Can It

When a person gets overbearing one rejoinder is "Can it!" I know.  I have heard that, or a variation, rather frequently. However, that brief statement also relates to canning of produce.  As readers of my blog know, back in July I posted that half or more of my tomato plants were Sun-Gold tomatoes, and hence there is a great loss of tomato produce to can.  We started harvesting the Mariana Hybrid tomatoes a couple weeks ago, but the first few weeks the crop is rather thin.  It is in the latter part of August, for our garden anyway, that the tomatoes really start to produce ripe fruit.  We are now entering that time, when we have to Can It.

Canned Produce from August 22

On Saturday, August 22 I went for my early morning walk, which takes about 50 minutes, and I as I completed the walk, at a time when the humidity made it seem warmer than the ambient air temperature, I was expecting a cooler house.  As I entered the door, the hit of heat in the house is what struck me.  Then it was the smell of tomatoes.  My wife was canning tomatoes.  She did not get a full seven quarts, but they were starting to rot, so Land Girl took started to can today.  I was not surprised that she was canning, but in the time it took me to do my walk, about 50 minutes, she had the tomatoes in the jars and in the water bath on the stove to seal the jars.  She was in midst of cleaning up somebody's mess as I entered the kitchen. 

Land Girl did not can only tomatoes that day.  While out for her walk a few days earlier she found some elderberry bushes and picked a decent quantity of the extraordinarily small berry.  She dried them in order to make elderberry tincture, which is supposed to be effective in "symptom reduction and prophylaxis of cold, flu and upper respiratory infections."  It can also assist persons with rheumatic conditions and painful joints. In that sense it should be used by most everyone over the age of 60.  I know of few people over 60 that do not have at least one joint that is painful.

Land Girl noticed that some large elderberry bushes exist on a rental property owned by a neighbor who was out of town.  She waited to get permission to pick until late this week when they arrived home.  That was too late, as the berries had pretty much been picked clean by the birds. If they are ripe, you have about a one day window to get the berry before the birds do.  Not to be dissuaded, we went to some wild village land on which she had found another wild elderberry bush and harvested a good amount from that bush.  Because of all the other vegetation around much of the bush we were only able to get part of one side that was nearest the trail.  It seems that elderberry harvest, and processing, would not make the cut in terms of reward for the effort used.  They are really small berries, they have to be removed from the stems, cleaned, and dried or cooked down.  Land Girl must have decided she had sufficient quantities of dried elderberries, because she cooked these down, ran them though an overly complicated food strainer, which always seems to clog, and then used the juice to make a syrup.  She said the syrup is supposed to be good on pancakes.  

She ended up with four half-pint jars of elderberry syrup, and a fifth jar partially full.  See what I mean by amount of time spent for a reward of four half-pints, and part of a fifth.  It took Wolf Paving less time to place the binder course of asphalt on our street than for her to take the berries off the stem, clean, cook down, run through the overly complicated food strainer, and then cook again to make a syrup and finally can.  Just typing the steps is exhausting, I cannot imagine what it would be like to do them all.  

While canning, my Land Girl made an interesting observation, when she said, why is canning produce always in the warmest part of the year?  I said, Mother Nature must have her reasons.  What I did not say to her, but will write here is that this proves Mother Nature is a woman, because no man would have placed canning time at the hottest time of the year.  (For the increasing number of overly sensitive/threatened/politically correct persons, this is a joke.)

Canning season has begun, although we have already frozen, eggplant, beans, carrots and raspberries.  We now move from primarily freezing season to both freezing and canning, as more eggplant will come, and of course more tomatoes.  Hence Can It will be with us for a few weeks.