It’s a color explosion – there are dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, beet pickles, beets, beans, stewed tomatoes, tomato juice, kraut, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries, apple butter, plum butter, jelly and jam! And in total, back in her prime, my grandmother used to can at least 200 jars of food each year to feed their family.

Next summer, in hopes of preserving a farm-wife tradition, I’m going to have Grandma teach me how to preserve food. She learned canning from her mom and from 4-H and it’s time to pass that tradition along before it’s lost.

The process of canning has changed and morphed over the years. Grandma used to use zinc lids and a rubber ring – now, they’re self-sealing metal rings and inserts. They used to can meat (beef and chicken), but meat lockers changed that. The pressure canner also changed the face of the job and sped up the process as compared to using the old boiler or kerosene stove. The advent of freezers meant bags and jars of corn, apples, pumpkin, gooseberries, strawberries and rhubarb could go in the freezer instead of on the shelves.

But even with the modern technologies, it’s not an easy process. First, you have to actually grow your produce! Then there’s the picking, cleaning, stemming, cutting, sometimes pre-cooking, making sure lids are sealed and adding paraffin to the top of jams and jellies.

My Grandma is now 85. At about 200 jars per year since she was 18, I’ll let you do the math.

Until we walk again…