Zippiknits Sometimes

 

Picassa finally Duked it out with the AV and put this up. For all the Flower lovers a bit of Beauty!

And this, a bit of nostalgia about sweaty hard working summers in prep for winter.


Is Home canning a lost art in SoCal?

There's been some talk about growing gardens and preserving the produce by canning. I can see by going around the blogisphere that home food preservation is live and well in the Heartland. But what about California?

Until about 15 years ago, when we quit growing any kind of vegetable garden, I also canned and made jelly and jam. My DH's mother was still making preserves of fig jam until a few years ago, but I know of no other person who still does any canning. Maybe it's so cost heavy,due to the cost of natural gas and electricity, that people have mostly given it up in California. It could also be that we don't have as many garden fruit trees because of pesky insects and wandering critters. These two factors finally lead DH and I to remove all but the citrus trees. We also had a source for fruits at places you could pick from orchards or fields. We would pack up the family and go to Julian to pick apples and pears to make fruit butters, and I used to pick strawberries, for jam, in a place that is now a housing development. Nowadays, I wouldn't even know where to go to pick them without spending $12 on gasoline to get there and back. It is now much cheaper to just BUY the ready mades off the supermarket shelf.

My mother grew big vegetable gardens, and we had a fruit orchard of peach trees- babcock and cling- bing and sour cherries, red plums, a walnut and and almond tree, and apricots. All the produce from her kitchen gardens was eaten fresh, or preserved by canning whole, or made into jams and jellies or pickled. We also raised chickens, ducks, geese and rabbits to eat. Mother's industry fed us well.

My brother and I helped pick everything, and I helped with the preserving. There were so many summers where I stood, sweltering on the porch, cutting up fruit, or adding peaches or tomatoes to hot baths to pick off their skins. That is how I got permanently sick of heat. Standing over tall pans stirring the fruit jams or jellies, tomato sauces, green tomato relishes, zucchini pickle, or spaghetti sauce was what I actually remember the most about summers. I still made Mother's Green Tomato relish, bread and butter pickles and cherry preserve until we quit growing our own gardens.

I was the oldest child by five years, followed by a brother who never seemed to do anything but play, and a baby sister, almost ten years younger. Being Mother's "right hand man" was a harder than normal childhood but also fun and instructional. In fact it might have been ideal if we could have factored out the paternal unit, or replaced it. It had too many broken gears and malfunctioned rather badly!