Chatting and Pressure Canning Green Beens

A long time ago a dear friend told me that when women's hands are busy they share their hearts. I find that to be very true. One of my favorite things to do is go over to my friends house. This last weekend she had picked a boat load of green beans and we pressure canned them on Saturday.
Along with her teen aged daughter we spent the day snapping, canning and chatting.  
These days people are so wrapped up in their electronic devices & running to and fro that sometimes we forget to actually engage in life. That is just ones of the reasons I continue to do what I do...
Very few simply take the time to be with each other. 
It's actually kind of interesting because she is the person who taught me how to pressure can, I forced her to learn how to can meats and now she was asking me questions through out the process. 

Pressure canning green beans is really very simple. Sorry I didn't get a lot of pictures this time. This time we used hot pack (using hot water to fill the jars for canning).
1) First you snap the ends of the beans and break them into smaller pieces. Rinse the beans well. 
2) Have your clean jars, lids and rings ready.
3) We added the green beans, pushing them in well and added hot water, leaving about 1/2" head space (or room) at the top of the jar.
4) Wiped the top of the jar to make sure it was clean. Then added a new, clean
lid and ring to the jar.
Here we are mid-process. Note the clean jars up front ready to be filled. The filling station is towards the right. The filled jars (with hot water) are sitting ready to pop in the pressure canner. We were doing 7 quarts at a time. Oh and those are pickles fermenting on the right.

NOTE: You need to pressure can green beans if you are canning they from the garden because of the acidity level.
5) We pressure canned the beans at 11# of pressure for 25 minutes.
We were using this great Ball Canning magazine for our instructions and timing. Look at the quaint, retro pictures.

6) Afterwards we let the canner cool down and when the pressure was at zero, we opened the canner, pulled out the jars and listened to them "ping"! That is the favorite sound for a canner.
In the end we had 24 quarts of green beans done and had solved most of life's problem. I hope you have a canning friend like I do. Us being goofy!

BTW, the picture of the well isn't crooked, the old well is. Anyway that is one of things I did this last weekend. What did you do?
Things we used this weekend.

           

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