got all dirty (with frosting) on the cupcake. The highlight for most guests seemed to be when Kansas Dad showed them how to catch grasshoppers and feed them to the chickens.

3. I did not exercise last Monday, so I missed a session. I planned on missing it because my parents were in town and I wasn't comfortable working out while they sat on the futon right behind me and watched, but I was all prepared to surprise you by making it up on Tuesday. Instead, we adopted a dog. I may still make it up on Saturday. I did, however, exercise at my regularly scheduled time on Wednesday. I'm considering this a success because I didn't let missing a session derail me altogether. (Too convoluted?) I was nervous with the dog, worried he would get in the way, but I put his pillow down and rewarded him a few times with treats and attention. He only strayed a few times right at the beginning. (I don't know what his previous owners were thinking; he's fantastic.)

Bonus: We had our first homeschool field trip (pictures still to come) at the botanical gardens. Still to come this week: our first Nature Study Club meeting.

Head over to Faith & Family Live for more Small Successes!

Pretty Picture

What I Don't Recommend

Spending all day Saturday in the kitchen canning tomatoes, making applesauce and slicing apples for the freezer and baking cupcakes and apple cake for a three year old's birthday party to be held at your house the next day.

But at least we only broke two jars (an empty one and my little salt jar).