How We Preserve Strawberry Jam for our Family of Twelve | Honey Sweetened, No Sugar!

Hey everyone, it's Sheri from the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. Today I'm going to be talking about how we preserve honey sweetened jam for our family of 12. If you're new to my channel, my name is Sheri. I am a homeschooling mom to 10 kids. I'm married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson. We've been married for 22 years. I'm a former public school teacher turned homeschool mom. I love encouraging other moms on my YouTube channel and on the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com. We've had a really busy week here. Our oldest son, Ty, graduated from high school this week, which has been such an exciting milestone for him and for me. If you're a homeschooling mom, you can relate that these past 13 years to get to this point just feels so rewarding. So we enjoyed his graduation ceremony on Friday and then we were at grad parties and we had a grad party here. So it's just been a very eventful and exciting weekend celebrating all these years that we have invested into him and celebrating the rest of his graduating class. It's also been a busy week on our farm as well. We have a small homestead where we enjoy gardening and raising some of our own animals. And this week our strawberries were ripe. They were ready for picking. When things are ripe in your garden or on your homestead, you have to get at it right away. You can't wait. There's no putting it off to next week. Everything else has to be pushed aside to take care of this. And that was what was also going on this week. Our strawberries were all ripe, so we were all out there picking. They're bringing in bowls and bowls of strawberries to the kitchen, which means that I had to get started on making strawberry jam. So I'm going to be sharing with you, I thought it would be just an easy video to do for me to share with you how we preserve strawberry jam for a family of 12. We try to make enough to last us a whole year. We almost did it last year. We didn't quite make it, so I'm going to have to do a little bit more this year. But I wanted to share with you the process and how we go about doing that. This is a small strawberry patch right beside our house. We planted this right around when we first moved here over three years ago. The very first year we pulled off all the flowers and we did this to give more strength to the plant. So the second year was the year that we got our first crop of strawberries, and they were just delicious. We got so many from our first crop. If you're going to grow any plants, strawberries are a good one to start with because they're very low maintenance. We planted this and we had to do a little bit of weeding, and they do send out runners, so you have to kind of keep them contained. But it's very little work, and it just provides so much. When it's strawberry season, it's all hands on deck. Everyone is involved. There's a job that everyone can do, and especially in the picking, we really need the kids' help in the picking. And of course, I think it's so great for them to see how their work is contributing to the needs of the whole family. Our approach to gardening has been to just look at some of the things that we eat a lot of and to try and grow those in our garden. So we eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, having a lot of kids, peanut butter and jelly toast, so it makes sense for us to try strawberry jam. And over the years, we've learned how to make it in a way that our family all likes it. And this is the first year that we learned how to make strawberry jam with honey, which has been something I've wanted to do for a long time, and finally found a way. The problem I had in the past was that I couldn't get it to set, and I tried it this year and was able to get it to set, and so I was really happy with how that turned out this year. So we like to grow food in our garden that I know our family is going to eat, and instead of planting a variety of things, we really just focus in on things that I know that I can preserve and make a lot of those, plant a lot of those. So one of those would be green beans. Green beans are easy. They're easy to just, you plant the seed in the ground, very little work with it. And at harvest time, the kids can pick the green beans, they can cut the tips off. It's a quick blanch and freeze. Another one that we do is sweet corn. I love to have cream corn. That's another nice side dish. We also plant a ton of tomatoes because you can make diced tomatoes or spaghetti sauce, salsa, there's just a lot of things that you can can with tomatoes. So that's another one that we do in bulk. As you can see here, after we pick the strawberries, we bring them in and wash them. And then we use a potato masher to crush the strawberries. I'm sure there's probably faster or easier ways to do this. You could probably put them in a blender. But I really like using a potato masher just because it's something that the kids can do. And it helps them to be able to have a part in the process and all the process. They're there for the picking, they can wash it, they can crush it. Pretty much the only part that my kids don't really help with is just when I'm boiling it on the stove and pouring it into the hot jars, unless they're old enough, obviously. But everyone can do the picking, the washing and the crushing of the strawberries. Another job that needs to be done early on is bringing up the jars from the basement and washing and sterilizing them. And this is another part that the kids can do. One thing that I think is so great is that when you do something year after year, the kids pick up so much from it. So they learn a lot from being a part of it and from the work that they do. But even when they just see it being done, even if they're not actually involved in every step of the process, they know how it works and they just kind of get a sense of how you make strawberry jam, for example. If they're there when you're canning applesauce or doing green beans or pickles every single year, they just, they know what happens next and they can just step in if I need help with the next part of the process. So we like to have them help with the process as much as they're able to do. But even when they're not present, they just learn so much over the years of seeing the same thing done over and over again. Right here I am pouring the crushed strawberries into a measuring jar. And if you would like to see the recipe for how our family makes strawberry jam, you can check it out on the website. I have done a full blog post on preserving honey sweetened jam for a large family. Last year I made 50 pints and it lasted us until about April. And this year I'm going to try to do just a little bit more so that we can get all the way through the year. The next step is to pour the crushed strawberries into a pan and heat on the stove until it comes to a rolling boil. Then we add the pectin. I use a low sugar pectin and this is important if you're going to be using the honey recipe that I'm using. This makes less than if you use sugar for the low sugar recipe. In the past I've used the same amount of strawberries with the low sugar recipe and it makes probably 6 pints of strawberries. This recipe makes only 5 because I'm using a smaller amount of honey. You don't need to use as much honey because it's so sweet as you do when you use sugar for the low sugar recipe. When the sure gel or the pectin comes to a rolling boil that can't be stopped then you pour in your sweetener which I am now using honey. And you pour the honey in and that has to be at a rolling boil for a full minute. So that takes a little while until it gets up to a boil and then it needs to boil for a minute. The final step before processing the jars and canners is pouring the finished hot strawberry jam into the pint sized jars. Back to the kids being there year after year watching what we're doing. Another thing that I think is really great is for them to learn and see your mistakes and to see that you don't just throw in the towel and walk away but that you figure out what you did wrong. A mistake I've been having is I've been having jars bursting in the canner which has been really frustrating and I haven't been able to figure out what is causing this until this year after I finish the strawberry jam and I pour it into the hot jars at the very end of the process. A lot of times I'll just let them sit in those jars and you know with a lot of kids around I'm always doing something and I think that I've been letting them sit too long and they get too cool so that when I put them in the canner the change in temperature is just too extreme for them and it's caused them to crack. So this year I learned why I've been having this problem. I need to put them in the canner right away when they're really hot or if they're going to cool down like that I can't put them in a boiling hot canner. I have to put them in when the water is warm and let them slowly heat up to a boil. So things like this are things that the kids learn just because they're there all the time and they see the mistakes and that's a valuable lesson for them. The next step in the process is to prepare the lids and rings. We boil the lids for one minute and then use a magnetic lifter to get them from the pot onto the hot jars. It's important to wipe the top of the jars with a clean cloth, a damp cloth, to just make sure that there's no bacteria or any residue on the top of the jars. And then they're ready to put the lids on. I put them on and screw the tops on. It's really important to screw them all the way but not too tight. If they're too tight the tops will buckle. If they're too loose the jars won't seal. At this point they are ready to go in the canner. I process them for 10 minutes so they have to be at a constant boil for 10 minutes. And then you can use a jar lifter to get them out of the canner and set them on a tea towel to cool. This is our process for preserving honey sweetened jam for our large family. I hope that you enjoyed this video and that you will try making strawberry jam for your family. Thanks for watching. You can follow along with our life homeschooling. I make one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms.