Freezing Peas!

It's funny how the entire harvest seems to come in at one time... ours and the other gardens around town. After all the canning of the green beans last weekend, it seemed we spent a lot of time in the evenings after work this past week shelling peas. We bunch we picked in the garden last week just seemed to take forever to shell... but, we finally finished late Friday night.

Lots of shelling in front of the television. I guess you could say it's a lot like the old days when I use to spend hours shelling peas with my Grandparents... same shelling metal pan, same house... except for us having the AC, cable TV, internet, and cell phones it is pretty much the same task!

My plan was to shell the peas during the week days and then prepare them for the freezer on Saturday. And then I got the call that the farm in town had me a bushel of zipper peas. That's a bunch more work... so I brought in the recruit to help shell on Saturday once I picked up the zipper peas.

Meet my Mom. She is a shelling machine. On Saturday, she shelled and I rinsed the bushel and a half of purple hulled/pink eyed peas from our garden multiple times, looked them over handful by handful for the wormy ones, blanched them and bagged them for the freezer... and I shelled zipper peas in between all the boilings. Hubby even helped get the zippers shelled. We had a nice time grilling steaks and shelling for a Saturday night!

By Saturday evening, the purple hulls/pink eyes were in the freezer and all of the new bushel of zippers were shelled and in the fridge for rinsing/blanching/bagging for the freezer at a later date.

And then Hubby showed up with this harvest from the garden... Ouch.

Canning Green Beans!

So after spending the entire evening on Saturday shelling zipper peas, snapping green beans and washing every pot and pan in this kitchen twice, I spent most of Sunday morning cleaning the rest of the kitchen up and preparing to attempt my first ever try at canning... Yep, old school canning! (Super thanks to the our friends, the Parkers, who loaned us their pressure canner!) Hubby spent a huge chunk of the morning stuffing blueberries into freezer bags... so that freed me up to go retrieve my Grandmother's quart jars from the storage shed. Next up was washing the jars... and then I remembered that we threw out all of her metal lids and rings when we moved into the house because they were rusted. All I can say is thank the Lord for the dollar stores in this small town! Hubby scored new lids and rings and a whole flat of pint jars for whatever else we decide to can later. After washing the green beans four times (which took forever since there was probably 4 gallons of beans) we finally started the actual canning process. I have to say what a chore this whole canning thing is! I do not know how my Grandmother did this every year all by herself. I would say that the entire amount of time we spent was about 8 hours to can 14 quarts of green beans and froze the remaining 4 quarts. Whew! I am just tired thinking back to Sunday...

I do have to say that I am very, VERY proud of my Grandmother's antique mason jar collection. There are so many different ones and she has a ton of jars in quart and jelly jar sizes.

Hubby loved to stare at them while they bubbled in the jars long after they were removed from the pressure canner.

We are very proud of our first run at canning. Next up, is freezing the zipper peas... just hoping to score a few more from the local garden stand in town to go with them!