Why I Can

When I was growing up people didn't talk about sustainability; they didn't talk about eating local, or 100 mile diets, or how important it is to support your local farmers. People didn't think like that. On the street where I lived, everyone had beautifully manicured lawns, with small collections of flowers that were mostly curated by over-paid under-acknowledged landscapers. Everyone, that, is except my father.

My father has always had an amazing sense of what makes a garden beautiful. As I grew up, the amount of grass encroached less and less on the bounds of his garden. The front yard was all flowers, day lilies, impatients, a cherry tree, iris, 100s of beautiful flowers all grown cherished and raised in our basement under high powered lamps (my father grows everything from seed to this day). While my brother and I were young the backyard had the trappings of youth: a little lawn for us to play on, a sandbox. But shortly after my twelfth birthday, that sandbox became a green house, the lawn a huge roaming English garden. In the summer, almost all the vegetables we ate came from our backyard: tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, even asparagus. We always had strawberries, black raspberries, and two kinds of currants. One summer has become infamous as the year my father's tomatoes caught blight and he can be quoted as having said that that "was a year of his life he wasted."

In my generation, having a father who gardened was unusual. Mostly it was mothers who could be found in the garden, or the kitchen (probably my father's two favourite places). But in my family, it was the men who gardened. My grandfather, until he became blind, ran a 350 acre farm in Alexandria, Ontario, and later (even though he was blind) kept two huge gardens. It was on my grandparents farm that I learned of the milky sweetness of raw corn, the ungainliness of pumpkins, of hundreds of zucchini made into chocolate cake. I was fortunate enough to be raised knowing the taste of real food, fresh from the ground.

But how does this bring us to canning? Well, in part, canning is a logical solution to long, cold, Canadian winters. If you can't have a fresh tomato, better have one whose source you know, then the one from Chile. But more then that, I remember being carted off, as a small child, to pick hundreds of strawberries to turn into jam. Likewise with raspberries, currants, and cucumbers that we turned into bread and butter pickles. For me, canning is not only a way of putting up, but also a way of staying in touch with my roots. A tip of the hat, if you will, to my father and grandfather before me.

I hope you enjoy this journey of blogging and canning. Please ask questions, discuss, share your own stories. The more we all know about preserving our food in healthy useful ways, the richer all our lives will be.

mxo