Success!

This year I tried canning for the first time as a grown up in my own house (instead of helping mom) and it was quite successful if I do say so myself.

I canned pears, peaches and nectarines and since we have already sampled all of the products, I can tell you they are all yummy.

I failed to get any pictures of the pears which I did first, but here are some of the peaches and nectarine round.

These are some of the first jars of peaches and nectarines I did.

And this is what my counters looked like when I was about half done. And this is my last batch of canning...one nectarines and 4 peaches and we are all done! :) Overall I did 43 quarts and am quite proud of my accomplishment.

We also borrowed a friends dehydrator and had some fun with that as well. I borrowed it do dry pears, since I love those and told Brian he needed to try them.

They were such a big hit with Brian and the boys, Brian and I decided to have some fun.

So here is a picture of pineapple, nectarines, apples, watermelon and honeydew all ready to be dried. (We basically thought we would try any and all fruit we had in our house dried since the box said you can dry anything.) And the Brian picked all the grapes from our backyard and thought he would try his hand at making raisins as well.

The drying was a success. However, we don't really enjoy the watermelon or honeydew dried (fresh is much better especially in the boys opinion) and the raisins would be better if our grapes were sweeter and some of them didn't have seeds in them...but you can't be that picky when you are using wild grapes from the backyard.

Overall, canning was fun and Brian even agrees that is wasn't that much work for the yummies, so we'll definitely be doing some more next year.

PS-Thanks Mom for all the question answering and tips!