Friday, November 18, 2011

I CAN Can....And Freeze--Trailer Park Homestead 2011 totals

I finished up canning my venison stock last night, thereby ending my planned canning this year.  I say planned because if my husband uses all his deer tags, I may end up needing to can some venison too, since I'm about out of freezer space, but we'll have to wait and see what happens with that. 

As of right now, I have 257 jars of food I canned in the house.  Yay me!  Not bad for my first year of fairly serious canning effort, wouldn't you say?

Here's what I have (totals may not actually add up to 257, since these tallies were done a couple days ago when the pictures were taken) and I'm pretty sure we've used some since then):

apple-tomato salsa (14 1/2 pints, 16 pints, 5 quarts)
tomato salsa (1 quart)
applesauce (16 1/2 pints, 43 pints, 8 quarts)
peaches (19 pints, 8 quarts)
pears (5 pints, 14 quarts)
pearsauce (8 pints)
diced tomatoes (8 pints, 12 quarts)
tomato sauce (4 1/2 pints, 31 pints)
dill pickles (3 pints, 9 quarts)
chicken stock (2 pints, 5 quarts)
venison stock (11 pints, 4 quarts)
ground cherry jam (8 1/2 pints)
raspberry jam (3 1/2 pints, 1 pint)
blueberry jam (2 1/2 pints, 6 pints)
peach honey (1 pint)

In addition to the canned stuff, I managed to fill the freezer this year too.  Our small chest freezer currently contains nothing that was in there prior to June of this year.  I didn't bother with quantities on the freezer stuff since the hodge-podge of bags and freezer containers doesn't lend itself well to standard sizing.

venison (soon to be added to, since my husband got another deer on Monday and hopefully will be getting more)
chicken (see When Zombie Chickens Attack)
acorns waiting to be processed
blueberries
strawberries
strawberry freezer jam
raspberry freezer jam (just a couple jars.  I got my canner as raspberries were coming into season)
a little bit of tomato juice
a little bit of tomato sauce that didn't seal when canning
venison stock
cream of mushroom soup
broccoli
red food coloring (derived from beets, still untested but will try soon)
shredded zucchini
Harvard beets
carrots (both sliced and sticks)
snap beans (2 kinds)
peas
corn
pear fruit leather
apple fruit leather
green peppers

I'm pretty proud of what all I put up this year.  Of all this stuff, the only things that came from a store were the mushrooms for the mushroom soup, a few other ingredients in the mushroom soup, the sugar for jams, the pectin in some of the jams, lemon juice used in canning, some vinegar, a little salt in the stocks, and the dill pickle spices.  That's it.  For that whole long list of foods, that's all the grocery store had to contribute.  Everything else came from hunting, foraging, gleaning, the farmers market (bought with insanely little money thanks to the Double Up Food Bucks program), or from my tiny Trailer Park Homestead.

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