No More Jam

The parents of people now in their mid seventies were children during the Great Depression.  It is highly likely that they faced bedtime with empty bellies on many occasions.  That may be a factor in my history of large family gardens filled with food.  Becky and I have tended our own gardens across the past fifty years.  We no longer put up large quantities of frozen or canned food but we still make our own jam.

This is the end of our frozen stockpile.  No cook freezer jam filled the freezer and nearly carried us to the next harvest.  Some of the strawberries used in the jam were grown here.  Most were picked by us from a nearby roadside operation.  Most went from the plant to the freezer in just one day.  The balance were processed the next day.  Starting each day with jam made from locally grown fruit is a remarkable experience.

As the last of the jam jars were filled, we turned to freezing fresh berries.  These are seen as a special treat and we usually find some of last year's crop still holding freezer space when the new crop is ripe.  It is a real hardship to make the effort to clean out the freezer in a timely fashion.

The roadside market that has served our needs for more than fifty years is no more.  We have found another but felt the need to grow our own.  These plants are in their second year here and look ready to provide us with a bumper crop.  The original plants were set in two rows.  Runner plants were set in rows on either side of the parent plants.  There was supposed to be a one foot wide clear space down the middle.  More plants should have been removed.  The bed is five feet wide and the wire fence is easily removable.  Picking from either is within our extended reach.  The one hundred new plants here might just supply our needs.

These berries lag behind the forty-eight plants near the house.  The nearby maple trees shaded this part of the garden despite their lack of leaves.  Since the sun climbs higher each day this ground lies in full sun now.  Winter was just a little late to leave here and that could be seen as a plus.  In any event we will be picking fresh ripe strawberries here very soon.  We must remember to purchase needed supplies now before the store stock is depleted.

Strawberry Season

There is nothing better than the taste of a freshly picked ripe strawberry.  These berries were taken from the field only two hours ago but they have continued to ripen since picked and will soon be past.  Fruit grown for commercial distribution has been bred to produce a harder more stable berry.  Those have also lost much of their flavor.  The named variety of these berries is a trade secret.  Their shelf life is measured in minutes but their flavor exceeds any attempt to describe it.

A little commercial never hurts.  Heller's were selling strawberries in this area when I first met Becky fifty plus years ago.  In that time they have mastered the art of growing this berry.  Their fields are clean and well tended.  Only nine dollars were necessary to make this basket of fruit mine.  I did have to pick them myself.

Age has mandated adjustments to how the berries are picked.  Daily medicine has made it impossible for me to do anything while standing with head down near my knees.  If I tried to do that, face down on the ground would be the result when I straightened up so I work while kneeling.  Becky can no longer kneel so she works bent over from a standing position.  Every time that I looked up today she was upright, arching her back to the rear.  I never expected that with all of those breaks her basket would fill faster than mine but it did.

No cook freezer jam preserves the incredible fresh taste of strawberries.  We now have 26 containers filled with this treat.  My day always begins with home grown herbal tea and toasted cracked wheat bread from a local bakery.  When the jam on the toast is from our freezer the day is off to a great start.

We do have two dozen of our own plants.  That number of plants supplies enough fruit for breakfast or a special dessert.  Strawberry season here lasts for only two weeks.  We treasure these days and look forward to berries or jam fresh from the freezer.  Freshly frozen berries are almost as tasty as those straight from the garden.