Summer in a jar

Making as an act of subversion

Backyard Black Currant Jam

When everything burst into flower at once in May, I knew I might be in for a busy summer. Over the years, I’ve planted a lot of fruit in this yard. I have gooseberry, red currant, black currant and raspberry bushes. I have a grapevine (last year I got a single bunch, but since I’d been killing grapevines for years, I was okay with that). I have three sour cherry trees, an American plum, a greengage that seems to be growing a feral plum grove around itself, and four apple trees.

It’s a lot.
Some years, there’s hardly any fruit. If things flower too early they get snowed on, and the apple trees are old, they only seem to really throw a good fruit crop every other year. The greengage has set fruit maybe 5 or 6 times in the 2 decades I’ve lived here, but when it does, they’re delicious. My plum tree hasn’t had good fruit in several years, I think it had to fight off the same fireblight that I fear is killing one of my big apple trees, but this year, it’s laden with fruit. It’s bowed down.

And then there’s my cherry trees. When I moved in, there was a grove of feral cherry trees down the block in an empty lot. I used to sidle down there with a bucket, and harvest enough cherries to put up in jars for a year’s worth of baked goods, and on yogurt in the morning. Then one spring they didn’t come back. The trees were dead. Turns out every cherry tree in town was dead. We’d all forgotten, but the autumn before, we’d had a fluke freeze. It went from 60F to -20F in 12 hours, then came back up into the 40s. It killed a lot of fruit trees in town. I think it was the fall of 2018? (I’m terrible with dates).

So the next spring I bought two bare-root Montmorency cherries and planted them in the front yard. One is still very small, it wasn’t sunny enough where it was, and then it got kind of bashed up by the roofers (they tried to be careful, but things happen). So I moved it across to the sunnier side, and bought a Bali cherry, which is a varietal discovered on an abandoned farmstead in the Yukon (they think it’s Russian by origin). My goal is, enough cherries for the year here in my own yard, and perhaps some morning shade eventually on that really hot side of the house.

This year was the first year the big cherry tree produced. There were SO many lovely red cherries, dangling in twos. I had a little trouble with the robins though, so I had to net it. I had a long discussion with that juvenile robin — go down the block, I told him, there’s a whole grove over there. Alas, he didn’t listen, so the whole little tree is now covered in bird netting, and thank goodness I haven’t killed any birds.

I harvested about a kilo and a half of pitted cherries so far, which I put up in a 3/4 sugar syrup. I probably have one more batch to do later this week when the rest of the cherries get ripe, and maybe the temperatures cool off enough? I like to go into a winter with about 10 pints of cherries if I can. They’re delicious on yogurt in the morning, on ice cream, in the almond-yogurt cake I make for every occasion.

I also managed to put up some gooseberries this year. Gooseberries are a pain because you have to “top and tail” them — pinch off the blossom end, and the stem. Frankly, I usually leave the gooseberries for the chickens and the wild birds because they’re such a pain in the neck, but because it was so wet this spring, they were lovely and fat and such a pretty clear green. So I put up about 6 half pints of gooseberry jam with ginger and cardamom, which was nice and tart and gingery and I think would be really nice over toast with goat cheese.

Lastly, we have the blackcurrants. Blackcurrants were illegal in the US for a long time as they were a vector for White Pine Blister Rust, but in the last 15 years or so it’s become legal to plant them again. Mine are about 7 or 8 years old , but they had to be moved around the yard a couple of times before they took. Years past, I’ve just thwacked them in some vodka with sugar and made them into kir, but since I’m not really drinking anymore, I made jam this year. Boy howdy. It’s glorious. Again, we had big fat berries thanks to all the rain, and they cooked down and set up into this delicious, very purple, delicious jam. Tons of vitamin C as well.

Canning seems to have come and gone as a stylish hobby, but I’m still here, putting food up in jars. It’s been a weird couple of weeks. There was a thing I’m not ready to talk about yet, and then an unexpected family health scare, which looks like it will be okay, and has resulted in some useful conversations among people who don’t always communicate well, but it was a real heart stopper. Now that I don’t have siblings anymore, my two younger cousins have stepped in. We were all raised more like siblings than like American cousins, who tend not to even know one another, and that they still like me despite the fact that I was a tiny tyrant who ruled over them with an iron fist, well, I’m deeply grateful. But I’m also not ready for any of them to not be well. They’re all younger than me!

I don’t know why I always feel like I have to explain that I spend so much time every year growing and putting up food. When I started, it wasn’t a thing people really did, you had to use the recipes in the Ball Canning booklet, or in older versions of Joy of Cooking. Then came the Instagram era of canning, which was annoying, but on the other hand, a lot of people learned some useful skills. Sort of like sourdough bread during Covid. It’s not a bad thing to know how to do stuff.

The goal all along on this house project has been to do as many things as I can while I have some money, so that I can live on way less money later. The house is paid off, as is the car. I paid cash for the solar panels, which while they can’t replace my entire reliance on the grid, look like they should bring it down to a range between 75-90% energy independence. I can grow food and put it up so that I can have nice things that are often too expensive in the stores. I learned how to make some simple, and slightly odd, yet stylish clothes of my own, which means that I can wear clothes in nicer fabrics than I can afford in the stores, and I don’t look like everyone else.

This is the part I don’t get, why everyone wants to look like everyone else. I’ve been reading Sarah Schulman again, her brilliant Gentrification of the Mind, and this passage struck me last night:

…gentrified thinking … is a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing … it is a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.

We’re surrounded by these strange pockets of homogenous social life.This time of year it’s flocks of men, dressed literally in matching fly-fishing shirts who gather in the Murray Bar at the end of the day. People have built whole identities around companies like Patagonia and whatever the new Patagonia is. For a while, there was a plague of Instagram girls in their early 30s, usually blonde, wearing the same strange hat with a flat wide brim, usually with a naked toddler on one hip. And of course, the really horrific newcomers, the ones in the giant yellow Jeeps and Hummers with the Trump stickers, or who refuse to get rid of their Texas license plates, are just their own kind of consumer identity. White goatees on the men seem to be an indicator of this tribe.

Who knows what it is that I’ve been doing back here in this yard all these years? Writing some things, growing a lot of things, learning to recognize which pests I need to kill (sawflies on the ribes for instance) and which ones I can coexist with. I’ve been making stuff and living with my oddball dude, a guy who builds things and finds things and has decorated his cabin with a world-class collection of garage sale paintings of elk and deer and pretty mountains, most of which were painted by the now-gone railroad workers and their wives, who took classes at the community center. We were that kind of town. And now we are not.

And I have no idea what to do about it other than to hunker down, make some jam, put up more greens for winter, keep making my own clothes, and keep trying to find a way to write about it all that also manages to escape, or at least try to escape, the homogeneity of consumerist thinking.