Put em' up! (summer canning)

Finally I have some beautiful preserves to show you as a result of some summer canning!

I kicked off the canning season by pickling okra.....this was a first for me. The first batch didn't taste how we wanted it to, I think because we used apple cider vinegar instead of regular vinegar. No worries though, we have lots more okra pods coming off the plants and I made more batches :) Our okra is actually still going strong!

The second thing I tried my hand at was making a tomato-based marinara sauce from tomatoes that were going bad or already had bad spots. The sauce included onions, garlic and lots of herbs in addition to the pureed tomatoes. It smelled divine going into the jars for canning. I'm excited to try this fresh sauce during the wintertime!

Once our beans and cucumbers finally started coming in steadily (the first month or two they were plagued by critter attacks), I pickled some and preserved them with dill and garlic in a beautiful brine. Yum Yum Yum!

These refrigerator pickles don't require any processing- they are crisp and have a great bite to them. As you can see we have been nibbling them before I could get a proper photo :)

Last but not least, my friend and I had a canning party and put our preserving skills to work. We got up early, gathered our supplies, went to the farmer's market for the extra veggies we couldn't grow in our gardens and canned the rest of the day! We made a fun event out of it with snacks and good wine slipped in between canning the tomatoes, salsa and pickle relish recipes :)


These are literally the fruits of our labor:

tomatoes, salsa, and sweet relish made from canning party

canned fresh roma tomatoes

preserved sweet relish

My pantry is fully stocked with beautiful jars- more than it ever has been before. Canning is so much easier that I thought once you get the hang of it. I can't wait to do even more preserving before the season is over.

 What have you been 'putting up' lately? 

Linking to:

Homestead Barn Hop

Our babies are laying!

I came home on Tuesday after a horrific weekend (more on that later) to two, tiny, bite-sized pullet eggs sitting in the corner of the babies' coop. They are laying!!!!!!

The babies' eggs compared to Rosemary's eggs.

Albeit the eggs are miniature, but I'm so happy at least one of my girls, maybe two, are entering maturity. No matter how long you have had chickens, it's always a thrill when one of your young pullets lays her first egg. These are some recent snapshots of the babies, which have grown incredibly since I last posted about them:

This little girl is super sweet, and she has already been letting Reggie have his way with her. 

these two were purchased from a different breeder, and because their mama hen raised them they are pretty afraid of us (except when treats are involved!) and do no like being handled. 

This little girl likes to continually be under or near my feet. I think she is getting pretty attached :)

I completely forgot to post about their ugly, in-between teenage stage of chicken life. Maybe that's for the best :)  I will say that this bunch raised by hand are especially friendly with us, and don't mind being picked up and petted at all. They run up to me when I come outside and like to jump in my lap when I sit down on their level. Awwwww.

We have decided to continue our herb and spice naming tradition and these girls will be given the names of:

Lavender,
Sage,
Parsley,
Peppermint ("Pepper" for short),
Pennyroyal ("Penny" for short), 
Sassafras

I think I will only need to band a few of them because several are already easy to distinguish from the others. One has a single-comb (recessive gene), one of them has a crooked toe, and one is much darker than the others with grey/black legs instead of yellow legs. All of these traits are defects that will make them unable to be shown. But that's okay, I still have three others that could make decent show birds if I ever decide to venture into that the world of showing chickens.

hunting for bugs....

I am looking forward to seeing how much larger the eggs get as the girls grow up. When the other pullets start laying, we will be overrun with eggs. Perhaps around 35 a week!!! We plan to eat a lot, bake a lot, and give away a lot. We also have a local food pantry that our church is helping to get up and running to which we will be able to donate our extra fresh eggs.

What do you do with your extra eggs?

Linking to:

Homestead Revival Barn Hop