Layne and Valeen Terry Family: Our Bountiful Harvest

We have had an amazingly bountiful harvest this year. We have had hundreds of tomatoes, which means salsa out our ears. Luckily my kids love it and eat it by the gallons.

This year the young men and young women did a fund raiser by selling corn on the cob at the Fremont County fair. Well, we learned, more than we earned. There is just not enough traffic at this local fair to justify the time or expense for the overhead. We got 40 dozen ears at the advice of our local hobby farmer in our ward. It was about 35 dozen too many. I had bought all the condiments to go with 40 dozen ears of corn. So rather than eat up all of our profits, of about $160 that had to be split between the YM & YW, I took my expenses out in the left over corn. So I shucked, cooked and cut off, and bagged 20 dozen ears of corn for the freezer.

I love doing this out on the deck, so the mess stays outside.

Then a few weeks later we harvested another twenty dozen out of our garden. So needless to say, the freezer is full!

Layne's nephew, Mikal, lives in Washington state with his wife Mindy. Her family has an apple orchard. So he brings apples down every year to sell. I bought a bushel this year and finally decided to give in to my family begging for applesauce.

Tanner helped me figure out the apple corer/peeler/slicer. And then I found out later you don't need to do that. But it is actually a pretty easy device to run. Karlee enjoyed working with it. So that helped her to be involved in the process.

The one thing I had about canning is the mess it brings into my kitchen. Bottles and bowls and pans everywhere!

Not to mention a sticky mess that I just have to take a deep breath and resist cleaning it up every two seconds, and wait until I am done to do it all once.

The apple pie filling went over big with the end results being enjoyed for several days. I bagged twelve quarts of apple pie filling for the freezer. So that will be enjoyed throughout the winter.

I was very frustrated with how many apples it took to get such a small amount of applesause!

Half a bushel of apples to get six quarts of applesauce?!?!?!

The half a bushel of apples to get 12 quarts of apple pie filling was much more rewarding.

Of course the zucchini and yellow squash are always plentiful and we can't eat it fast enough. So I cut it and bagged it to freeze. We will see if we remember to use it and if it is edible. I hope so. I think the next big purchase may be for one of those food savers, where it sucks the air out of the bags for freezing.

I told Layne that next year is is only allowed to grown one short row of cucumbers. I only want enough to enjoy eating fresh. We had so many that I couldn't get them canned fast enough and had to throw some of them away. We gave away a lot and I canned a ton of dill as well as some sweet, which I don't really care for, but Layne and Tanner like them.

As if I didn't have enough on my plate, I heard of a great deal on peaches, so I got a bushel and a half of those and canned those for the first time on my own. I remember doing it with my mom probably 25 years ago. Verla and Shay and Karlee helped me and that made it go pretty quickly.

As frustrated as the first bushel of apples made me, I must have lost my mind when I went and picked two more bushels from my brother, Calvin's, trees. A lady in my ward said I could use her applesaucer and that it was so much easier. So I wanted to give it a try. While I was there my sister-in-law, Kristie, told me to help myself to their tomatoes. Yes, I did mention that I had hundreds of my own. But mine were still green, and theirs were practically rotting on the vine. And I couldn't stand to see them go to waste.

So, since I make a lot of taco soup, I decided to dice them and can them. It is always such a Christmas miracle when you hear the lids popping and when you press down on each lid to find it has sealed. Ahh, the simple pleasures of life.

I got another twelve quarts out of the apples from Calvin's tree. Plus I had at least another six quarts that I just didn't have time to can. I started after dinner and was up until midnight waiting for these to cook. You have to have them at a rolling boil for 45 minutes! It takes forever for that big of a pot to even get to a boil. It drives me crazy. So I ended up just putting that last six quarts in containers in the fridge. I didn't need to worry about it going bad. My kids eat this stuff up like candy.

I have to tell them to slow down a little, because if all of my hard work is gone in six weeks I might just have a come apart!

The one thing that is frustrating about harvesting a garden, is that the produce does not wait until it is a good time for you. When it is ready, it is ready, and in most cases needs to be picked and preserved within a short amount of time. As with everything else, we had a crazy amount of beans. They were ready to pick at the same time I was doing the corn with the youth. My pressure cooker needs to be fixed, and the last time I did beans they went bad. So not only was I leery of doing them, I just didn't have time.

Luckily I have the best sister ever! LarRene volunteered to have her grandkids snap them and she canned 54 pints of beans from ONE picking! Needless to say, we let another family in our ward have the second picking, and then we ripped up the vines.

Just when I thought I was done canning for the season Verla mentioned that her plum tree was loaded. I have never done anything with plums before and didn't have much interest to do anything. But then the neighbors were picking them and cleaning up the mess of all the plums that had fallen. So I felt guilty and sent Karlee over to help clean up the mess. I told her to bring some home and we would make a "little" jam. When she came home with a twenty gallon tub, FULL of prunes I just about fainted. This thing was so heavy I couldn't even lift it. I asked her how she got it home from Grandma's. I guess me telling her to be a man, not a mouse has paid off. She and the ten year old neighbor girl lifted it up on to a wagon and pulled it home. Oh my!

So I decided if we had that many prunes to do that I could justify buying a strainer. This made the job much easier and really made a nice puree.

When I looked at the jam and jelly recipe I was horrified that it called for 7 cups of sugar for every 3 cups of fruit! That seemed outrageous. So I just used half the sugar along with some pectin. But I soon learned that the sugar is really what makes it jell. So instead of jam or jelly, we have some lovely plum syrup. It still tastes really good. It will just be used for french toast instead of on a peanut butter sandwich.

I also borrowed some dehydrators and made some fruit leather. This is not worth it to me. It takes a whole day, sometimes two if you get it too thick. And you get very little reward for the amount of time. So I probably won't do a lot of this in the future.

I have now definitely become obsessed about using up the plums. But they are rotting faster than I can strain them. So I boiled them and strained out the juice and have canned that. The kids like to add it to 7-up for a yummy drink. So now, I would like to hope that I can officially be done for the season. I am documenting this, so in the future when I don't can anything anymore I can look back and give myself a gold star for what I have done.

Karlee thought that picking raspberries was fun...the first time. After that the fun wore off. Our raspberry patch definitely hit its stride this year. We were picking every couple of days. I didn't make any jam this year. But we froze them and have been enjoying them on top of ice cream.
So next year I will probably venture into raspberry jam.