My husband and I made a deal years ago. He doesn’t particularly care for lawn work, and since I retired from the hayfield the mowing is my substitute. I’ve been addicted to the smell of fresh cut grass for most of my life. We garden together, but he’s in charge of canning. I quit the canner scene years back, as soon as we got a freezer. Our chores overlap a bit; he sharpens mower blades and fills the gas tank sometimes. I wash jars and tighten lids but the chopping, peeling, filling, and stirring is his department.
This year, we didn’t have enough tomatoes for salsa but the freezer is stuffed with asparagus, green beans, corn, and peaches. Now, it’s apple time. On the way home from a grandson’s wedding in Grand Island recently, we detoured to an orchard. We’ve been out of homemade apple butter since spring and that’s tantamount to a catastrophe in this house. My mother loved Bruce’s apple butter so much she ate it right out of the jar. He’s of the same mind as my daughter, who says a recipe is only a suggestion, unless you’re baking, and then it’s chemistry. Consequently, every batch of apple butter tastes different, but it’s all sumptuous. Before we even got the apples, he made me promise to keep enough room in the freezer for some apple pies, and since those don’t require canning, it’ll be my department. That is if he leaves me enough apples to make it happen. If not, I anticipate another trip to the orchard.
Next will be the beets and carrots. I can freeze those, unless he wants beet pickles, in which case, I’ll be hunting more pint jars from the stash in the basement at the home ranch. My family gives home canned goods for Christmas, and we love it, but every so often I have to make a roundup of jars to return. I did that this summer; just hope I didn’t get too carried away. Some years, we’ve had enough carrots to put in bucket of sand and eat fresh till nearly Christmas, but now that we have downsized to raised beds, I’ll probably just freeze the overflow to use in vegetable soup this winter.
I miss home raised potatoes but they’re a lot of work. Years ago, we had a large potato and melon patch, and stored several hundred pounds of spuds in the cave my dad made for that purpose. The shelves there would always be lined with quart jars of fruit, vegetables, pickles, and home canned beef, evidence of my mother’s hours of slaving over the coal range we used for heating and cooking. There’s a reason why I stopped canning as soon as possible. The kids always hated going to the cave for whatever I needed and I did too, it was full of spiders, snakes, and other wildlife.
My first father-in-law had an old-time potato digger out behind a shed. It probably hadn’t been used since my children’s father was a tot, but when our big garden was established, Bob resurrected it to help with the harvest. The neighbors all borrowed it every fall, and sometimes we had to call around to locate it when we needed to dig our own patch. Several years ago, my youngest son went to a neighbor’s ranch sale and called me that evening to report his purchases. “And I bought a potato digger,” he said. “Don’t need one, and it cost me two hundred dollars, but it seemed the right thing to do.”
“For Pete’s sake,” I replied. “Stan was always forgetting to return what he borrowed, and he must have been the last in line!”