Week 36 of 2017 - Angel on my Shoulder.

It is Week 36 already...wow...

This week I have been very busy with the garden. We have had a cool summer this year but we had rain on a regular basis. So as you can see the garden is flourishing! I purposely planted later in the spring so all the produce in the garden would not be ready during our late August vacation this year. Now that it is the first week of September the coolness of fall is in the air. My beans are just starting and the tomatoes are getting red but very slowly. 

The tomato plants are weighted down with lots of green and light orange fruit. The fruit is so heavy that sometimes they fall off too soon and drop to the straw covered ground beneath the plants. So my patio table is full of tomatoes in all stages from green, light orange, dark orange and red with green spots! I place them there for a few more days of sunshine hoping that they will ripen just a bit more.

We, the tomatoes and I, are hoping for some more summer warmth and sunshine. My gardening skills I got when I was a strong young woman in my twenties. I had a neighbor who had an acre of land between my house and his. He grew a large garden on it and one year invited me to help him. Looking back, the things I learned that summer were life altering lessons....that is for a different blog. My garden is smaller and I am older. That is good.

I have to try to rein myself in when planting time arrives. I see all the empty space between the rows and I try to convince myself that I can fit one more row or one more squash mound!  I try to plant too much in my small space. I have plenty of room but I need to use it wisely. 

So this week I am preserving all the produce from my little patch of heaven. Some of you probably think I am crazy because it is a lot of work but it is rewarding. Each year as the fruits of my labor appear, it take me back to a time when my Mother canned everything she could get her hands on and made jam that we would eat all winter.

In the 1950 and 1960's it was not easy to feed a household of eight. So you learned how to buy, barter or just obtain the extra (or as in my case, grow...) bushels of fruit and produce that you in some way would preserved. I remember sitting at the table licking the spoon of foam that was carefully scraped off the top of the strawberry jam when Mom made it. When we got older, we were recruited to go pick berries with her for her jam making adventures. We were instructed that we could not just pick and eat!

Later in the summer she would buy bushels of fruit. We especially loved that time of the year because we would sneak fruit from the baskets as they waited to be canned. I vividly remember a year where someone ate so many plums that they ended up spending the next day on the toilet. Ops...learned that lesson. That was also the year when Mom figured out that we were snitching from her baskets! Plums were a favorite along with peaches and pears. For years she threw the peach pits and the peels on the same spot in our side yard and before we knew it we had our own peach tree. She did not realize it but all the fruit and vegetable waste she put on that pile made for a perfect place for that peach tree to grow. Mom was not a gardener but she knew how to put thing up for the winter.

Fast forward to the 1975...alright, you don't have to go too fast...I have my first little cracker box of a house and a wonderful neighbor who, as I said, had this big garden. I am helping him...really he is teaching me. I have two children and all the produce I could handle and now what do I do? My Mother came to my rescue! We collected jars, lids and rings from every source that we could find but especially garage sales and estate sales. She helped me find the tools I needed; a water bath canner, jar lifters and a canning funnel. In the spring, she showed me how to make jam, her famous strawberry, after we picked the berries ourselves. I saved up enough money to buy a second hand freezer so that we could freeze what we could not preserve by canning.

Raspberry Jam

By midsummer, the neighbors raspberries were ready and we made jam again. I had never eaten raspberry jam before and it soon became my favorite. We never had enough peas to freeze because my children ate them fresh out of the garden before I could get them to the house. Once the beans started, Mom showed me how to blanch them and freeze them. Then we went on to the tomatoes....lots and lots of tomatoes. We had so many tomatoes that we bartered tomatoes with the neighbor to our south for pears from her pear tree. We each did up a bushel. Mom had not canned much since our moved to Imlay City. Her family was shrinking as the older three girls married and move out. Now they were a family of five. We found peaches at a good price so we did some of those too. I think we had that water bath canner boiling for about 5 or 6 weeks canning everything we could get our hands on. 

Pickled Beets

 Stewed Tomatoes

At this time of the year as I am canning things from my garden, I hear my Mom telling me how to do it...”don't forget a little salt...” she would say when we canned tomatoes. “Get all that air out of that jar.... clean off that rim before you put the lid on...make sure the lids and jars are hot...be sure to let them cool on the counter ...make sure the hot jars don't touch...” 

 All through the process, I have a little Angel sitting on my shoulder, who reminds me of all the things I learned from her and all the fun we had that year.  So just maybe that explains why I do this every summer and fall. I certainly can afford to go to the store and buy jelly, tomatoes, fruit and vegetables but I would miss the visit that I get from my Mom! And the store bought goods do not taste as good as my preserved items!

Love you Mom...we are at it again this year!

Love, Jan