Pressure Canning Greens

 

This is the first time I’ve grown my own greens. In my part of the country people love them. Everyone has their preferred method of flavoring and cooking them, but I try to keep these Southern favorites as healthy as possible. I do use a little bacon grease, but I also add onions and chicken stock or bouillon for flavor. I also prefer to pressure cook them as this will cook them down appropriately, but keep the nutrients intact better than boiling them on the stove. Some people are purists about greens and will only make one kind in a batch. For instance, my husband prefers kale while one of my other close friends prefers collards. I like to mix them because I like all of them. 

To that end, the bed below has bok choi and one end and some lettuce on the other. In the middle, there is collard, kale, Swiss chard and mustard greens. When I harvested the first batch, I just cooked them all as a mixture and we both liked the result. 

Pictured below is the bed of greens from a couple of angles. You will see that one section has been eaten a bit and there is what looks like dust on the plants. The dust is the diatomaceous earth (which is basically dead bugs that deter other bugs). These are the things we live with when we can a chemical free garden. It might be ugly, but it tastes better. If you do grow your own greens, be sure to wash them multiple times. I tend to not only wash each leaf, but once I rip it up into bite size pieces and discard any thick stems, I immerse the greens in a big bowl of water. Any critters you might miss will rise to the top. I also run them through my salad spinner, then rise and spin one last time. 

Greens are low in acid, so it’s a must to pressure can them. I decided to try an experiment on the first batch. Instead of canning plain greens, I decided to can them with all of the seasons and onions so I could just merely heat them up when we want to have them as a side. I pressure canned them using 10lbs and processed them for 60 minutes. For the most part it did work, but some of the jars didn’t seal and my guess is the bacon grease was the culprit. I plan to can more batches but sans bacon grease. I can always add that when I heat them up while still canning with the flavor of the other seasonings intact.