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Last summer I made a post about making apple butter; it was my first foray into canning, and I would go on to make and can another batch of apple butter, huckleberry jam, blackberry jam, cranberry sauce and tomato sauce (that was before I was warned about the dangers of botulism when canning tomato sauce; I didn't have a problem, but I probably won't be doing that in the future). I lugged the jars with me cross-country and doled them out as gifts; as my stockpile slowly dwindled away I didn't quite forget about canning, but I didn't feel compelled to can anything--mom made dilly beans and strawberry jam, and I wished we had picked enough wild blueberries for jam, but that was about it.

Then summer started winding down. Then I found a recipe for peach butter, which I made (peaches were on sale for a dollar a pound), which reminded me how good apple butter had been in oatmeal and on bread. And I finished the jar of dilly beans I brought from home and got  the idea of zucchini dill pickles stuck in my head, so it was like if-you-give-a-moose-a-muffin on several levels. The short version, here, is that I've been canning: two quarts of pickles, three pints of apple butter, about the same of peach butter. I'm wondering about adding bread-and-butter pickles and pickled beets to the store as well; it's hard to explain how satisfying it is to have things in jars, to know that I can keep this indefinitely. Those apples that were spilling out of my backpack when I got home from the farmers' market yesterday will now stay with me over winter, no worries. I have strawberry jam from home as well, made from berries mom and I picked in the Berkshire hills, and it tastes like summer. I'm glad I'll be able to keep summer around for the long Saskatchewan winter, which maybe explains why I'm suddenly stockpiling like a squirrel. I think Greg Brown has a song about this. (And The Gourds have a song about pickles.)