Sunshine in a jar

This week at the urban farm I had my first taste of canning. I have always frozen some fruits and veggies (raspberries are my favorite freezable) because freezing is fairly straightforward, even for a novice like me.

We are looking forward to a good raspberry harvest this year. Netting will keep the birds from taking too many!

Reusable netting is good for all kinds of fruit crops.

The world of Ball jars and canning lids has been a big mystery to me. When I was a kid my mom and dad would buy boxes of Concord grapes from the local grape growers and make jelly. The popping of the lids as the jars cooled made my mouth water for a slice of toast with homemade jelly. But that was many years ago, and we now all live far away from the Concord grapes of Tontitown, Arkansas (with its fun and delicious grape festival that feeds festival goers some of the best Italian food around).

In my mind I had originally thought that food preservation would all take place at one time in the fall, but now that I think about it more, canning and freezing and drying will happen at many points throughout the year when we will put away food from whatever plant is producing in abundance. As a food and farming meditation, I have been slowly re-reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and really thinking about each chapter. This week I'm contemplating her ideas of local eating.

What is local in the upper Midwest?

Here in Wisconsin, if you don't can/freeze/dry some of the harvest, over the winter a local meal will consist mostly of meat and milk products with root veggies. By early spring even the root veggies will likely be gone. Preserved foods are like packets of sunshine in a jar, ready to take out when the days are cold, reminding us that we do produce beautiful food here in the summertime, and giving us faith that the long, warm days of summer will indeed return.

Strawberry season

In the future I hope to have a strawberry patch of my own, but until them I am enjoying the fruits harvested by my local farmer's market growers. I bought two quarts of perfectly ripe, local, organic, berries at the downtown Middleton farmers market (conveniently located at Capital Brewery) and brought them home to make jam while they were at the peak of ripeness. My mom and I canned them using water bath canning, and I'm excited about pressure canning the less acidic foods later this summer!

Starting the process of filling up my pantry for winter.

And just because I like to know the monetary value of things, a half pint of local, hand-made jam goes for 8 bucks at the farmer's market (this seems expensive to me, though I have been known to pay this on occasion because it is so much more delicious than the grocery store variety). For $10 worth of berries, $2 for pectin, and $2 for new lids (I already owned the jars) I produced $72 worth of strawberry jam.

Chickens and compost

Just for fun, here are a couple of pictures of the pullets enjoying the strawberry tops!

It took a while for them to warm up to the berries.

But they figured out that they are delicious and begged for more scraps.