After several years of canning using regular lids, I decided that I was tired of having zillions of metal lids lying around that I could not reuse.  Many of them got tossed, although I did keep quite a few to use for things I stored in canning jars that didn’t need to be sealed.  The [...]

Due to my very prolific cucumber plants, I have been putting up pints and pints of dill pickles.  Canning pickles is a great way to preserve cucumbers for the winter.  But there was a couple of instances when I had too many pickles to eat but not enough to warrant filling up the canning pot [...]

Here at Green Bean Gardens, I have cucumbers sticking out of my ears.  We eat multiple cucumbers every day and still can’t keep up with them.  I may have planted a few too many plants.  What to do with such a surplus?  Make pickles, of course!  After three seasons of fiddling with recipes and trying [...]

Inevitably I can’t resist the pull of the dark beautiful Bing Cherries during the summer. Cherries are juicy and super tasty and are a perfect summer fruit.  However, somehow they always get pushed to the back of the fridge before I can eat them all and then weeks later I find myself throwing away molding [...]

With 4 boxes of peaches to preserve, I wanted to find another way to enjoy them.  Wanting to diversify my preserving to include freezing, drying, and canning, I decided that peach sauce would be a perfect way to savor the sweet juicy flavor of peaches.  Oh man, this stuff is so good!  Although it is [...]

Preserving the sweet deliciousness of peaches by drying them is a great way to save them for later.  Drying concentrates the flavor and sweetness of the beautiful peach, and these make a great snack.  They are super yummy in granola or trail-mix or just on their own.  Drying is also very simple with not a [...]