Water bath canning - PEP BB Food.sand.waterbath

This'll be my second year making wildflower jellies, I like to give them to my family and neighbors, so there's a bit of an expectation for more this year too.

I'm making violet jelly with what may be the last of the season's violets. I'm following this recipe from homestead acres

I ended up with 4 half-pint jars of jelly. I was hoping for more as in addition to sharing these, this is my favorite jelly, so I guess I'll be back out looking for more violets this weekend.

For this badge bit I made Watermelon pickles from the Ball book of Home Preserving.

My chokecherries are late this year. So is everything, what a weird year. Anyways, I usually can the syrup. That involves steam juicing them (they are too small to pit) then adding honey to make a light syrup. I admit, I usually don't use a recipe for this, but this recipe for peaches gives directions for making a light syrup with honey instead of sugar: https://www.amodernhomestead.com/canning-peaches-in-syrup/ I use 4 cups of juice to 1 cup of honey. Once boiled, I'll ladle it into jars for water bathing.

Then I fill sanitized jars to 1/4 inch headspace, top with a sterilized lid and water bath it for 50 minutes at my altitude! All 6 quarts sealed nicely, and after labeling them, they go downstairs for cold storage. They won't last long at my house, though! With 6 kids, and lots of sourdough pancakes, we sure go through all of it.

I did a hot water bath for homemade applesauce.

The recipe: https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/food-cooking/recipes/a11239/homemade-applesauce/ except I used maple syrup instead of brown sugar.

I wasn't able to fill the 5th jar to the head height especially after all of the taste testing I had to do!

This was my first time canning!

I realize that it's hard to see the rack inside the pressure cooker from the picture but it's there.

It's the summertime so I used the burner on the grill to cook the applesauce and the pressure cooker outside so as not to heat the house. I kept the lid off the pressure cooker.

Plums!  On my first load, I had 3 jars break, which was a huge bummer.  I cleaned up, consulted my canning ladies at Rebel Canners, prepped more jars, added a PC rack under the WB rack, and did a full load of 7 quarts, which included the 2 surviving quarts from the first load.  Success!