And So the Race Begins . . .

Summer has just barely begun, but I am working doggedly, as I strive to make the best use of our garden and orchard. It is primarily my responsibility to put away as much of our produce as I can to see us through the lean months of winter. However, I have enlisted help from my family members whenever they are free. It's a race to put away as much from our garden as possible before the cold weather returns in fall.

My morning mind is often hazy, so I made my list of chores the evening before. After taking care of other business (side-hustle to earn a little spending money), I charged out to the kitchen with purpose. The small stockpot sits on the top shelf in the pantry, only taken down for occasional jar sterilizing. With space at a premium, the small stockpot is nestled inside of the larger stockpot that I use for making yogurt, tomato salsa, and large batches of applesauce, jam, or preserves. The small stockpot was a bargain piece bought at Fred Meyer 30 years ago. At the time it was my largest pot. I used it for putting up the fruit that grew on the property of our rented duplex. There were 2 apple trees, 2 plum trees, 1 sour cherry tree, and 1 crabapple tree. There was also a pear tree but it never set fruit while we lived in the rental. My guess is it needed a rooster tree and either none had ever been planted or the rooster had died and been removed many years before we moved in. That first summer, there, was a game-changer in my strategy for economizing on groceries. We moved in during the month of April. We had just relocated to the Seattle area, and my husband was looking for work. The fruit trees would prove to be a real blessing that summer and fall. The landlord encouraged us to use whatever we could pick and we did. The neighbors in the other half of the rental were a couple of bachelors. The two of them were more interested in finding dates for the weekend than picking and canning fruit. All of the apples, plums, cherries, and crabapples were ours, all ours. I need to take a step back and tell you that neither my husband nor I had any experience with home-grown fruit or processing it to save. I knew extraordinarily little about canning or making jam. My mother had on occasion made plum jam with farmer's market plums, but I was too little at that time to have made any mental notes about the process. Fortunately, this first summer in the duplex, I had a Joy of Cooking cookbook which had simplified instructions for a wide variety of jams, jellies, and preserves.

When the fruit trees first began to bloom, we had no idea what would grow on any of the trees. The cherry tree was to first to bloom and set fruit. The tiny fruits looked almost like little lemons. For a week or two we imagined that we had a lemon tree in our yard. Of course, being up in the Pacific Northwest, the likelihood of a lemon tree surviving our cold weather and then actually setting fruit is nil. Tell that to us greenhorns who knew nothing about growing fruit! By the middle of June we could see that those tiny fruits would be cherries, but it took a little grilling of the locals to determine if the cherries would be sweet or sour. They turned out to be sour cherries, and there were a lot of them. I quickly learned how to make cherry pie, making two pies at a time to have for breakfasts and desserts. My son was not quite two years old, and was he ever in heaven! Pie for breakfast was a favorite of his. I thought it all through, and logically I couldn't see why pie couldn't be a breakfast food. After all, my homemade pies using fresh-picked fruit were surely healthier than Pop-Tarts. There were so many cherries that summer that I gave away large bagfuls to neighbors and friends. And I still had a lot to freeze for winter pies. I laugh now at the thought of us believing that we might have had a lemon tree. Silly, young me!

The small stockpot was purchased when the crabapples began to show color. I had never made jelly before, but that fact didn't stop me. By mid-summer, my husband had a temporary job, but we knew it would only last another few weeks. With so much financial uncertainty, I was determined to use whatever God put in front of us. The stockpot was nothing fancy. It was on clearance, and it was cheap. I knew I could return its cost to our bank account in just a couple of batches of jelly and some applesauce for the freezer. I told myself that someday I would have more attractive pots and pans. This one was strictly functional. So it's rather ironic that I still use this stockpot every time that I need to sterilize jars, which since I make yogurt a couple of times per month, that's actually kind of often.

Pulling out the small step stool, I prepare to start my day of preserving the rhubarb. What shall it be? Should I make the vanilla-rhubarb curd or the rhubarb and rosemary preserves? The rosemary is still rather puny-looking, so I chose the curd. Today, I would be making as large of a batch of the rosemary curd as I could, so I took down both the small and the large stockpots.

It's difficult to motivate oneself to do the hard work of preserving the garden fruits and vegetables when I know that the grocery stores have an abundance of all manner of produce year-round. So, I summoned up my inner Victorian prairie girl and transported my thoughts to another century. A prairie family would not have the luxury of abundant fresh produce at the market in winter. All family members would pull together to harvest and preserve every last morsel from the soil. To do otherwise would simply be wasteful and foolish.

While I chopped and measured and stirred, I entertained myself with survivalist musings. You know, what could I plant and where on the property, should we ever need to provide the bulk of our food using just what God has provided in land, water, and weather. I would plant more winter squash, pumpkins, and potatoes -- produce items on the higher calorie side. I would also grow even more kale, simply because it is so prolific and dependable here. By sequential plantings, I could be harvesting kale from the middle of March clear through the first of December, if I'm willing to go out and harvest it in the bone-chilling rain. While much of these thoughts were just entertainment, they did make me realize that I could start even more kale than I had originally planned for planting out later this summer to harvest in fall and spring. Right now, I've got my summer kale growing in the garden. I've been able to harvest baby leaves to add to salads already and expect the plants to be mature by the middle of the month. One of the wonderful things about kale is that if it does attract any bugs, the smooth leaves don't offer any place for them to hide, unlike garden broccoli or cauliflower.

I continued to stir and taste, cook and puree, until the rhubarb curd had just the right amount of sweetness and smooth texture. The added vanilla extract makes this fruit butter sublime. I added a small amount of pectin to give the curd some body. While the whole pot bubbled for that last minute, I quickly removed all of the jars and lids from hot water in the smaller stockpot.

By the end of the weekend I had made 20 jars of vanilla-rhubarb curd. As I am not buying very much fruit this summer, I have decided that we shall eat the berries, apples, plums, and pears as fresh fruit and make sweet spreads from the over-abundance of rhubarb in my garden and the wild blackberries that we will forage later in summer. The vanilla-rhubarb curd can be used on toast, with biscuits or scones, or as filling between cake layers for a simple Victoria sandwich tea cake. I think my inner-prairie girl did a fine job this past weekend. I'll have to summon her again and again this summer, as I endeavor to put away as much as I can from what we've been given.