Congrats on your first batch in your new canner. Wishing you many happy days of canning in the future.

I eagerly await the tomato crop. The vines are loaded like I haven't seen in years. I have everything ready to can loads of sauce which we use a lot of. The peppers are slow but I think it's because they don't get enough sun. Next year I'll pick a sunnier spot for them. We have 3 veggie patches. I'm addicted to roast peppers.

Congrats! I am envious; I am a long ways away from beans, since they have just sprouted from the soil (miserable year for beans in my area.) You don't need to drag out your other canner though - I use my Presto to BWB can as well, but I don't lock down the lid. :-)

I should have thought of that! I already cleaned the Presto so I may as well use the old water bather. I just came back from Food Lion and Wal*Mart with all kind of seasonings for Bread and Butter pickles and a few packaged pickle products, both Ball and Mrs. Wages... plus another doz. pint jars.

I have to find somewhere to store all these jars now, once filled. Maybe I can move the craft stuff to the outbuilding.....

greenhouser,

Put pint jars back into boxes when full. Stack six boxes in middle of living room & cover with a decorative cloth. Voila---a coffee table! A stack of three boxes makes a handy speaker stand. With a few pillows arranged artfully on top of a stack or two, you can make a bench for the kitchen table. And so on... ;-)

Zabby

No beans here yet. but at least the plants are almost a foot tall. Still quite slow. I plan to blanch and freeze mine as they are the more delicate yellow waxed beans. Used to grow a lot of purple pole beans, but found they lost a lot more flavor once blanched and frozen. Used to make 'dilly beans' with them and once the jars were cold packed and a vinegar brine was poured in, the heat would release the purple pigment and it settled to the bottom of the jars. I only did a single batch that way, and so have not grown any more of the purple vareties even though they are easier to see and pick.

I'm just getting blossoms on my green beans. Still searching for the way my mom made her green bean pickles. Going to write to my Aunt back home and call dad to ask a few of moms friends. I really want to make them seeing dad really loved them. Thanks everyone that posted and sent links..I read them all...BP

If they had dill, they may be the same or similar to Linda Lou's Dilly Bean recipe. You need to search of that DILLY BEAN recipe its here buried in many places..

What an excellent idea! I stacked the unused ones in the utility room and covered them with a nice decorative flowered flat sheet I bought at Goodwill for $1. It looks like some kind of piece of furniture - or something. The full ones will be stacked next to them. :)

Where there's a will, there's a way and the good people on gardenweb usually know that way. My empty jars are usually stored on the second floor of the storage building. The filled ones are in the pantry or in the bottom of a very nice storage cupboard in my dining room. Sometimes I hide some new empties in my sewing room. Like the idea of using them in their boxes disguised as furniture. :)

It's a good year. So far, 7 pts of pickled beets, 10 qts of green beans in the freezer with a ton more beans to pick, cucumbers to go pick and lots of other stuff. Yum-yum this winter.

I hope to get enough beets this fall to pickle some. I love beets and will eat them fresh from the pot and peeled. They're so tender and so sweet when you grow and pull your own. YUM!

How do you make your tomato sauce - I saw the directions on the NCHFP site but wondered if you do something different.

Be sure to BLANCH beans before freezing. If they don't get that blanch, they can lose all the good flavor fast.

My pickled beets use a similar brine used for sweet mixed. I also add slices of onion to the jars if the beets are big and sliced. If small, they get pickled whole and still get a couple of onion slices or whole small onions in there. I parboil the beets, but leave an inch of stems left, as well as a half inch of root. Once partally cooked they are easy to peel and that's when you cut off the green tops and root. Then you can can either way, depending on the size of the jars and the beets. An eldery lady friend loves my beets too, but I can't enjoy them anymore, so I just grow them for her every other year. Tomato juice is easy, its the same done with the same machine mentioned in many posts (Villaware/Roma). Using big juicy tomatoes and they will gove you the most amount or the liquids. You can fill jasr and process provided you add the necessary citric acid. Also, a dash of ground celery seed and, a dash of tobasco if you like it spicy. Salt is optional, so thats good too. If you have a juicer, runsome carrots through it as well as a couple of beets, celery, onion, and a few of the other 'V-8" veggies and you have a healthy drink. These tomato juices do seperate when canned, so be sure to shake before serving.