Are You into Home Canning Foods?

Another Way for week of August 14, 2020

Pandemic Pings: Are You into Canning?

I get our pressure canner out that my brother-in-law gave us for Christmas when we first started a garden. What a great, long lasting gift. It has served us forty-plus years now.

What would August be without canning vegetables to have on hand for the winter? (I don’t can fruits but well remember when mother and grandma did.)

I gather up other items I need for the rather massive and messy project: canning jars, lids, strainer and pestle for squeezing out the tomato juice, scores of large pans or Tupperware, my largest popcorn bowl, salt, a small pot for boiling lids and keeping them hot, digging up the propane fired burner we use outside. Too much to name here.

Making tomato juice is kind of fun (especially for kids) and easier than canning tomatoes themselves. When canning quartered tomatoes, you of course have to get the skins off the ‘maters which involves dipping them in boiling water for 30 seconds or so, then cooling them quickly in ice water (in a spanking clean container), then taking a knife and sliding off the skin or peeling, then cutting them up in quarters to be placed in the sanitized quart jars.

All of this is much easier now that I don’t have to can at the end of a busy and tiring work day. Or doing so with wee ones underfoot.

This year I’ve read that more people have tried their hand at growing their own vegetables, especially in light of the pandemic. I also heard an amusing aside regarding a woman who asked at a store if they had canning jars and the young clerk looked puzzled and said she’d never heard of canning jars.

I hunted widely (by phone and in person) for canning lids on shelves of hardware and grocery stores. Finally, I landed some oddly packed regular sized blue canning lids made by Ball in a store called Jon Henry’s General Store (as old fashioned as it sounds). The canning lids were in little bags, not boxes: I speculate that perhaps some manufacturer was able to produce the lids but didn’t have boxes on hand to meet the demands? Anyone have insights or info on that? Later I did land some traditionally boxed wide-mouth lids at our local hardware store.

Once the jars of juice are lifted from the canner and allowed to cool, the lids give me the satisfaction of a pleasing ping, telling me my efforts panned out: they all sealed, always cause of deep satisfaction.

A niggling unease, though, rises in my psyche: what might we face in years to come in terms of shortages, rising prices, lower incomes. A pandemic of this scope was normally only the territory of doomsday or dystopian novels—and a few epidemiologists (those with expertise on disease epidemics). A worldwide reckoning with a virus was never seriously on my horizon. So what will our children and grandchildren face and experience?

That’s when the legacy of family traditions—like the labor of late summer canning and freezing vegetables and fruits can feel like a source of strength and pressing on. If my parents and grandparents got through the Depression—and even the flu of 1918, World War 1 and 2, Vietnam, Korea and more, it gives us courage to face our fears and doubts. The strength of faith, community, and family remind us that we are not alone. Even if confined to a room in a nursing home. As time goes by in this time of fighting covid infection, some of the early examples of caring for each other (such as the daily music from apartment balconies in cities in support of health workers) fade away with the sheer dailiness of pandemic reality.

My worried wondering can rest in the arms of a God who cares for us all, who reaches eternal arms around us to comfort and sustain us for all time, even when human or medical efforts fail.

I have two free pamphlets I’d love to share with anyone who needs them, “Journeying Through Loneliness” and “Losing Someone Close.” Request for yourself or a friend. Write to anotherwaymedia@yahoo.com or Another Way Media, P.O. Box 363, Singers Glen, VA 22834, or comment on the blog.

Another Way is a column by Melodie Davis, in syndication since 1987. She is the author of nine books. Another Way columns are posted at FindingHarmonyBlog.com a week after newspaper publication.