Making Strawberry Jam

We went u picking on Saturday at a local farm. The weather was cool and the berries plentiful. We forgot the camera so unfortunately have no photos of the farm. We had all the kids with us and wondered how we would do. My hope was 60 pounds of berries. Two years ago we had a bit over 30 and the jam was gone by December. We did pretty well and came in at 62 pounds in a little over 2 hours!!


The berries at home. They were in the garage hence the icky floor.

The beginning of the assembly line. Cutting of the stems.

After cutting they were washed in the sink and placed here to dry a bit.

In past years I have used the potato masher to crush the strawberries. This year I decided to try the food processor and hope we did not end up with puree. There are not as many larger chunks but as we have not eaten the jam yet I cannot tell you what I prefer yet.

Into the bowl, and another bowl, and a pitcher. I kept having to find more and more containers. I could not can it fast enough.

One of our helpers. She decided she was tired of washing and took a break to color.
Into the pot. I was able to make a double batch of jam and fit it in the pot and the canner at one time. This greatly sped up the process. 5 batches would have been 10.

The workspace. Water bath canner heating up, jam cooking, tea kettle heating with extra water, and towels on counter to place hot jars.

More workspace. Bands, sugar, pectin, pot with hot water and lids.

The workspace after. A bit messier and a full counter!

This is the jar I poured the last bit of each batch that would not fill a jar completely.

29 pints, 8 half pints. We ran out of pectin or we would have made more. Joe had all ready been to the store today and cleaned them out of no sugar needed pectin.

In addition to jam we froze a lot of whole berries and the leftover crushed berries. No pictures of that.