Canning Days of Summer

The past few days have been busy for me as I have been canning all our excess veggies from my dad's garden. This garden is one of the prettiest I've seen...and it produced some really wonderful corn, squash, green beans, tomatoes, peppers, and huge sunflowers. So I have been trying to figure out all the ways I can preserve them. On Monday, I started with cutting cucumbers for bread and butter pickles. I ended up with 5 quart jars of pickles. The next veggie that I needed to do something with was jalapenos and serrano's. I decided I was on a roll with the whole "pickling" thing, so I stuffed the peppers in quart jars and pickled them, coming up with 8 quarts of pickled peppers. By this time I was ready for a little more challenging canning operation...so I opened up Barbara Kingsolver's newest book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and followed her recipe for Spaghetti/Marinara Sauce. That day was definetly the longest and hardest canning days! Let's just say it was about a 6-7 hour process from start to finish. But we'll appreciate it when winter rolls around and we won't have these veggies on hand! So that's the life of some rural americans' summer...putting up all our excess fresh veggies...and looking forward to the days of fall!