Garden overflow

First wanted to say thanks for all your sweet comments on my life stay at home mom post. I just needed to get that off my chest and figured there is no better time to do it then now. Appreciate your comments and if you were offended feel free to email me and we can discuss and I'll pray over you. K? Now on to our regularly scheduled programming.
Garden recap: Our herbs are doing great this year and so are our peppers. Sad year for tomatoes but we are still getting a good sized crop just not as big as we hoped. 

Here is our pear tomato plant

Still full of blooms

Our roma tomato plant has seen better days but it is still producing some. 

Last weekend I collected all our jalapenos and herbs and got to canning. We had quite the weekend full of canning goodness. We added some other things that we don't grow but most of the things we did came straight from our garden.

From left to right (salsa, plum jelly, peach bellini jelly, peach jalapeno jelly, lemon honey jelly, pickled pear tomatoes and onions, herb jelly, mint jelly, and hot pepper jelly)

The whole loot 47 jars

Have you all ever had hot pepper jelly? It is one of my favorite snacks to eat. Hot pepper jelly scooped over a bit of warm cream cheese served with homemade wheat thins. Delish. I got a little excited for Thanksgiving time after making the herb jelly. I tasted like Thanksgiving in a jar. I used basil, thyme, and rosemary in the recipe and once we tried it both W and I knew it would be on our table this year with warm croissants. The mint jelly was not as minty as the ones you buy in the store but I liked that. It will be nice to serve with lamb and not be in your face minty. I am so glad I have finally found a use for our mint bush. Never grow mint. Unless you are a huge fan of mint and even then you should contain it to a planter. It grows back every year and just gets larger and larger. 

And that peach bellini jelly? It will be served with pound cake. Can't wait. In fact I may have to bake up a pound cake this weekend to test it out. 

So, what have you all been doing with your overflowing gardens? And how did your crop turn out this year?

Jammin'

I am obsessed with it now. So simple, so delicious, and quite fun. I have done both the freezer method and the shelf stable method and both types of jam taste delicious but to save space I think I will continue using the shelf method as I need all the freezer space I can get for meal planning and meat hoarding. 

For everyone who has never jammed before I would recommend giving it a try. The freezer method is the fastest as you do not even need to cook anything! You just cut up some fruit, add sugar to it, add instant pectin to it, stir it up real good, then pour it into containers. So simple.
The boil method takes a little longer but gives you a larger batch and has a little better jam color/consistency.
Here are a few pictures of the steps for the boil method.
1.) Collect berries...it helps if you have a large group to do the work for you help (or buy them from the store)

2.) Don't forget to taste test the berries...

3.) Get your supplies together. (here is a picture of the finished jam too)

You also need some big heavy duty pots and a dishwasher to sanitize all the jars in. Or you could boil them in a pot but the dishwasher works just as well.

4.) Wash, cut and smash your fruit. Throw them in a big pot with the sugar and pectin. And bring to a boil...stir constantly. Make sure you also have a large pot of boiling water ready to go and a smaller pot simmering with the lids in it. 

(You can see how full my stove is in this picture and me stirring away. also, don't wear a white shirt when you make strawberry jam or else you will have a tye-dyed pink shirt at the end)

5.) Now this step I don't have pictures of as it goes pretty quick and you need all your hands/helpers you can get. Basically you pour the boiling mixture of jam into the steamy hot jars then stick the lids on and get them in a boiling water bath to seal the jars up.

6.) Let the jars cool and seal on the counter for 24 hours. Then enjoy or stow away in your pantry for another day.

That's it. Super easy. And if you don't have the time to do the boil method please at least try the freezer one. That is what us house church ladies did and it was so quick and fun to be able to hang out and talk and not have to focus too much on boiling jams. Plus, it gave each of the ladies confidence to make jam on their own, with limited storage of apartment living, as you can make as little as 2 half pint jars at once.

We ended up make 12 half pint jars in under an hour! Six strawberry jams and six peach jams. We plan on having another party in the fall to include all the ladies who missed out this time. We think we will do hot pepper jelly, maybe strawberry rhubarb, and apple butter. We might even have another one this summer as one of the guys in our group has 3 peach trees and 3 apple trees at his house. He will definitely need us girls to come over and use up his fruit :)

The girls, and of course LB couldn't miss out on getting his picture taken, posing with our bounty after the jammin session :)

Do any of you can? What is your favorite thing to make? Next up on my list is spaghetti sauce. I can't wait for all our tomatoes to come in the garden so I can get to working on that, and maybe a few salsas too.