2015 Tally of Preserves

It has long been my goal to keep better records of what I grow (always too busy planting to keep track of what gets planted) and what I harvest (weighing what I bring in from the garden sounds simple until I am rushing out to pick greens and supper is late, blah, blah, blah). Maybe next year I will be more organized and keep a better record, but for this year I have concentrated on an overall tally of what I was able to preserve through canning and freezing.

I thought that I would include this spring's maple syrup, our first ever. Because it was a novelty to most of our friends we gave away several tiny taste-test size jars and had a couple of half-pints for the kids to have on pancakes and for me to use in bread. I saved 2 quarts in hopes that the weather will cooperate and we can do maple taffy in the snow at each of our son's birthday parties (January and March). Last year we had tobogganing and horse-drawn sleigh rides for both and the weather was nice. I hope we are as lucky this year :)

I was lucky to be invited to pick fruit with a friend in a lovely yard this summer. There we picked enough plums for good eating plus a bit of plum sauce (seriously, removing the pits was so time-consuming!).

My boys enjoyed pitting cherries, though, and were a great help. The wild saskatoons were wonderful this year and we discovered just how many grow right here in our yard.

My garden was a dismal failure by some standards. We had a drought until July and the scorching heat and my inconsistent watering did not enable much that I planted to germinate. Some things came later and I was surprised how much lettuce I ended up with. Pumpkins continued to bloom until frost without ever producing fruit larger than a golf ball--terribly disappointing because I successfully started the plants from seed! If anyone has pointers on growing pumpkins I would appreciate some advice!

Like most years, though, what my garden lacked was supplemented by the generosity of my mom and neighbours. A friend's mom gave me half a box of apples which I split with my mom and made apple pie filling with. I was given cucumbers and still managed to make enough pickles for our winter eating. My aunt gave us carrots and I saved enough to make a treat jar of pickled carrots for Husband to enjoy over the Christmas holidays. In many ways the scarcity of the pickles makes us savour them more and it is always a shame to throw out uneaten ones when you have gone to so much work.
Every year I plan to grow more tomatoes and more peppers for even more salsa, but like the pickles it is a shame to see it go to waste. So this year I have concentrated more on slow roasting and freezing for sauce and know that the salsa I have made for ourselves and as gifts will be all the more special because there is less of it.

So here it is, a tally of what I have "put up" from my garden, yard, and generous gifts from others:

2015 Preserves

2 qt saskatoon pie filling
2 x ziploc freezer bag of berries
2 qt rhubarb/saskatoon "fruit" for our elderly neighbour
3 qt cherries "fruit"
3 qt cherry pie filling
2 qt apple pie filling

2 pints pickled beets
1 quart dilly beans
5 pints hot chili chutney
3 1/2 pints raspberry jam
3 pints million dollar relish
5 1/2 quarts bread and butter pickles
2 qt + 1 pint sweet heat salsa plus 7 half pints of sweet heat salsa for gifts
4 qt hot salsa
6 qt canned whole tomatoes
1 qt dilled carrots
2 qt dill pickles
5 ziploc freezer bags of roasted tomatoes (so far). Tomatoes still ripening in the basement

1 laundry basket of potatoes minus what we ate fresh from the garden. Red potatoes were scabby but large, white potatoes were excellent.

Perhaps most exciting in this year's food production were the two apples that our 2 year old honeycrisp apple tree produced. The fruit was huge, crisp and juicy, and although there were only two apples we watched them grow and shared them as a family. We are very hopeful that the tree will provide us with plenty of beautiful apples in years to come.

Easter 2015

Sugaring on an old cook stove at the farm. 

Great memories for the kids and grown ups alike. Happy Easter!

Sugaring in Saskatchewan

When we planted trees on our acreage the year we had our house moved here, I purchased and planted over 100 Manitoba Maple trees with the intention that my sons could one day tap them and have a source of syrup, if they choose. Then this winter my brother mentioned he didn't think maple trees ran sap in our climate, so we discussed that possibility and he decided we should tap the maple trees at our parents' farm to find out.

A week ago my brother noticed sap leaking from where two limbs were removed from my mom's big old maple tree on her lawn. The following morning we tapped 21 of the maples in her hedge row using stainless steel tubing my brother had on hand. Although we only collected approximately 8 gallons of sap we wanted to boil it up before it spoiled.

There is A LOT of contradicting information online regarding maple sugaring. I recommend you do your research ahead of time using trusted sources (what makes for good photography on pinterest and some blogs may not be sound advice) and, if you have access to maple trees, give it a try. We only tapped about half of the trees available to us--next year we plan to tap all of the maples and purchase some spiles and a hydrometer if we can find them. Our product turned out a bit cloudy but tastes wonderful and the kids absolutely loved the experience of helping tap the trees, collect the sap, and participate in the boiling.

We ended up with about a pint of syrup this year so far--perhaps some might say that is not worth the effort and resources. For us, having the kids up and dressed and out in the fresh air every morning to do their "job" was wonderful and they are extremely proud of the part they played in making the the syrup. But, as my 5 year old pointed out, it's all thanks to the trees ;)