Getting Creative With Canning

Lately, I have felt the need to create. I have also been nostalgic, thinking back to the summers of my childhood in Walker Springs, Alabama (a suburb of the great metropolis of Jackson). We always had a huge garden. My parents grew tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, squash, zucchini, green beans, butterbeans, and peas. At the time, I could not fully appreciate the abundant bounty that our garden produced. It required much work, either planting, weeding, picking, shelling, snapping, cutting, or canning. My sisters will say that I always got the easy job of housework while they worked in the heat picking vegetables, but to them I say, "whatever".

We always loved it when we had peas or beans to snap or shell. We would come into the house, cooled by a single window unit. We would grab our pans and a bucket to put our ends in and watch TV. This was the only time we could "legally" watch TV. We often had sore, purple fingers.

We also helped our mom can and prepare the vegetables for freezing. I can't tell you how many pounds of squash and zucchini I have sliced in my time. We always seemed to have it coming out of our ears. We also made pickles from cucmbers and squash, and we canned tomatoes and green beans. I had never thought much about canning until the other day, when I thought that I may want to try it.

This morning I decided to take the kids blueberry picking. They have really missed out on the whole gardening thing. My parents and Tremaine's parents both have gardens, but they are about an eighth of what they once were (all of their workers are gone). We went to a cute U-Pick farm in Wilmer. It is called Betty's U-Pick Blueberry Farm. We picked two one gallon buckets full in about an hour. It was a fun, but hot experience, and Ms. Betty showed us her baby donkey, who had just been born on July 3rd.

After the berry picking, we went to Wal-Mart, and I got jars and all of my canning supplies. I had found a recipe for blueberry jam online which only contained blueberries and sugar. Simple enough. I came home, and Anna Caroline and I got busy making jam. We washed and sorted the blueberries. Anna Caroline was over quality control and stem patrol. She was also an excellent smasher. We added the sugar and cooked the jam. I followed the steps in my canning booklet that came with my "Canning Discovery Kit", and to my amazement, all of my jars sealed, and the jam looks beautiful. I did not save any for us to eat because I just knew that I would have at least one jar that did not seal.

I printed some cute labels for the jars online and decorated them with fabric and embroidery thread, and I am planning to give my first jar away tomorrow. I feel such a sense of accomplishment from doing this, and I hope that this will be a part of my childrens' memories someday. I think I may try salsa next!