You can never have enough...

[Lilith7]

I'm the opposite when it comes to bottling.   When I was a child we had a big section filled with fruit trees and every summer my poor mother spent weeks bottling Golden Queen peaches and Peacherines, surrounded by wasps.  Nobody helped her.  To this day I have never bottled fruit, although I used to love making jams and jellies and marmalades.   These days I use the freezer; yesterday I dealt with the week's tomato mountain and now have nine Jimbo's pots of tomato and onion pulp in the new freezer.  To be repeated every couple of days for the next month, with added tomatillos soon.

We do our best to cheat the blackbirds by netting, then harvesting the tomatoes as soon as they show the faintest colour and ripening them inside.   We also keep enough figs for ourselves by covering each fig with a little plastic bag (bags are recycled every year) when it reaches full size but before it colours.   It's quite laborious but worth it for the figs, which otherwise get completely demolished.

Similar for me Olive. I remember coming home from school to find mum exhausted in preserving season - she did the lot. Fruit,veges,eggs (in horrible slimy goo stuff which I think was called ovoline) plus all kinds of pickles & sauces, & also spaghetti in home made sauce.
Living out in the country (& in pre supermarket days ) meant a  huge garden was needed, as it was for most people then. There was a big floor to ceiling cupboard which was filled every season with preserves.

The most I do is freeze things but interestingly, sweetie darling no.2 has lately started preserving things so perhaps its making a comeback. That, or he's a bit weird like me...