Earlier this year, I posted about the agony of helping my mother plant vegetables and re-pot tomato plants. She shut everything down.
A bit later I had a conversation with all my family members, mother last, about the kinds of jams and preserves they like. My father likes certain preserves, but he would never go into the cellar and grab a jar of plums, or cherries, or apple-sauce. He wouldn't even open a bottle of home-brewed cider. He's completely passive. It would never in a million years occur to him to go down the stairs and get some marmalade. My father wants me to grow chili peppers, but he rarely uses them. Instead, when it's harvest time, I dry them, and then he buys chili powder at the store anyway. He doesn't like the varieties of apples in the garden. He eats lots of apples, but he buys new ones at the store.
My sister doesn't eat breakfast. She has coffee for breakfast and that's it. She doesn't eat marmalade. She likes marmalade, but she doesn't eat it. She uses home-cooked bottled tomato sauce and salsa. My sister would prefer fruit to preserved in 300ml jars and savoury sauces in 700ml bottles.
Mother often talks about opening a jar of plums, but she never actually does. She doesn't ever open a jar of marmalade that is older than six months. The next year, she says "Why not open the good stuff first? I don't want to eat the old marmalade!" This way, there's marmalade from 2010 that has never been opened. She likes apple-sauce, but she would rather cook it fresh from store-bought apples. She would never open a jar of her own home-canned cherries, because she didn't take out the pits. She would never drink the preserved apple juice.
Nobody actually ever opens a bottle of apple juice, or a jar of cherries. Everybody buys cherries and even apple juice when they need to cook or bake something with apples.
As a result, there's marmalade in her basement that is ten years old, and there are large jars of canned plums nobody eats, large jars of canned cherries nobody eats, bottles of cider and apple juice and home-brewed wine and so many apples. Apart from one of the trees, they don't really store well, but every year, I help harvest the apples and the pears and the cherries and three different types of plums, and then nobody eats the preserves.
But this year, I talked to everybody, and I got everybody on the same page, and I even got mother to agree that this is dumb. I took charge of jams and preserves, and I worked out how many jars of cherries we actually eat, how many jars of marmalade we need, and so on. If some cherries or strawberries go to waste, that's ok. If some plums go to waste, well, I don't like them anyway. I got mother to agree to only make preserves she actually eats, and unless we make cider again, we're not juicing all the apples.
There was already a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, because mother wanted me to no be so fast with all the cherries, but I got a large pot and 20 small canning jars and I canned 8 kg of cherries – the cherries I like to eat, prepared the way I like to eat them – in one day. Usually, she processes 2 kg of fruit per day, as the buckets and baskets of harvested fruit pile up in her kitchen. This year we made 3 kg of strawberry marmalade only, and some rhubarb marmalade. I decided to make syrups out of the berries instead of jam, because we have so much jam from last year, and we made 2.5 litres of syrup. I opened some jars from 2018 and dumped out the stuff that wasn't edible any more. I even popped out all of the pits of the cherries before canning them, which mother never does, because she says it's too much work, but then the cherries spoil faster and there's cyanide in the jar. Not enough to kill you, but more than necessary.
Basically, somehow I got my way. I talked to mother in a calm and measured way, and I explained that we don't have to eat all the cherries and strawberries and apples just so they don't go to waste, and we don't even have to make preserves if we never eat the preserves. Even then, when we make preserves, we should make sure that we actually want to eat them, and prepare them according to our tastes.
Year after year, this was a point of contention, and mother made me climb into the trees and harvest cherries she didn't need, or she made me juice every last fallen apple, even though we don't drink apple juice. And this year, she just listened to me, and she agreed that we don't need that much marmalade. This year, she admitted that she doesn't like pits in her canned cherries. She admitted that it doesn't make sense to make preserves you know you won't eat.
For years, it felt so... mentally draining to have to help her with all the harvesting and preserving, knowing it would all go to waste in five to ten years anyway. I wonder if she remembers this next year.
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