Every housewife knows that it is best to make jams and pickles from local fruits and vegetables. Very often, imported products from supermarkets are in no way suitable for home canning. They may look beautiful, but have a poor structure for workpieces. Watery tomatoes, tasteless cucumbers, wax-covered apples and other imported goods cannot be used for seaming.
From this article you will learn in which months you should look for certain fruits on the shelves and local vegetable markets, in which months it is better to buy vegetables for preparation, and when you should generally postpone the process until next year.
May
This month you need to freeze and pickle herbs (dill, parsley, sorrel), and roll up zucchini. There are mushrooms that you can.
June
In the heat, early varieties of berries and apples ripen, from which you can make jam and compotes. Freeze peas, can can zucchini.
July
This month, berries and fruits are used - cherries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries, apricots, blueberries. It's time to preserve tomatoes, cucumbers, and green peas.
August
This period is suitable for making jam and jam from apples and plums. It's time to preserve vegetables: squash, zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, carrots and beets, beans and cauliflower.
Young corn, melons and watermelons are suitable. Don't forget about mushrooms, they can be canned and pickled.
September
It's getting cold outside, but some vegetables are just ripening. This month is the time to make watermelon and melon desserts, preserve grapes, pears, plums and apples, make jam from sour berries (sea buckthorn, rowan, viburnum, cranberry, lingonberry).
The season of mushrooms and cabbage continues, as well as other vegetables (beans and garlic, cucumbers and tomatoes, peppers and eggplants).
October
The first frosts appear, but you still have time to buy mushrooms, horseradish, cabbage (white and cauliflower), peppers and green tomatoes. It's time to prepare vegetable salads and soup preparations.
November
If you haven’t had time to prepare for the winter in spring, summer and early autumn, you have the last chance to buy local fruits and vegetables at the market for packing. But they will cost several times more than in the earlier season. You can either accept the high price or postpone cooking until next year.
Margarita, Cheboksary
Hello! Tell me, please, when can I start making preparations for the winter?
The harvest has been harvested, which means it becomes necessary to preserve it. Growing beautiful, healthy vegetables and fruits is only half the battle, because it is equally important to preserve the fruits of agricultural activity, being able to enjoy them in the cold winter. How and when can you start making preparations and what secrets are experienced housewives ready to reveal?
Methods for making blanks
The level of vitamins in the body during the winter period is critically reduced, but fresh fruits and vegetables can be replaced with prepared products. There are several known methods for making blanks:
- canning;
- freezing;
- salting and pickling;
- pickling;
- drying.
Important! This or that method is used depending on the type of product to be harvested, as well as the planned shelf life.
Preservation is the heat treatment of products with the goal of storing them for as long as possible. It is customary to preserve vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, meat, and fish. The only disadvantage of such preparations is that they retain the beneficial properties of the product, vitamins and microelements in small quantities.
Freezing is considered the easiest way to make products, and, for all that, the most useful, because frozen products completely retain their beneficial substances. Frozen vegetables and fruits can be stored for a long time (about 12 months).
Salting, pickling and fermentation are fairly similar technologies that involve the creation of an artificial environment unsuitable for the growth of bacteria, but ideal for long-term storage of products.
Winter preparations using the drying method have the goal of removing moisture from products, which allows them to be stored almost forever.
There are several known drying methods:
- Drying in the open sun.
- Drying in an oven.
The first method completely preserves the beneficial properties of fruits and vegetables, but the second is simple and quick.
Choosing time for preparations
Gardeners begin to think about preparations in the spring, stocking up on lids, jars and barrels for pickles. The active harvesting period begins, as a rule, from the moment the first fruits and vegetables ripen.
July is the time to harvest cucumbers and tomatoes
Advice. The harvesting season opens with greenery - this happens already in mid-May. It is better to freeze greens by placing finely chopped pieces in vacuum bags.
The further sequence of manufacturing blanks fits into the following scheme:
- early June: the first berries appear (currants, raspberries, strawberries);
- mid-June: harvesting zucchini and radishes;
- end of June: time rich in cherries, apples, cucumbers;
- July: peak of harvesting, bringing with it the fruits of tomatoes, beans, garlic, onions, plums and other things;
- August: harvesting period for carrots, peppers, beets, eggplants, pears;
- early autumn: cabbage, late pears and apples can be added to winter stocks.
August-September - time to make pear jam
In winter, you can pamper your household with such extraordinary preparations as jam, jelly or confiture - preparing such dishes will take more time, but the result is worth it!
From late spring to early autumn, the harvesting season does not stop. The main thing in this process is to stock up on the necessary supplies, materials and culinary imagination so that the winter table is no less rich than the summer one!
People of the older generation not only grew vegetables, relying on folk superstitions, but also knew when it was best to preserve cucumbers, and made preparations for the winter on certain days. Many people remember how they loved to treat themselves to their grandmother’s crispy pickled cucumbers in the summer, despite the fact that the jars taken out from the cellar contained last year’s preparations.
Signs for conservation
Active fruiting in cucumbers begins in July, so in the gardener's summer lunar calendar you can find information about the most favorable days for preserving this vegetable.
Modern housewives, some time after preparing canned vegetables, often have troubles with jars prepared for the winter. This includes the appearance of unpleasant odors from vegetables from an open jar; the appearance of mold, which affects vegetables with putrefactive processes; Fermentation may begin for no reason, causing the lids to fly off the jars.
In order to avoid such incidents, you need to know the basic rules for preserving cucumbers, which have been tested for many centuries:
- It is better to pickle cucumbers in the morning on the waning moon at the end of the month;
- vegetables cannot be collected on full moon days;
- to get crispy cucumbers without voids inside, you need to harvest them on the same day as soon as they were collected from the garden beds;
- they begin to work on preparations 5-6 days before the new moon, then to finish the work before the appearance of the new moon;
- cucumbers will turn out empty and soft if they are prepared during the last quarter of the moon.
5 popular time-tested ways to prepare cucumbers for the winter
Canned cucumbers with tomatoes
- 0.9 kilograms of cucumbers up to 10 centimeters long
- 0.9 kilograms of red small plum or round tomatoes
- a pod of red or green hot pepper
- 3 dill umbrellas
- 3-4 cloves of garlic
- horseradish leaf
Ingredients for filling:
- 1200 grams of water
- 72 grams salt
- 30 grams sugar
- 70 grams 6% vinegar
Recipe:
- Fresh cucumbers are soaked in cold water for 6 hours, and you need to change the water twice - fresh.
- Dill and cloves of garlic are placed at the bottom of the prepared container. Also, a horseradish leaf cut into strips five centimeters wide and a pepper pod cut lengthwise.
- Cucumbers and tomatoes are placed in layers on top of the seasonings. To give it a beautiful look, you can add thin slices of carrots to a jar of vegetables.
- Vinegar is added and brought to a boil again.
- The container with the contents is filled with boiling brine, covered with a lid and pasteurized for a quarter of an hour.
- After sterilization, the jar is rolled up and placed upside down until completely cooled.
Fragrant cucumbers “like from a barrel”
Ingredients for filling a three-liter jar:
- 2000 grams of cucumbers
- head of garlic
- 3 dill umbrellas
- horseradish leaf
- 5 cherry leaves
- 5 currant leaves
- hot pepper pod
Ingredients for filling:
- 1500 grams of water
- 60 grams of salt
- 3 allspice peas
- laurel leaf
Recipe:
- Cucumbers are soaked for two hours in ice water
- The jar is washed with soda and sterilized over hot steam
- All spices are placed on the bottom of the container, cucumbers are laid out on top, as densely as possible. A hot peppercorn falls into the void near the neck.
- To make the brine, add salt to the water, add laurel and allspice. Boil until the salt dissolves and pour into a jar of cucumbers.
- The container is covered with a lid and left to ferment for three days. It is necessary to place a rag under the jar, since foaming will be violent.
- After three days, the liquid is poured into a saucepan, boiled for five minutes and poured back into the jar.
- The container is rolled up and wrapped upside down for cooling.
The time of year for cooking is July, August.
Cucumbers with sweet peppers in Polish
Ingredients:
- 5 kilograms of cucumbers and sweet peppers
- 0.2 kilograms of dill
- 3 heads of garlic
- 20 black peppercorns
For ten liters of pouring lightly salted cucumbers, you need to take 0.3 kilograms of salt, and for salted ones - 0.6 kilograms of salt. Salt is taken according to the housewife's preference.
Recipe:
- Cucumbers are pre-soaked in cold water for four hours.
- In a large container, dill, pepper, and garlic cloves cut in half are laid out on the bottom.
- Cucumbers are placed on top of the spices.
- Water and salt are boiled until all the salt has dissolved.
- Cucumbers are poured with boiling brine, covered with a napkin and left under pressure for a couple of days.
- After two days, the stalks of the pepper are cut off and the seeds are removed. The pods are placed on top of the cucumbers. The brine should cover the peppers and cucumbers, so if there is not enough brine, you need to add fresh brine (take 30 or 60 grams of salt per liter of water, boil, cool and add to the filled container).
- Cover the top of the pepper with a napkin and leave under pressure for another three days. If mold appears, it must be carefully removed, the mold washed, and the napkin changed.
- When the required time has passed, the cucumbers and peppers are washed under running water and placed in clean jars.
- The liquid is filtered and poured into jars of cucumbers.
- The container filled with vegetables and brine is sterilized for at least 15 minutes, sealed and removed to cool.
The time of year for cooking is August.
Lightly salted cucumbers with citric acid.
Ingredients:
- cucumbers are taken in such quantities as will fit into 4 three-liter jars
- 8 cherry leaves
- 8 currant leaves
- horseradish root
- 8 cloves garlic
- 12 peppercorns
- greens or dill umbrellas
- for brine per six liters of water - 120 grams of salt, 360 grams of granulated sugar, a bag of citric acid
Recipe:
- Cucumbers are soaked in cold water for about six hours. Place in an enamel basin and pour boiling water over it for half an hour.
- Leaves, dill, chopped horseradish root, garlic and pepper are laid out into 4 three-liter jars.
- Cucumbers are placed tightly on top of the spices.
- Water for brine is poured into a large saucepan and placed on fire. Then sugar and salt are dissolved in it and boiled for ten minutes.
- After this, under the boiling pour, the gas is reduced to a minimum, and citric acid is poured into it in small portions. When the marinade stops foaming, it is poured into jars with cucumbers.
- The container is sealed with lids and covered upside down until it cools completely.
Tender cucumbers with mustard
Ingredients:
- two tablespoons mustard powder
- 4000 grams of cucumbers
- 180 grams of sugar
- 200 grams 6% vinegar
- 190 grams of vegetable oil
- tablespoon ground black pepper
- 110 grams salt
Recipe:
- Pre-soaked cucumbers are cut lengthwise into quarters and placed in a large saucepan.
- Add salt, pepper, sugar, mustard powder to the cucumbers, add vinegar and vegetable oil. Everything is mixed and set aside for six hours.
- Then the vegetables are laid out in half-liter jars and filled with the resulting marinade.
- The container with the contents is sterilized within 40 minutes.
- The jars are sealed and covered until completely cooled.
The time of year for cooking is July.
Favorite recipes for preparing cucumbers for the winter are often passed down from generation to generation.
Often proven recipes are enriched with new ingredients to improve taste, but the rules of pickling remain unchanged:
- Only rock salt is used for preparations. Many housewives will not answer the question: why exactly this, but they do not recommend using boiled and iodized salt;
- vegetables should be soaked in spring, well or rain water, since chlorinated tap water is not suitable for this purpose;
- oak or horseradish leaves (also horseradish root itself) give the prepared cucumbers density, and they remain crispy, without voids inside;
- It is recommended to use only unripe vegetables, without large seeds or voids inside, as large cucumbers will turn out soft;
- There are various seasonings for preserving cucumbers, each of which can add a characteristic taste or aroma to the finished dish.
Detailed recipe for canning cucumbers (video)
When preparing recipes, you can use different seasoning compositions that better suit the housewife’s taste. Well, the hostess herself decides in what quantity to take seasonings that are not included in the recipe.
In any case, it is advisable to adhere to common sense. Our grandmothers could, for example, not preserve food for 40 days after someone died, including on church holidays. However, if you fully trust the signs of conservation, then you have the right to comply with any of them. This doesn’t mean that you need to completely submit to them and not try anything new, does it?
Many experienced housewives know about the existence of the lunar calendar and its influence. But some are skeptical about this, others use the advice of a neighbor who “knows lunar signs.” How to deal with this amazing assistant to housewives yourself?
Homemade jams and preserves are fabulously tasty compared to their store-bought counterparts. The aroma of fresh fruit distinguishes home-made preparations collected on the “correct” days. What about fruits, any harvest will be stored for a long time without preservatives and stabilizers if it is collected on the days designated for harvesting. If you choose the wrong time, then many troubles are possible - the appearance of mold, the rapid appearance of an unpleasant odor in vegetables and fruits, and damage by putrefactive processes.
Here are some tips for making homemade preparations using the lunar calendar.
It is advisable to collect and preserve fruits in the position of the Moon in the fire signs of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, and it is preferable to harvest root vegetables for quick consumption in the position of Scorpio and Cancer.
Everyone’s favorite, so rich in vitamin C, is prepared for the winter in large barrels. Sourdough recipes are different, with fruits, nuts, herbs. If you want to select cabbage for food, then you need to do this in bulk for a whole week at once in order to prevent the cabbage from drying out or fermenting. The main condition for collecting cabbage will be a ban on sampling on the days of Cancer, Leo and Virgo. If you break the necessary rules and make a fence in the days of Leo, the cabbage will dry out; in the days of Cancer, the fermentation process will begin.
If you want to verify for yourself the correctness of the proposed method, then you should try making a preparation according to a recipe familiar to you on the waxing and waning Moon. You will notice the result immediately, one of them will be successful, the other will be tasteless at best.
Our grandmothers used various folk signs, a folk calendar, which we now call astrological. Astrobiology considers not only the concept of a waxing and waning moon, but also an ascending and descending one. Thus, everything depends on the position of the Moon above the horizon and its passage along a different arc. And this, of course, depends on what zodiac sign she is in.
The rising Moon fills the fruits with juice, promoting the development of the above-ground part of the plant. It is easy to recognize such a Moon in the sky; it is positioned with its horns upward, like a full bowl for the harvest. The descending one goes to the bottom, which means that all the juices fill the root vegetables. The moon in the zodiac sign of Sagittarius and Capricorn or Aquarius and Pisces, Aries and Taurus will be ascendant. If in Gemini or Cancer, Leo or Virgo, Libra and Scorpio, then descending.
The transition period falls on the zodiac signs Gemini and Sagittarius. All preparations for the winter must be combined with the rising Moon.
Then canned foods, jams, and juices will be aromatic and of high quality. The August harvest of medicinal herbs occurs during the full moon. Such herbs have undeniable medicinal properties.
August is a hot time for the housewife, so during the days of the zodiac sign Aries, start canning cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers - all land fruits. And in Taurus - root vegetables. If you are preparing assorted dishes for the winter, then do this work at the intersection of two signs.
These simple tips will help you using