Garden-Fresh Preserves

With increased concerns about food safety and the environmental impact of transporting produce hundreds of miles, more people are going back to basics by preserving locally or homegrown produce for use all year long.

Every year in late June for as far back as I can remember, my mother and I would don scrubby jeans, long-sleeved cotton shirts to protect our tender skin from brambles, and straw hats to keep the gnats from our eyes and head off into the woods to pick wild raspberries and blackberries by the gallons.

With an aluminum pot in hand and the dog at my heels, I’d crawl under the massive raspberry brambles on the steep wooded hillside above my parents’ pasture, curl up in dappled shade and sunshine under a cave of wild vines, and pop bright pinkish-red berries into the pot, then into my mouth, cracking the delightful little seeds against my teeth.

After a long morning of berry gathering, we’d trudge back to the house, sticky with the summer humidity, wild frizzy hair pressed damp against our foreheads and necks, to begin the long process of preparing the berries for sumptuous devouring. We’d wash some of them to eat fresh for the next several days, freeze more for wintertime consumption, and then make syrupy-sweet jams with the rest to spread on toast or pour over ice cream.

To me, this was a normal part of the rhythm of life, a yearly activity as mundane and ordinary as planting a vegetable garden or gathering peaches and plums from the orchard. We ate all year from the wealth of cultivated soil or the wild fruits of the mountain hillsides, just as my grandparents and great-grandparents had done before us.

This centuries-old summer tradition of berry picking, gardening, and food preservation is not as common a practice as it once was, but it is far from a dying art. In fact, with growing concerns about the impact of global warming, combined with concerns about pesticides, many families are returning to the garden—or at least their local farmers’ markets—and reviving the arts of freezing, canning, and preserving, and a crop of new books on the subject will surely inspire more to do so. By growing and gathering one’s own food or buying locally and preserving produce to last through the winter, families not only eat more healthfully, they also cut down on the carbon footprint caused by transporting produce across continents and oceans.

“We have definitely experienced an increased interest in food preservation around the country,” says Elizabeth Andress, PhD, director of the National Center for Home Food Processing and Preservation. “People are preserving fruits and vegetables because of food security and safety concerns, wanting to save money and wanting to support local agriculture.”

Wild Berries and Family Fun

A great bonus of gathering wild fruit and growing one’s own garden is the opportunity it offers for family bonding. In Monterey, Virginia, 55-year-old Virginia Smith, her daughter, Patricia, and her grandchildren all participate in keeping the family vegetable garden, but berry-picking season in July is especially fun for the kids, who gather buckets and scramble outdoors to gather wild raspberries on the family farm.

Smith remembers being taught to pick and preserve wild berries to eat in winter when she was a small girl in her own grandmother’s kitchen. “One of my earliest memories is of berry picking,” she says, noting that her parents could sell berries for 50 cents a quart.

Today, her efforts aren’t driven as much by economy. In fact, she and her daughter typically enter more than 300 preserves in the county fair each year and win ribbons by the dozens. But why all the trouble of tromping through fields and woods to gather berries and then labor in a hot kitchen for days on end making jams and jellies and canning vegetables and fruits when it’s so easy to buy a jar of jam off the grocery store shelf?

“I’d rather have my own,” Smith says. “And they’re better. I know what I’ve got.” She also points to the fuller taste of homegrown or nature-grown food that is picked when ripe. Smith and her daughter generally can enough fruits and vegetables to last the family all winter.

“From any kind of fruit there is, you can make jams, jellies, or preserves,” says Smith, “and as long as the jars don’t come unsealed, they’ll keep a long, long time.” Some berries can also be used to make syrup and cordials, and most are rich in vitamins, especially vitamin C, and antioxidants.

So if you want to enjoy gathering and preserving berries, where do you start? You can plant your own domesticated varieties, but there are plenty of places to find wild berries that are just as good, if not better. Marie Junaluska of Paint Town, North Carolina, who has been picking and preserving berries since childhood, says some of the best spots for finding wild raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and mulberries are in pastures, old cornfields, and along newly constructed roads, usually in late June to July, depending on where you live. Blueberries or huckleberries tend to come out later, usually in August.
To make jams and jellies, Junaluska says, gather berries that are very ripe because the juice is what makes up the preserve. “You cook and then strain them for jelly,” she explains, “and save the juice. Then you mix the juice with Sure Gel and put it in jars. Preserves can keep up to two years.”

For jam, everything goes into the preserve, including seeds. Junaluska also likes to freeze berries to make cobblers in the wintertime.

Preserving Garden Wealth

Every winter since early childhood, I have enjoyed the almost garden fresh goodness of homegrown sweet corn from the freezer or onion-flavored home-canned green beans. Andress says produce preservation allows you to buy vegetables in bulk when they’re on sale or in season and then save them to eat later.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that these frozen and canned vegetables will not have the same nutritional value as those that are fresh. “Because of the heat required for food safety, particularly in canning, you will lose some nutritional content,” Andress points out. “Water-soluble vitamins will leech into liquid.”

Andress says freezing is typically less destructive to vitamin and mineral content than is canning because it requires minimal cooking time, if any, for processing. Freezing is typically easier as well for the beginning food preserver and requires less equipment.

But Andress cautions beginners, and even experienced home food preservers, to keep abreast of the USDA’s latest food preservation guidelines. “Some people think cooking equates to the heat of canning, but it doesn’t,” warns Andress. Improperly preserved food can spoil through exposure to microorganisms and enzymes that won’t be destroyed if food is not heated long enough at a high enough temperature. Different foods require different canning times and temperatures. High-acid foods such as fruits and fruit juices can be canned in boiling water at 212˚F, while low-acid foods, which include most vegetables, require canning at temperatures in excess of 212˚F.

Andress cautions against using your next-door neighbor’s canning instructions. She advises home canners to always refer to the latest versions of home-canning guidelines, such as those found in the Ball Blue Book. She advises novices to start with simple recipes like jellies and pickles.

“The major benefit of canning is the satisfaction of knowing exactly what goes into the jars,” Andress adds. “It’s really a lifestyle decision.”

— Deborah R. Huso

Equipment You'll Need

• Water bath canner with wire rack (available at hardware, home, and discount stores) or pressure canner;
• Jars (don’t need to be new);
• Jar rings (can also be reused);
• New lids with rubber seal; and
• A book on canning methods, timetables, and temperatures (as they vary for different foods; you can also obtain this literature for free through your local cooperative extension office).
To freeze fruits and vegetables, all you need are sealable freezer bags or freezer-tight plastic storage containers. Freezing is often as simple as cleaning fresh produce, spreading it out on a fresh tray, then bagging it for long-term storage in the freezer. Refer to USDA guidelines for recipes for specific fruits and vegetables.

Additional Resources

For instructions on preserving just about any fruit or vegetable under the sun, as well as recipes for everything from spaghetti sauce to salsa, check out the following websites and books (and read on for more) or contact your local cooperative extension agent:

• National Center for Home Food Preservation (www.uga.edu/nchfp)
• Ball Fresh Preserving (www.freshpreserving.com)
• So Easy to Preserve, Fifth Edition, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension (http://www.uga.edu/setp/order_book.pdf")
• USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning (www.uga.edu/nchfp/publications/publications_usda.html)