The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
I drove home and walked into the kitchen, and Curt was eating a sandwich standing up at the counter, the way he does at harvest. I told him about the sign and about the three cans of corn.
“How many are you thinking?” he said.
“Same as before,” I said. “A hundred and forty.”
He finished his sandwich. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he said, “Garden’s still got beans. I’ll get the canner down from the shelf.”
I want to be clear about something. I did not do it to show Ashley. I did not plan for her to see a single jar.
I did not tell Nick, and I did not tell anybody at church except Jeff, who already knew everything anyway.
And if I am honest, I did it because my hands needed something to do besides be mad.
The first thing I had to do was buy jars. Ashley’s dumpster had taken all of mine. I drove to the farm store in town and bought every case of wide-mouth quarts they had, which was nine dozen.
Twelve dozen jars, with the new lids and bands, came to $214 and some change.
Our garden had plenty of beans left. Curt had planted a late row in July. But our tomatoes were mostly done.
So on a Saturday I drove out the gravel road past the Bontrager farm, where the Amish family runs a produce stand out of a shed by the road. I have bought from them for years.
I asked for two bushels of Romas. She asked what I was putting up, and I told her it was for the food shelf, and she went to the house and came back with her mother.
Her mother looked at me, and looked at the bushels, and said, “For the food shelf, it is a dollar off the bushel.”
I tried to argue. She shook her head once, and that was the end of it.
Then she put a third half-bushel in the back of my truck and would not take money for it at all. She said the food shelf had helped her sister’s family one winter when the barn burned.
I canned for three weekends straight, and some weeknights after school, too. My kitchen was a factory. Every burner going, the windows open, the box fan in the doorway pushing the steam out onto the porch.
The tomatoes, I scalded and peeled and packed raw into the quarts.
Two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice went in the bottom of every jar before the tomatoes, because tomatoes today are not as acid as the old varieties.
Half an inch of headspace. Wipe the rims with a clean wet cloth. Lids on, bands finger-tight. Into the big water-bath canner, with the water an inch over the tops.
Forty-five minutes at a full rolling boil for raw-pack quarts covered in hot water, the way the extension book says for our altitude.
The applesauce, I made from the Jonathans off my grandmother’s tree and some Cortlands Curt picked up from the orchard by Decorah. Cooked down, run through the old Foley mill, sweetened a little.
Hot sauce into hot jars, half an inch of headspace, twenty minutes in the water bath for quarts.