I DO love green beans (or string beans if you prefer), they are probably one of my favorite cooked vegetables (I don't appreciate them raw :) right up there with cooked asparagus, carrots and garden peas. As for raw vegetables I love sugar snap peas, carrots and cucumbers. Nothing beats a cucumber sandwich with the bread-crust still attached.
We didn't plant as many string beans this year because we still have some bottles from last year that we haven't eaten. But, despite having fewer plants, we still ended up with more than we could eat and store, but that was okay because a friend of ours was glad to take them.
Bountiful Harvest! We are truly blessed ...
And, or course, whenever you work in the spring garden you're bound to have company
It's fun to sit around the table or counter and snap the ends off the green beans. Before we had much of a garden ourselves we would buy our green beans from the Amish bulk food store just up the road and spend the end under the shade tree with bowls on our laps and the dogs at our feet as we snapped the beans.
We've kind of graduated from big intense canning days to take-it-as-is-comes canning days. Instead of trying to freeze a year supply of corn or beans or tomatoes in a single day, we just do little whenever there's enough for a full caner load. I personally like it better this way.
We snap the beans right into jars right when they come inside and store the jars in the fridge until we have enough to fill the caner. Then we add a tsp of salt to each one, place a sanitized lid and ring on eahc one and carrying to the green house where we do all the canning now.
We moved canning to the greenhouse because the pressure caner is loud and it sure does heat the house up. We keep all the greenhouse windows open, but it still turns into a sauna, especially at this time of year. Canning apple juice won't be as bad becuase it will be in late autumn.
Another reason we moved canning out of the kitchen is because we have an induction stove that only works on pots that are real metal (a magnet can stick to them) and pressure caner is not and our stove will not acknowledge its presence. We did have a electric burner that we would plug in on the counter, but electric is nowhere as efficient as gas, so when we had a bit to spend we decided to make the process more effective by buying gas burners, which, of course have to stay outdoors (or in a greenhouse :).
And there you have it: Low stress, simple and enjoyable canning brought to you by the Mormish family. Gotta love those green beans when canning them is as easy as flipping a switch!
