Canning season

Harvest season is upon us.  The garden was doing great until we had an early hard freeze in September.  That frost damaged most of the plants, meaning we didn't get as much as we had hoped for.  Mainly it killed off the tomatoes, corn, and pumpkins.  We didn't get any corn this year.  We did get some big pumpkins, but the largest only came in at 70 pounds, shy of beating our last record.  Had the freeze not happened, we likely would have had a 100+ pound pumpkin.  We put all the pumpkins in a  fall display outside the front window.  I will post pictures of that once we take a family picture.

So far we have canned 1 full and 2 half  batches of spaghetti sauce and a batch of salsa.  We haven't started on the apples yet, but we will probably only do juice this year.  We still have tons of applesauce left from last year.

The pictures below show our assembly line for the tomatoes.  Alise and I cut them into pieces;  Brenna and Annie moved the pieces over to Zadik; and Zadik put them into the Kitchen-aid for processing.  It actually went really smoothly.  Everyone helped on the first batch of spaghetti sauce, but only Zadik stuck with me on the rest.  He is a really good helper.  (He also loves controlling the Kitchen-aid)