Up to my ears in fruit

Last spring as I was planting a garden, I had these visions in my mind of what my harvest would look like in the fall. We planted TONS of tomato plants thinking we could make our own spaghetti sauce and salsa. Of course, we would also use our own onions and peppers too. Yeah, that's not how things turned out! For some reason, tomatoes just did not do well around our part of town. I have lots of "master gardener" neighbors who have been gardening for 40+ years and their tomatoes really didn't produce much this year either. Our cherry tomatoes did well, but between Jac and the three girls, there really wasn't much excess. I was pretty saddened by this as I really wanted to try canning things for the first time this year. I decided I still wanted to can, I would just do different things. After TONS of work and asking millions of questions to my mom, I finally finished. I actually finished quite a while ago, but I wanted to wait to blog about it until I could take a beautiful picture of all of it on my new storage shelves Jac is building for me. I don't understand why he doesn't have them done, between working so much and the five million other projects I have him do "real quick" before he gets to the shelves! The jars are all neatly stacked in my storage room though, and they do still look so pretty. You'll have to take my word for it. Because they look so nice and because they were so much work, I almost don't want to eat them. In the end, I bottled:

5 quarts of carrots
38 pints of corn
7 quarts of apples (thinking I would use them for apples crisp or something)
14 pints of peach jam
28 quarts of applesauce
25 quarts of pears
64 quarts of peaches
42 quarts of apple pie filling

Yes, you read that last one right. I planned to just make one or two batches of apple pie filling because we really aren't pie eaters (well, I'm not and since I'm the cook, my family isn't :). Then Jacob suggested I use the pie filling to make apple crisp and it was REALLY good. And we really aren't big apple crisp people either. So then I started making several batches because we had tons of apples. I was up to my ears in fruit and wasn't really thinking about what I was doing. When I finished jars I would just take them downstairs and shove them on a shelf thinking I would organize them on my nice new shelves. I was doing apples, peaches, and pears all at once. Then one day I decided to count how many I had done. Yes, it was time to stop! I never did any salsa or spaghetti sauce.

In addition to all that, I also dried a lot of apples and peaches and made fruit leather (fruit roll-ups). This was all a lot of work, and after buying so many jars, I don't know that I really saved a whole lot of money (maybe next year!). However, like people say, there's just something about eating food that you have preserved yourself. It's so much more satisfying!