hot and sticky

One of the problems with having a successful garden is what to do with all the produce you pull out of it. So this weekend we launched the Great Pickling Project of '08. Seriously, not since World War II has one family pickled so many things in the name of conserving resources and feeding the multitudes.

Two dozen jars of pickles (dill and sweet), three of pickled beets and a dozen half-pints of jam for good measure. That's what came out of my kitchen in two days.

And that's just phase one. I can't wait to see what happens when the cucumber harvest really gets going in about two weeks.

So we made it a family affair. Ty washed jars, Sam pulled onions, Nature Boy sliced vegetables, Goober ran waste out to the compost pile and I made brine. Our eyes stung from the permeating fumes of boiling vinegar and we all suffered burns on our hands from the hot jars. We waited with bated breath for the jars to pop, signaling the finale of the canning process, and when they didn't, we set the canner to boiling and dropped them back in. It took all day Saturday and half of Sunday to get all the pickles put up.

Nature Boy and I waited until Sunday night to do the jam. We had strawberries, raspberries and rhubarb taking up space in our fridge, garden and freezer and we knew they wouldn't last forever. So we decided to do jam. After all, we already had all the canning stuff out.

But the pickles were nothing compared to the jam. Pickles are just hot. Jam is hot and sticky.

So last night, I stayed up late, scraping dried jam off the stove and pouring boiling-hot water into my pans to de-goo them. All the while, Nature Boy is grinning like an idiot.

"You're loving this," I said, incredulously, scouring at a particularly stubborn blob. "You just love this. All weekend long you've been dancing around here, happier than a pig in slop."

"I am," he confirmed, drying a lid. "I've missed this. I remember my mom making pickles and jam and I've always wanted to get back to that."

I thought about that, and I thought about a discussion I had with my friend CB, a fellow gardener and pickler, about how fortunate we are to live in an area where we can have big gardens and grow our own food and move closer to being both self-sufficient and earth friendly. I also thought about what we're teaching our kids and how much they're learning about where our food actually comes from.

I just wish it was easier to clean off the stove.