Daily BULK Garden Harvest →Preserved! | Canning, Freezing & Freeze-Drying

Hi everyone, welcome to Little Mountain Ranch. If you're new here, my name is Chelsea. If you've been here before, welcome back. We're hanging out in the garden this morning doing an impromptu harvest. Well, it's not really impromptu because I actually come down every morning and do a harvest very similar to the one that we're going to do today. And the reason for that is for the most part I grow bulk produce and all of that produce becomes ready around the same time. So I often am harvesting all of one thing. So the broccoli harvest that we did together the other day where we harvested the bulk of the broccoli, we have cauliflower that's coming on. When we did our garlic, it was all garlic. But there's still a lot of things that are coming on each day that just sort of trickle into the kitchen. And so what I try to do is come down to the garden every morning and do a walk around the garden and pick whatever it is that needs to be picked. I like to do it in one to avoid the heat, of course, but also because a lot of the vegetables that I grow do best after a cool night, not when they've been sitting out in the baking sun all day long. For the most part, that's how I garden. I garden with the intention of big bulk harvests all at once. I preserve all of that particular vegetable all at once. And then it's kind of like a one and done situation. But in the garden, there's lots of things that trickle in throughout the season. So one of the examples of that would actually be broccoli. So I've already done my big bulk harvest of broccoli where the majority of the heads came mature all around the same time. I picked all those and preserved all those, but there's still quite a few heads. There's probably 15 or 20 heads of broccoli in this patch that weren't quite ready to harvest at that time. So each day I'll come out and pick the ones that are ready. I thought it would be fun to take you with me on one of my morning wanders through the garden. We'll see what we end up at the end of it. And I'll be making a decision about how we're going to preserve that together today. So we're going to start here in the broccoli patch and go through and just see if there's any heads that we need to pull off right now. There are quite a few left. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 just right along right here that could size up a little bit more. They're nice and tight still so I can leave them in to bulk out a bit more over the next couple days. But I'm sure there are also some that we need to pull off now that are starting to loosen. That would be one right there. Oh there's another beauty. It's a guarantee that there's going to be zucchinis to pick. No question about it. One, two, oh that one I should have picked a few days ago. Ideally I'd like to pick them when they're around this size because they don't have a lot of seed in them and the flesh isn't very watery. It's nice and dense but I do have a plan for larger ones like that. A couple more heads of broccoli. Quite a few zucchini in there. I know for sure I have a couple more zucchini down in the high tunnel too because I noticed those ones yesterday. I just spotted something that I have been trying to eradicate in my garden basically since I planted it in here eight years ago and that is this borage. So borage is beautiful. I'll show you one of these flowers here. Look at how pretty that is. Absolutely gorgeous. So it was eight years ago that I planted the first borage in my garden and I haven't planted it in here since and every single year I pull out literally hundreds of borage plants. I kid you not. And they have spread from one end of my garden to the other and while I do love a good volunteer plant, I have probably hundreds of different volunteer plants in my garden and I do love that, when it comes to the borage it is just so invasive in the garden. So I've been trying to eliminate it. I'm going to let this one go maybe another couple of days until it goes to seed and then I'm going to pull it out. I planted this primarily for the bees because the bumblebees absolutely love borage, but I don't use it in recipes. It tastes very similar to a cucumber, something like that, but it's not something that we love. The flowers do make beautiful decorations, decorative flowers on cakes and stuff, but they don't taste great. So it's not something that I want to keep in the garden and it's too bad because it really is pretty. A trip down to the garden is not complete without a quick tour at what's new as far as the flowers that are growing in the garden and right now they are just gorgeous. This is an example of some of the volunteer flowers that I have in my garden that are welcome to show up anytime, anywhere and that is the calendula. They are such a beautiful, cheerful flower and I have all different colors, different shades of yellow. I have some oranges, some orange and white and they are beautiful, but they also are a medicinal plant. I take these petals off and freeze dry them and then use them to make salves in the winter time, but more than that they're just gorgeous. We are about to have gladiolas. This is my first time ever growing, oh what was that? Some kind of little, little green spider. First time ever growing glads and I just cannot wait for these to bloom. And look at this dahlia. Is that not exquisite? I'm a little obsessed with the dahlias, I must admit. They are so stunning. Look at how cheerful that is. Oh look at this one. It's going to have some white on there. Another one of the show-off blooms over there. Oh my word, look at that. Dahlias are something I don't think I will ever go without now in the garden. They just bloom and bloom and bloom and their colors are almost outrageous. Look at that yellow, pink, oh my word. So yes, a little mountain ranch garden will never not have dahlias in it from now on. I have some gladiolas here in the back all the way along as well and I did not know that dahlias grew so abundantly and so tall or I would have planted these somewhere else. But I think they're going to be able to reach up in behind here and we'll still be able to see them. But they're so gorgeous that they really do deserve their own bed. And then of course there is our poppies. In the morning when I come out here, especially really early, the poppies are just warming with my honeybees which I love. And early in the morning is when the poppies look the best. As soon as the sun hits them they open up. I am going to definitely do a poppy patch like this in my garden again next year but I'm going to be a little bit more strategic I guess about the way that I plant them because I just took hundreds of seeds and threw them in this spot which looks glorious but they're so densely packed together that they some of them are dying off, they're falling over. I do have some supports along the side here to try to hold them up so that they're not falling into the pathway but I'll plant them just a little bit more spaced out next year. But my goodness it is still so beautiful. Okay I was heading back to the pickling cucumbers to see if we have any pickling cucumbers and I saw this spot and I just think this looks so lovely. So we have shasta daisies here which are perennial. I have a few perennial flowers in my garden because I do a no-till garden and the beds stay as they are from year to year. I can plant perennials in here so we have the shasta daisies and I love the white cheerfulness of them. We have some baby pak choy here that bolted and I decided to leave it because the bumblebees absolutely love this stuff. They love any of the blooming brassicas so I left those because I love the white and the yellow and then in behind we have a volunteer sunflower that has multi heads on it so when that blooms I'm not sure what color it's going to be because the volunteer sunflowers in my garden hybridize year after year and I end up with mixes of all different kinds of things so we don't know if it's going to be a straight up yellow or a pinky or a gold kind of color but that's just going to look gorgeous and then we have the dahlias in the back and then the gladiolus that are going to come up there. This spot is just going to look gorgeous when it's in full bloom. It looks really beautiful right now too though I think. All right what we have here are our pickling cucumbers and I'm not sure if we have any in here so let's take a look and see. We have scads and scads of flowers. These little guys are prickly oh my gosh so these were some that I got at the local nursery that were just called pickling cucumbers so I'm not sure which variety they are but they're very prickly. Be cool if we could get enough to do a jar of fermented pickles. Pickling cucumbers are one of those plants that you really do need to be checking every single day best in the morning and preserve them the same day and I'll show you some tricks when we go in the house how I do that without driving myself crazy. Not a bad little harvest so far. I know I for sure have some cabbages to grab over on that side of the garden but my high tunnel is closed right now and I need to go get it opened anyway so we'll go harvest anything that we need to pick from in there first. Oh boy it is going to be very very hot in here. Okay I'm just going to run down and open up the back door too. All right here we are in the jungle. I have volunteer sunflowers growing in here and what's really cool about these ones is they are a hybrid between a couple different varieties that I grew in here the first year so five years ago now I think it is and one of them was a teddy bear variety so a short sunflower with just a completely teddy bear head and I'll show you one in a sec but it hybridized with a different variety and now I have these very unique sunflowers growing in here that I just love. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? So it has a little bit of the teddy bear petaling here and then the regular, I was going to say feathers, the regular petals here so this is what a teddy bear blossom looks like. This one's a hybrid too though because it's quite tall but it has more the teddy bear characteristics on the bloom. I just love how this one gets that green in the middle like that. I just think that is so beautiful. So these will eventually form into the seeds when the flowers fully mature but I love it like that. My goodness friends it is very very hot in here. Okay so what we have to harvest is a bunch of our basil and this is the third or fourth time that I've cut the basil back and we'll probably get at least one more flush on here before it bolts. Oh that smells so good. Okay let me show you where you want to cut these. So you can see here how we have some branches that are coming out here so when you're going to cut it, cut it right above a set of branches like that and then these will grow up into more basil for you. This was quite exciting. Look we have an early melon there and another one there and our watermelons are just going crazy and I noticed we have some little baby watermelons coming on so that is exciting. I hope we have enough time to actually get some of these. These are little miniature dwarf watermelons that are supposed to do well in the north so we shall see. I came in and did some pruning two days ago and haven't cleaned up my pruning clippings but I was quite happy because I don't have as many tomatoes growing on my vines as I normally do but once I clipped off all of the bottom leaves here I was able to see that I actually have quite a few beautiful clumps of tomatoes growing on here. Look at that just lovely and we do have a couple ripe ones. So these little marzito tomatoes are supposed to make really good sauce. This is the first time that I've ever grown them but they're quite prolific. You can see here and they are ripening before lots of the other tomatoes are so one will definitely grow again and the flavor is pretty good too. I definitely recommend the micro dwarfs for green stalks. They do really well. Cute little harvest. Oh my gosh what do we have over here? This is super exciting. This is my first larger tomato of the year. This one is a black crim. Isn't that gorgeous? The black Hungarians are just going crazy and they're actually ready. Some of these are ready to harvest here but because I have so much to already do in the kitchen today I'm going to hold off and just do a pepper day but I just wanted to show you something. Can you see these kind of almost what look like stretch marks on the pepper? Those actually are stretch marks and they're caused by a really deep intensive watering. This can happen with rain if you get a really strong deluge of rain especially after a bit of dry spell and then the fruit grows really fast and the skin can't keep up with it. That's also what happens when you get cracks on your tomatoes as well. This zucchini plant here is absolutely beautiful. For those of you in the south you're probably used to seeing zucchini plants this big. For us in the north they don't generally get this large certainly not this early in the season but growing it here in the high tunnel just made it go poof. Over here this is a dwarf no sorry a bush delicata and it is also massive but I did notice when I was here yesterday that I have a gigantic zucchini. So these ones are black beauty I think is the variety of these ones so we have a nice big one there a little bit of a smaller one. I'll check the other plant over here. So the risk I run growing plants like this in my high tunnel is that there's pretty high humidity in here and high humidity can equal fungal growth like powdery mildew for instance but so far so good and it's going to be very hot now for the next couple of weeks and the air here is generally really dry so with the doors open it should hopefully stay dry enough in here to ward off the powdery mildew. Let's see what do we have in here oh there is one another big one. I actually didn't hand pollinate these ones but I do have my beehives right outside the high tunnel and they come in here and pollinate for me which is great. Definitely gonna have to do something with zucchini today that's for sure. Just as I came back in the house the signal on my freeze dryer letting me know that the batch of broccoli that we did together the other day was finished which is perfect timing because I can show you how this reconstitutes. So remember I have not done this before and I was curious to know how it would reconstitute. I do do cauliflower which works really well so let's give this a try. I also wanted to show you that we have a ton more berries in the back that we wild harvested off of our property yesterday. So that was yesterday afternoon because it starts to cool off in the afternoon a little bit later and they've been sitting there waiting for me to do something with. We got another six gallons of saskatoons and a gallon of raspberries which is very exciting. So we're just going to do something simple with that for today because we have so much other preserving in our wheelbarrow there to have to deal with. So first let's grab this bowl here and we're going to put a couple of pieces of broccoli along with a piece of the stem. So this is kind of cool but as you can see it's literally just breaks into dust because there is zero moisture left in here. We're just going to soak it in water for a few minutes until it has rehydrated. What's cool about a freeze dryer is it retains I think it's somewhere up to 95 maybe even 98 percent of the nutritional content that it had when it went into the freeze dryer. So if you pick it out of your garden, blanch it and freeze it or chop it up and freeze it depending on what it is right away it retains most of its nutrients which is really cool because all it's doing is removing the water from it. So what we're going to do here is package these up and then get them because you do want to get your freeze dried food put into containers or either jars with oxygen absorbers or bags with oxygen absorbers right away because they it will start to absorb moisture right out of the air as soon as you take it out of the freeze dryer. But what's good about this is I actually need these trays for the basil and the raspberries that I want to put into the freeze dryer. I do have another set of trays but they are full freezing in the freezer so what I might actually do is take those out put those in the freeze dryer and then put these ones in the freezer to pre-freeze because you do need to or it does help to shorten the amount of time it has to spend in the freeze dryer if you pre-freeze it. I have been really missing having my full kind of homestead summer kitchen happening where I have just tons of produce and lots of preserving to do because it's something that I really love this year because it seems to take so long for the season to actually get going but now that it's here I'm ready for it. I am excited. I'm excited right now by the time October rolls around I'm going to be very ready to be done with this because it is a lot of work but it is extremely rewarding. I'm actually going to be giving away a freeze dryer in August, the second week of August. I'm partnering with Harvest Right to give another one away. We gave one away last fall and it was such a fun giveaway to do. We'll be doing the giveaway through my newsletter this time so if you want to be entered into that you can sign up for the newsletter now and then you'll be notified as soon as that giveaway goes live. So fun giving away things like that. So now our broccoli has reconstituted. It really only takes a couple minutes so let's try. So texture wise as far as the way that it looks, it looks okay. Color's good. It's going to taste a bit soggy I'm sure because it's wet. Tastes like broccoli. A little bit soggy. I'll be honest I'll probably use this for making soup with. I think freezing this is better just for the end product but for long-term storage and for just making soups this will be fine. You can use a hair iron for sealing these if you like. Okay one preservation project down. I was talking in my last video about how I had noticed that my raspberries had molded just being overnight on the counter and so many of you recommended that I rinse them or soak them in a little bit of vinegar and water to help kill any spores that might be on the mold spores that might be on the berries. So I actually did that last night because I didn't have time to deal with all of this fruit last night. I did it also with the saskatoons although the saskatoons are way less prone to mold than raspberries and it worked. I don't have any mold on these at all. These are kind of packed together a little bit. So my plan for these is I'm going to freeze dry them whole because they're delicious just for snacking or putting on yogurt or oatmeal or anything like that but I'm also going to make some powder because I have some fun cookie recipes that I do in the wintertime. Usually baking happens around here in the winter not so much in the summer but some cookie recipes that I use raspberry powder in. Wow I'm taking a really long time to say this. Some raspberry powder in. So we're going to make a little bit of raspberry powder too. I am going to freeze a bunch of these saskatoons. I'm also going to can some in a heavy syrup to use for saskatoon pie in the wintertime. I'm going to use fairly small bags for this because I'm going to be using these in smoothies adding to muffins and just baked goods and I like to only freeze in the amount that I or the size of bag that I'm actually going to use for whatever ingredient. So much easier to do it that way. So we're going to bag up all of these then we're going to put together that quick batch of filling and can that and then we are going to deal with all of the zucchini that's back over here. Actually no we'll do the fermenting first because that is really easy and we only have one jars worth to do so I'll run you through how I do that and then share with you some of my tricks for small batch canning just doing a little bit each day especially if it's pickles because like I mentioned down in the garden pickling cucumbers you really want to process the day that you pick them but usually you're not going to have tons all at once especially if you only have a few plants and they'll be coming in over a couple of week period. So I'll share with you some of those tricks but first let's bag up all of this food. Okay you're going to want to use a clean jar and two tablespoons of some not non-iodized salt I'm using kosher kosher kosher kosher salt here and you can vary the amount of salt that you use in this brine for fermenting based on your taste preferences how salty that you want it or how quickly you want it to ferment the less salt the quicker it ferments the more salt the longer that it takes but I find two tablespoons to a quart works well going to add our dill in here lots of dill so these can be very dilly and we're going to cut off the flower end of our cucumber so we have the stem end and the flower end there are enzymes in the end the flower end that can make your pickles go soggy so just nip that off and this goes for any kind of pickles that you're making I think these this size here is kind of the perfect these ones are really good but it's hard to catch them at that size this size is pretty good as soon as you start getting too big with pickles then you get a lot of seeds in them and a lot of water I'm going to have more than I can fit in that jar probably be able to do two jars so why don't we do one refrigerator pickle and one fermented and so that I can show you both I've been doing this for a long time so I have a really good idea of what it is I'm going to make with each thing but what I preserve on the day really depends on what it is that I pull out of the garden obviously I guess that that makes sense but I don't always have it planned what I'm going to be doing so for the refrigerator pickles I'm just going to add about a teaspoon or so of salt I'm going to steal a little bit of the dill out of that jar so that we can have dill in bowls using fresh dill in your pickles is what I recommend dehydrated dill just doesn't have enough punch enough flavor to it but oftentimes in the garden dill will mature faster than pickling cucumbers do so I recommend picking it and then just throwing it into the freezer just in a ziploc bag you don't have to treat it fancy or anything put it in your and then pull that out and use that in your pickles rather than using the dehydrated stuff because it just it'll work just as well that way I mean fresh is best but frozen is second best but I have some garlic here so this is some of the soft neck garlic that I grew this year it is just about cured out in in the greenhouse but not quite there's still a bit of moisture left in the stem there you can see the moisture there we want that totally dry before we bring it in to preserve it inside so this is a an artichoke variety I can't remember the name off the top of my head for the type it is but we can take it and pop the whole thing right into our jar here smells really good okay so we have our two cloves of garlic in each one we're going to take our pickles here and put them into our jar you know what I'm going to use the bigger ones in the fermented one and the smaller ones in our refrigerator pickles I miscalculated the amount that I had to work with here whoops actually able to fit just about all of them into one jar which is fine because I can still show you the how to do both so this one is our refrigerator pickle and this one we're going to pretend is full of cucumbers here we're going to add some water to this I'm going to add a couple of red pepper flakes in here just to give these a little bit of a kick a teaspoon of sugar you don't have to add the sugar if you don't like sweetness in your dills and we're going to fill this up with half vinegar and half hot water make sure our stuff is covered right up put on our lid give it a little shake make sure our salt is dissolved and then we're just going to pop this into the fridge and let this pickle doesn't that look pretty and let this pickle for probably about five days as long as it'll last and then we'll eat it up if I were to have enough pickles here I would be topping this off with warm water just so that everything can dissolve you can do this all if you're doing large enough batches just on the stove and then add your brine into your jars I just find this easier for smaller batches like this you want to make sure that you're using non-chlorinated as water as well because the chlorine actually can kill the bacteria that you need for fermentation so then I'll top this off I will put some type of weight on the top in order to weigh my vegetables down so they're underneath the brine and then I'll sit it on my counter for around seven days I'll start tasting them at seven days and if they're sour enough I'll put pop them in the fridge and if they're not I'll leave them until they're sour enough the rate at which this is going to ferment is really going to depend upon how cold or warm your kitchen is in the summertime these can ferment really fast in the fall and the spring fermentation can take longer so just keep that in mind really keep a close eye on it the other thing I always recommend with fermenting is to make sure that you have your jars that are fermenting on some type of plate or something because sometimes the liquid can boil up not boil up come up out and down the side and it is a little bit acidic and it can actually wreck your countertop so something to keep in mind I will show you we'll do lots of fermenting throughout the summer actually how to do this when we have vegetables that can go in there but in the meantime hopefully that explanation suffices I'm going to be processing the broccoli the same way that I did in the last video so I won't show that to you again I'm just going to be blanching it for three minutes cooling it very quickly with some ice water and then freezing it now it is time to deal with the mountain of zucchini that I have collected mostly today we are going to make zucchini relish out of a lot of this actually maybe the whole thing we'll probably just make a big huge batch of zucchini relish it is our hands down favorite relish I have all kinds of other relishes in my pantry but zucchini relish is hands down our favorite and it is the first relish I ever made when I was in my early 20s the actually the only fall fair I ever entered anything into was my very first batch of zucchini relish I did win first place I've told this story before but it were it's worth repeating because it's really entertaining I got the recipe off of one of my friend's grandmothers and I entered the fall fair I didn't know she was also entering and I my recipe beat hers or my batch beat hers in the fall fair and she was very upset I had no idea about etiquette with recipes and asking people to use them if you're going to be using them in contests or anything like that I just didn't know about such things and so needless to say it took quite some time for her to forgive me for my indiscretion and I just I think about it every single time I make zucchini relish and it makes me laugh the recipe that we're going to be doing today is a modification upon that original recipe most zucchini relishes online are generally the same basic recipe so we're going to be making a brine this is a sweet relish so we will be using sugar in this relish but one of the most important steps in this recipe is to cut this up we are going to grate it and I am going to be using my food processor for this so that this can be much faster than it would be if we were doing it with box grater although that's pretty quick too because this is a pretty soft vegetable and then we are going to put this with some salt in a big pot and let it sit for at least eight hours overnight is better although today we're going to get this done and then we're going to put this up tonight when it is a little bit cooler in the house we're lucky here in the north because nighttime temperatures cool off significantly it can be 30 degrees during the day and then 10 degrees at night so I prefer to do canning when it's hot in the evening so that is the plan here we're going to take all of this beautiful look at this one this one is called romanesco isn't that gorgeous oh my gosh I'm going to show you what I do with larger ones so remember how I said that I prefer this size for eating and I have been eating this every day for lunch fried up with some garlic and some butter but for recipes like this you can use larger fruits like this one but what I do is I cut it down the middle roughly down the middle and then I take a spoon and just scoop out all of these seeds and the more kind of pulpy bit of the zucchini and all of this my chickens love because it's all seed so this will go out to them but you can compost this as well you may end up with some surprise zucchini plants in your compost pile next year but I do it this way so I clean it out I use these sometimes to make baked zucchini boats too where I fill this with meat sauce and cover it that works too but for our purposes today I'm just going to cut this into strips and then use my food whoops then use my food processor and get this all grated okay so we're going to get this all grated up and I'm going to add probably for the amount of this about six tablespoons or so of kosher salt okay so for this let's move that out of the way so you can see I'm just filling these jars with our berries and then I'm just going to top it off with our syrup and then steam can it I think it's around 20 minutes I'll have to double check the time on that but this is pretty easy pretty easy way to preserve and then the rest of these berries I'm going to freeze I honestly don't like relying on my freezer for food preservation even though I do love the way that some things are in the freezer as far as just the quality of it there's certain things that I prefer to freeze the broccoli would be an example over freeze drying even but I like having shelf stable products that don't rely on power to keep working I have we had forest fires here in 2017 and we were evacuated and all the power was cut off to our area and we lost I think it was two large freezers full of food when that happened and that was no fun I'll tell you that not fun at all if you want really clear syrups for whatever reason for jelly making would be in a good example then using just regular sugar this is organic cane sugar and it has a color when it you make it into syrup I don't mind that but something to keep in mind especially if you're entering fall fairs or whatever and color and clarity is really important I meant to mention this when we were doing the pickles earlier something else that I do to make doing pickles especially when I'm going to be canning them I will show you that when we have enough to can some batches is I will make a big batch of brine and then just put it in the fridge and pull it out and reheat it when I'm going to make my pickles and that saves me a lot of time I can just bring pickles and wash them cut the ends off or cucumbers and then add that brine and can them up really quickly so that's one of the ways that I kind of saved myself the extra hassle of having to mix up a new thing of brine every time so we'll pop this over on the canner my daughter just went and grabbed me some onions so this is about the size that our onions are at right now nowhere near done yet but that will be good and then I do have a bag where did that go I do have a bag of onions from down in the pantry that need to get used up so we're going to get those chopped up and for this I probably have I'm going to say 24 cups or so of this in here so I'm going to add eight eight or nine onions to this and we're going to do it exactly the same way that we did it before with the food processor okay so we have our onions now done my berries are on in the canner over there and they're going to can for 20 minutes okay so I will just mix this oh my goodness the amount of water already that's coming out of this is crazy so we're just going to mix this together put this down into my cold room and that is working perfectly well all right it is now time to put my feet up I am definitely feeling like I've done some work this morning which is a good feeling but it's time to rest so I'm going to do that and I'll be back with you a little bit later on to make our relish it has now been approximately four hours according to my yogurt timer since we were together last and I have this broccoli here that I am bagging up I am just going to bag it up in ziploc bags which is what I used to do before I had a vacuum sealer anyway so we are going to do that and then we're going to make our zucchini relish so ideally like I said doing it overnight is better but I have a very busy day tomorrow so I'm not going to have time to do that so I am going to do it now I also want to get to it before everybody gets home so we are going to get this bagged up so that's three and a little bit bags we did have a couple of heads of broccoli for lunch because we had broccoli salad for lunch which is absolutely delicious I'll show you how to make it one of these days while we're still in broccoli so we ended up with a little bit more for the freezer you can probably hear the freeze dryer going downstairs I did get those raspberries and the few saskatoons put in there and I have the basil that we picked laying on cookie sheets over there I'll probably just end up air drying that until the freeze dryers run through this cycle and then I'll pop those in the freeze dryer with the other stuff that I have down in the freezer I'm going to run downstairs and grab our big bucket of zucchini so what we're going to do with this is just dump it into our colander and then we are going to rinse off all the salt and squeeze out as much of the liquid as we possibly can this is pretty cold so like I said earlier it can be hard on your hands and you want to squeeze it really tight to get all of that liquid out okay we have our squeezed out stuff this is not fun squeezing all this stuff I also have some red and green pepper that I have chopped up in here and now I'm going to measure out this and the reason for that is because even though I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants with this recipe I do want to make sure that I have the right ratio of vinegar to vegetables so that this product can be safe to can so this has 36 cups of veg here so I am going to need how many cups here okay we need seven and a half cups of vinegar this base recipe is from allrecipes.com and I'll link it for you down below and it's pretty much the same recipe that I have been using for years the only thing that would be different is if you don't like certain things like because the recipe calls for celery seed turmeric nutmeg and ground pepper so if you don't like one of those then you can omit them or omit it but you don't want to mess around with the levels of vinegar that you need to vegetables this is going to give us a year's supply or more of zucchini relish so when you see that this takes 18 cups of sugar don't have a heart attack it's going to be over a year that it will be consumed oh I had a couple people ask about these mason storage jars I got these at Costco a while back and I absolutely love them the only thing I will say is this particular these particular ones the lid goes on and it does seal but it doesn't hold on so you don't want to pick it up by the lid or you'll end up with your whatever's in the jar all over the place I did find some other ones by the same brand that do have lock lids on them which might be a better option but I like these ones because they're nice and big okay so we're going to add four and a half teaspoons of celery seed a little extra for good measure two and a half teaspoons of turmeric and turmeric gives it a nice yellow color so I definitely don't recommend omitting the turmeric two and a half teaspoons of ground nutmeg I'm not usually a big fan of nutmeg but in this recipe it does something good to the flavor and a bunch of black pepper how much do we need here one and a half teaspoons I'm going to be at this for a minute now we're going to mix all this up put it over on the stove and let it simmer for around 30 minutes and then we're going to jar it up okay friends we are ready to jar up our relish here so this recipe does call for a little bit of cornstarch and cornstarch is generally not recommended in home canned food due to the fact that there just hasn't been sufficient testing done on the heat penetration at heat penetration of using cornstarch I actually would feel comfortable using because it's just a little amount of cornstarch that's required for this recipe to help to thicken it so that it just isn't so watery however I don't have any which is unfortunate so I am going to have a slightly runny relish I am also out of pint jars so I'm going to be able to do this batch and put this in let this cool down and then put it in the fridge overnight and can the rest of it tomorrow because I don't I don't have enough jars I have 12 jars here and I have at least that much left so that'll be 24 jars of the relish for the pantry which is so great I have like I said lots of other relishes down there that we need to get through as well so I probably am going to end up with a two-year supply of relish total in the pantry which is fantastic all right I will lid it up lids on finger tight oh that's hot and over into our canner and we're going to can these for 15 minutes all right I'll be back with you when we're all done and I'll show you what we ended up with all together today we are done and it's been I think two days since we were together last time it's been so busy and I am losing track of the days but we ended up with a whole bunch of the of the frozen saskatoons some of the two bags of the frozen raspberries and then four bags of the broccoli I have some of the basil here that I'm just leaving on the counter because my freeze dryer still has the raspberries in it I forgot to press the button to keep the cycle going so I just did that this morning so those won't be done until tomorrow so I'm not able to show you those I ended up with 24 jars of the zucchini relish which turned out so well we've already had some of it and out of all of these 24 jars I did end up with one that didn't seal and likely it was because I didn't wash the rim well enough that's usually why I have lid seal failures on things with high quantities of sugar and then we had four jars of our saskatoons in medium syrup here and for breakfast this morning I made some sticky buns with the saskatoons and I just used a basic cinnamon bun recipe and then made a with some saskatoon berries a little bit of sugar and some corn starch let that cook till it thickened and then put that in the buns and poured it on the top and they were really good so that is pretty good for all together this took us how long was it well I guess because it took the entire day because we had to have the pause in between for the zucchini to sit in the fridge with the salt or down in the cold room with the salt so I'm really happy with that now we're going to be able to stop put some more things in the freezer some more things in the pantry and some more things in our long-term food storage with the freeze-dried stuff I hope that you enjoyed hanging out with me the other day but for you today and I look forward to seeing you next time bye everybody