Green Bartlett pears
After waiting nearly two weeks for them to ripen, the above box of green Bartlett pears has been transformed . . .
Pint jars of pears
into 33 pints of canned pears. I do still find pears one of the most difficult canning projects, but it seemed a bit easier this year. Derek was a huge help with the peeling. Thanks Derek!
Up next: Picking the last of my Shiro plums and making fruit leather and then moving on to processing tomatoes into sauce. I have a good tomato crop this year, but I’ll probably still buy a box or two of pears from the local fruit stand to supplement. I’ll definitely need to do this if I want to can tomato soup in addition to regular tomato sauce.
How is your food preserving coming along?
Sandy
The 10 Year Challenge 
Those jars of pears look delicious – one of our all time favorite canned fruit. Doing one box is pretty ambitious but doing two of them is amazing. I have yet to do any canning. I have a freezer stuffed with produce though – kale, swiss chard, spinach, broccoli, braised red cabbage, peas, corn, and green beans. I am hoping warm weather this week will provide me with a flush of cucumbers so I can do a canning batch of dill pickle relish. Most of the rest of my canning will be done after I return from a trip to my mom’s in Spokane later this month. I always stop at the big fruit barns in Thorp and pick up the seasonal fruit – will probably be too late for pears this year but definitely will pick up boxes of apples and do apple sauce. I may have to grab a box of late season tomatoes then too to augment my gardens produce – but I will evaluate at that time. We have the potential with a warm and dry September to produce enough for our needs. Since it is the two of us now, I am finding we are not going through the tomato goods nearly as fast as we used to do. I have been freezing my tomatoes as they ripen to build up enough to do a batch of of sauce – since the tomatoes have been dribbling in this allows me to bank them up. Should get a larger flush of tomatoes in the next few weeks with the warm up and can do at least one batch of diced tomatoes from my own production.
Wow, Sandy! That’s a lot of pears! Will you actually eat all of those? Or is this part of the X-mas present stash? I wish that photo was inspiring, but I have to say I feel exhausted just looking at it. 🙂 Congrats!
Hmmm…*; ) Pears in tomato soup…it might just work!