wrote:
I have been canning juneberries for about a month now and need to
accelerate because soon they
turn too soft and are just mush in my hands. They make an excellent
drink as I usually put some
currants with them.

The sour cherry harvest began Monday of this week, and today is
thursday. They are not fully ripe
and I try to pick them when fully ripe. With good tree management
cherries can be almost worm free.
When I started in 2001 about 3/4 of the cherries had worms in them,
but as I picked them through the
years, my picking has thus eliminated the worms from a life cycle and
so only the occasional cherry
has a worm in it.

I try to eat as much fresh as possible, and only can the excess. I
should manage to can 200 quart
jars this summer. Cinnamon applesauce is going to be the bulk.


I should comment on my history of canning of fruits and tomatoes for
it may save someone else
the hassle of a learning-curve and all the time and money wasted.

My canning history started about 1985 or 1986 and I thought I needed a
pressure cooker. How so
foolish I was about canning. So I bought an expensive pressure cooker
and packed jars with fruit
and under the pressure cooker. My first batches in 1986 had many
broken quart jars, probably I
had the heat too long. Anyway, a huge waste of time, money.

Then I learned that it was stupid and foolish to have a pressure
cooker when all I wanted to do is
can fruits and tomatoes. The acid in those foods is strong enough that
all I needed to do is heat
the fruit or tomatoes to a boil and then pour them into a quart jar
and the heat will seal the lid.
The acid in the food will allow storage of those jars at room
temperature.

So my canning procedure these days is simply prepare the fruit or
tomatoes and then bring them to
a boil and simply pour the quart jars full and then screw down the
lid. Now I reuse the old lids and when
I open a jar I am careful as to how I open it with using a can opener
so that I can reuse the very same
lid in the future.

When I first started canning using the pressure cooker, I broke very
many jars. Nowadays I may break
one jar during the entire year of canning 300 jars. Sometimes the
pouring of the hot liquid can crack
the jar, so you want to pour the jar full in a pan in case the jar
breaks and you would not want the
hot liquid to go flooding the floor.

Now the tools I use in canning other than the quart jar with lid, is
that I use a very big spoon and then
I use a pyrex cup to scoop the liquids and fruits and I use those
funnels as I pour from the cup into
the jar. I also use a paper towel to wipe the top should any liquid or
fruit spill on the top of the jar.

The largest work is picking the fruit and preparing it before canning.
Juneberries are easy and also
apples. But cherries are time consuming because I cut each cherry open
to see if there are worms
and to remove the pit.

I average about 6 quarts a night on a big canning night, and about 3
on a slow night.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies