{"id":10519,"date":"2024-07-24T13:53:09","date_gmt":"2024-07-24T17:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/?p=10519"},"modified":"2024-07-24T13:53:09","modified_gmt":"2024-07-24T17:53:09","slug":"why-bother-canning-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/2024\/07\/24\/why-bother-canning-so-much\/","title":{"rendered":"Why bother canning so much?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I get this question a lot. After all, on a good year I’ll can up dozens and dozens of jars of a good crop that’s had a great growing year. Sweet corn, for instance. Many people say, “Well, I canned up a couple dozen pints and gave away the rest. That’s all we’ll eat this winter.” Then they wonder why I bothered to put up a hundred pints. (Yes, I also gave away a lot too.) This year demonstrates the why of this! First off, we had torrential rain that washed away many of our sweet corn seeds in all but two of our gardens. Then it rained day after day, rotting those that hadn’t germinated right in the ground. After the rain stopped, we got intense heat that caused the clay in three of our gardens to crack into hard concrete. Okay, Will tilled up that mess and we started again. But the soil was clumpy and still kind of hard. We planted anyway, hoping for the best. It didn’t happen. Very little corn managed to germinate in that clumpy clay. The rain seemed to have returned to normal, so we again tilled and planted. Still, no dice. Fortunately, most of our corn from which we let mature and save seeds for our little seed business was planted in better soil and earlier. So, that, at least is doing quite well. But <\/em>I’m not going to have much, if any, sweet corn to can this year. Buying is out of the question as even at farmer’s markets, the corn is just too expensive. Fortunately, I still have at least a year’s worth of corn canned up, down in the pantry. That’s<\/em> why I always can up all I can in good years folks! We’re not greedy, just being prepared.<\/p>\n

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Fortunately, most of our corn varieties we planted for our seed business are doing quite well. This is Simonet.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our peppers look pretty good this year, both in the hoop houses and in the gardens. I planted lots of both jalape\u00f1os and Sugar Rush Peach peppers so I can make my now-famous Cowboy Candy, Vaquero Relish and Gaucho Relish, all using the Cowboy Candy syrup. I’ll swear, it’s like cocaine. You just can’t stop eating it! I even use the leftover syrup to can and use as a marinade and also in stir-fries and other recipes. Yum!<\/p>\n

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This year I wanted more Cowboy Candy and its syrup for other recipes, so I planted lots of jalape\u00f1os!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Each year I mix up our leftover old wildflower seed then toss it out onto disturbed soil to beautify our surroundings, whether it’s the driveway or along various paths. All that rain made the flowers really pop! In our new part of the front yard, Will had been in there with the tractor, scraping stumps and filling holes. Perfect. I tossed seed out there and wow, did it take hold. It’s just so beautiful! What a great place to come and sit \u2014 when the mosquitoes aren’t bad!<\/p>\n

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These are some of the flowers in the new part of our front yard, Spurred Snapdragons. I love them!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

— Jackie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I get this question a lot. After all, on a good year I’ll can up dozens and dozens of jars of a good crop that’s had a great growing year. Sweet corn, for instance. Many people say, “Well, I canned up a couple dozen pints and gave away the rest. That’s all we’ll eat this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,12,13,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10519"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10519"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10523,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10519\/revisions\/10523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}