Getting Too Old For Long Hours

It’s canning season again and I help several ladies with their annual harvesting and canning of their gardens’ bounty. I stopped gardening a few years ago when my kids left home and when two seasons of weeding my garden was ankle deep in mud. For several years I’ve helped friends harvest and can vegetables from their gardens. For some reason this year my body doesn’t like to cooperate and so far it’s been a banner year from those gardens and a third garden has been adding some crops of zucchini and cucumbers.

Monday I went to one friend’s garden to pick green beans. I knew one lady was feeling poorly and decided to give us a jump start. I started at 7:30 AM because she usually wants to start between 8:30 and 9:00 AM. I searched the bushes of three rows picking nearly 4 gallons of green beans. I just finished the last row when my friend arrived. We began to wash, snap, and pack the beans into jars. We also made “Marie’s Ketchup Peppers” a very tasty sauce using onions, ketchup, and peppers, hot and mild in the mixture. The onions needed chopped, the peppers seeded and diced, then added to the ketchup, sugar, oil to simmer, place in jars, and pressure cooked. We also made “dilly beans.” The thinner beans were placed in brine, some garlic, and either salt and dill seed or dry Italian salad dressing mix. I got home just after 6 PM to shower, eat, and head for bed.

Our canning team is short one person. Her days and hours of work were changed. She’s less available. We missed her help with cutting, washing dishes, and sweeping up messes.

Tuesday I was able to stay at home until 8:30 AM before we picked, canned, and stewed the tomatoes that were ripe. We also picked a peck of peppers, washed and chopped them up to make hot pepper jelly and made more ketchup peppers. Some were canned in pint jars for us older people who live alone. Often a quart was too much. Then we pulled the beets and washed them before we boiled them to loosen the tough outer skins and cut them into chunks to fill the jars. I got home again after 6:00 PM.

Today we are making sauerkraut. Heads of cabbage will be sliced on a mandolin, packed in salt, mashed down, then stored in a semi-sealed bucket for nearly 2 weeks before it can be packed into jars and canned. I’m not sure yet if anything else is being planned, but it is going to be a later start day.