Canning in Minnesota

I learned how to can this weekend! Calhoun and I went up north to his parent's house this weekend and the weather was BEAUTIFUL! It was sunny, breezy and about mid seventies during the day. It ended up being great canning weather, so Bemidji and I had an afternoon adventure canning tomato juice!

Canning requires a lot of tomatoes. Good thing Bemidji's garden has had a great summer, we blanched and peeled fifteen pounds of garden tomatoes with pounds left over.

Tomatoes from the garden

blanched tomatoes

almost fifteen pounds!

Next, we cooked the tomatoes along a handful of other ingredients to make tomato juice.

Bemidji's tomato juice recipe. She got it from her sister who got it from Cuisine Magazine. 

Some modifications have been made.

Cooking - it smells better than it looks 

After cooking, we had to strain the ingredients so that the texture was actually juice like.

The juicer - who knew canning tomato juice required so much equipment?

Finally, we poured the juice into the jars

Sealed the jars and boiled them for fifteen minutes...

I successfully canned for the first time EVER!

 Although writing this now makes the process seem simple, it took us over two and a half hours to complete the whole process but Calhoun and I brought home seven pints of tomato juice - we'll be hosting blood mary's sometime soon :)

My Flower Garden

I didn't grow up gardening but I've gotten more interested in gardening as an adult (am I an adult?). I have especially been into gardening lately because you can plan all the flowers you want when its your own garden!

Last year we planted some perennials from Calhoun's grandmother and this year we filled in some of the extra space with some beautiful annuals. We planted a few weeks ago but I was worried that they weren't getting enough sun because they seemed to be a little sluggish. But, they're blooming now! And although I didn't really plan the heights of the plants well or the colors, there are blooms now and I don't really care that they don't match!

double petunia

coleus

mystery perennial from Calhoun's grandmother

Free Perennials

This spring is the first time I've ever had my own little plot of dirt to plant some green things in. The owners of our house are not much for gardening, so we were really excited to move in and be able to plant in the empty flower beds all of our own plants! Here's a picture of the flower bed, sans plants.

I'm more than a little worried about it. I want to have pretty flowers but I don't have any track record of successful gardening. I spent a few dreary winter hours doing research online regarding the best plants for Minnesota. I thought the University of Minnesota's 2009 Flower Trials had good information and I got excited about planting some of them...but then I remembered that perennials are pretty expensive.

So, I was happy when we went up north for Easter and Calhoun's grandmother (who used to run a greenhouse) dug well rooted perennials out of her garden and sent them down with us. We spent the afternoon gardening and I'm hoping that future posts are of actual flowers! Here's a picture of the flower beds, with the perennials, a collection of Irises and Lillys.
Sogn has also become a digger. When we were out planting today he was trapped behind the fence. But when I was watering the plants, I couldn't stop myself from spraying him with a little bit of the hose water :)