Beanucopia

We are now harvesting my last plantings of green beans for 2011. Today we cleaned a bucketful I picked this morning, plus some guys we'd stored in the refrigerator.

Here are the jars ready to go, filled with boiling water.

"So green!" says Virginia.

Yes, it's too bad canned beans turn such an ugly -- I'm not very good at this color thing, but after looking through a color chart I'd pick -- ooze.  Oh well, they're good in soup, and soup colors are almost always far from fresh.

Ending up with 14 quarts, I decided to put two pressure canners to work, including one we found a couple years ago in a Goodwill store. Perhaps that was a risky proposition since I haven't tested its pressure gauge. I basically ran them side-by-side, overdoing the pressure and the time on the unknown canner. So far so good.