Sunday in Iowa...

We spent an afternoon visiting Don and Bonnie...they are finishing up the garden year, after canning some 660 jars of produce from the garden.  They share their bounty with their children's families; their married daughter and her 4 children come up from Missouri to help pick and can.  We were lucky enough to get some fresh tomatoes and green peppers to take home.
Bonnie's parents lived on this homestead, and her mother planted grapes, a cherry tree, asparagus and rhubarb, and fed her large family from a big garden.

I took some pictures of their "cave", a root cellar containing shelves full of their hard work.  They tried a number of new recipes this year.
Here are some photos...


The shelves above contain things like pickle relish, grape jam from their vines, cherry jam from their cherry tree, and other jams and jellies.


These shelves contain green beans, meat, V8 -style juice on the left, potatoes and pickles on the right.


On the left, second from bottom, spaghetti sauce, carrots on bottom shelf, the other shelves are green beans and tomato products including stewed tomatoes and tomato and V8 style juice.

9 comments:

  1. WOW. That is Amazing. The look like pretty wide shelves; making to hold A lot of canned goods. A lot of hard work but in the long run it's all worth while.
    Seeing all them jars filled with wonderful home grown veggies, etc. reminds me of my mother of all the things that she used to can; doing all the canning in the basement. She also had a large garden

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  2. Beautiful post and pictures from the gorgeous garden to the "cave" showing hours and hours and hours of hard work harvesting and preserving. But what a bounty! And what a lost art. I feel such hopelessness when I think of the generation or two younger than I who don't even know how to cook let alone grow, harvest and preserve anything like this. The learning curve wouldn't be easy, but maybe the vast majority of our population will eventually get back to this way of life. Maybe?

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  3. Myrna and I are always surprised how much we still can when neither of us has any kind of big garden anymore; folks share and we never let anything go to waste!
    Our daughter and daughter-in-law can, as do Don and Bonnie's...I have been surprised to find how many of the younger people here in Iowa still garden and can too...especially tomatoes...nothing like what you can buy!

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  4. Wow, very impressive. Reminds me too of my mother's cellar. My mother probably spent less at the grocery store than anyone. We ate what we grew and had.
    I noticed what looks like Green Giant canned corn tho. My mother for the life of her could not can corn without it spoiling. She would go outside to open a jar of corn because it was almost always bad. Ended up just drying corn, and to this day I still like dried corn. It is pricey and hard to find, but we stock up at the Amish bulk stores when we can get to Ohio.

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    Replies
    1. Glad to hear someone else had problems with canned corn. I never did get it to come out right. That is one place where the jolly green giant works for me. Never did try dried corn, do you soak it before using?

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    2. The safest way when it comes to canning corn is either to blanch and freeze in freezer bags or using pressure canner at which time it must be in P. canner for at least a hour or a bit more than a hour.
      Remember my mom always used a Large dish pan or large bucket when it came time cutting kernels off the cob.

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  5. I'm jealous of these people. How nice to have organic and homegrown food in such abundance for the winter. I'm a bit surprised they buy V8 juice though, when they grow so many tomatoes.

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    Replies
    1. I should have said vegetable juice, their own, home-canned. They sent some home with us, very tasty. It didn't have 8 vegetables, but still a nice combination.

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  6. lots of work, but beautiful ,,, I am working on this...

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