Fruit time!

It's been fruit season around here! In the past month I've kept busy with fruit processing. Here are the late summer/early fall 2011 totals:

Peaches: canned 18 quarts
Pears: canned 24 quarts
Raspberries: made about 13 pints of freezer jam
Strawberries: made about 21 pints of freezer jam

I only have about a dozen empty quart jars left in my pantry, which tells me that we have a lot of delicious preserved food on hand. Yay! I still have several quarts of applesauce that I made last year, and I have several quarts of chicken that I canned earlier this year. I may have to buy more jars when it's applesauce time, next month!

I don't think I've ever done strawberries this late in the year, but it's a good thing that they went on sale over the past few days because we had run out of freezer jam! I knew I hadn't made enough strawberry freezer jam in the spring, but I thought it would last us a little further into the winter. It was mutiny around here when the jam ran out and I had to BUY some jelly at the store. But, then I got a couple of flats of raspberries and made jam from them, and then over the weekend I bought a ton of strawberries on sale... 3 lbs for $1!! I bought 15 lbs on Saturday; didn't get to them until Sunday night and about half were moldy. Boo. So, I went back first thing this morning and bought 15 more pounds... at that price you can't expect them to be great quality, but I only had to throw probably about 1 lb worth of berries away from this morning's batches. This should last us until next spring, when strawberries are in season again.