Canning as a Contact Sport

We finally made it to the u-pick blueberry place on Tuesday. With our crew it didn’t take but a couple hours to pick 5 gallons. Youngest, at 8, was not real happy until he discovered an apple tree he could play under and climb and make into his special place . . . And when the rest of us had had enough sun in the berry fields we joined him in there!

I love this place. The lady is so extremely local. I value that. Ok, I am that too, but I value that. I love my friends from everywhere but it is so rare that someone is from somewhere and is still there and there is a connection to place, a level of knowledge and connection, a culture, that just isn’t there otherwise. And she’s just really nice, asked us when we paid her if we felt like we were satisfied and getting good value for our money. I think she’s gone up a dollar a gallon in the past two years. She was worried that one man had been out picking for a long time and asked us if we’d seen him . . . so we went and found him to make sure he was ok before we left, so she wouldn’t worry. She told us tales of people passing out in the field and her taking chairs to people so they could sit while they picked.

Then on Wednesday husband went and picked four gallons of blackberries. So we had a lot of processing to do. I learned how they make Molotov cocktails from a Professor O’Donnell I met in 1980 when the Troubles were what terrorism meant. They put sugar in them because it makes the heat stick. Canning hot sugar is dangerous. I know that well. Kids have always been banned from the kitchen when we are doing it, and we don’t do it alone.

And we still had an accident today. I was pouring the stuff into the jars and dropped the pot somehow and some sloshed on my wrist and sure enough, it burned the fire out of it. As careful as you are, sometimes sh*t happens. As it turns out, it isn’t too serious and I’m real glad of that. We soldiered on with the jamming anyway and made 30 pints which was 6 batches of blackberry (one of them a partial batch since I dropped it) and one of blueberry and about one third of what we’ll hope to end the year with. We also dried about two gallons of the blueberries, and froze a couple, and ate the rest I guess.

And we’re deciding which days this coming week will be berry picking days.