The blueberries are done

Ever since we planted the blueberry bushes here in our new home, they’ve been growing like mad.

Their production is increasing, too. The first year, I harvested one pound of berries – not surprising, since the bushes were just ramping up. Last year, they produced sixteen pounds.

This was on the order of what our bushes in our last home produced every summer, so to be honest I would have been perfectly satisfied with that.

But this year, the bushes produced and produced and produced. I picked and picked and picked. I filled gallon bags with fruit and popped them in the chest freezer, and I kinda lost count of how much I had. All I knew was it was a lot.

Finally I got tired of having to burrow past endless bags of blueberries in the freezer whenever I needed something, so I knew it was time to weigh the summer’s bounty and get it canned up. I pulled all the bags out of the freezer and laid them on the table.

Can you see why these bags were dominating the freezer space?

One by one, I started weighing the bags, and tallying the results.

The total: 57.25 lbs!!!

Holy toledo, I did NOT expect the bushes to be this fruitful.

The trouble is, we don’t need nearly sixty pounds of blueberries. I still have some canned up from last year. The solution, of course, was to give most of them away. I gave ten pounds of frozen berries to the UPS driver, a very sweet man, who said his wife canned and would be grateful for the fruit.

I planned to can up the rest and distribute a good portion to church members.

Canning gave me an excuse to use my lovely new water-bath canners I got for my birthday last year.

I canned everything using a “very light” syrup, the recipe of which can be found in this canning reference book.

While the syrup heated up…

…I washed fourteen quart jars, the maximum the two canners could handle.

The berries had been defrosting overnight. I cold-packed the defrosted fruit into quart jars.

Adding the syrup.

Wiping the rims (and checking for nicks).

Filling the canners with water. I used regular disposable lids for these berries instead of Tattlers, since I was giving away the majority of the canned blueberries.

For raw packs in quarts at our elevation, I needed to process the jars for 25 minutes at a rolling boil.

I brought the water up to a rolling boil and began timing the berries. Suddenly I heard a bang. Sure enough, the bottom broke off one of the jars, resulting in a deluge of loose blueberries and a broken jar floating at the top of the pot.

I fished out the broken jar and let the rest of the jars process.

The culprit, I believe, is the racks that came with the pots didn’t have enough clearance from the bottom. (During canning, jars should never be in direct contact with the pot’s bottom.)

So I put a rack at the bottom. Duh, I should have done that first.

Typical canning chaos in the kitchen.

When all was said and done, I canned up 36 quarts of blueberries (including the one that broke), plus gave away another 10 lbs. of frozen berries to the UPS fellow.

Now 36 quarts of blueberries – on top of what I haven’t yet used up from last year – is way more than we need, so we brought 24 of those quarts to church to hand out. (By the time I managed to snap a photo, several quarts had already been claimed.) The only request – augmented by a piece of tape on each quart – was to return the jars to me when the contents are finished. (What can I say, I’m territorial about my canning jars.) Needless to say, every last jar disappeared.

Interestingly, though, several older church members have offered me some of their surplus canning jars they no longer need, so it’s turned into a win-win situation.

So that’s our blueberry harvest for the year. With nearly sixty pounds harvested, that’s about three-and-half times what we harvested the year before. I wonder what will happen next year?

Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2024/10/the-blueberries-are-done.html