Put 'em up

It's that time of year again, when the fruits of my garden become the fruits of my labor. I've officially canned so much tomato sauce that I can't even look at the plants anymore; if I see red on them, I call a neighbor and she comes and picks them. 

This past weekend it was figs. Fig jam, specifically. I'm not a fan of figs, to be perfectly honest but I like making jam. And I was given a little sprout of a fig plant in fall 2021 that has grown into a 10 foot beast that's trying to take over the driveway. 

We've been picking every morning and sticking them in the freezer until there was "enough" to make jam. The recipe called for 3.3 lbs. We had just under 10. So, triple batch.

It turned into 17 half pint jars and a few of the itty bitty ones. 

It took about 3.5 hours, start to finish (excluding all the sticky pots and pans, which my husband washed because he's a good man and also the one who eats most of the jam). 

That's a lot of jam for the price of a bag of sugar, some lemon juice, a few tablespoons of balsamic, and time. 

I like canning, even when it's hot and melting in the kitchen makes me cranky. I enjoy bringing the garden indoors and turning it into food for later. But I can't imagine how hard it must have been when this was a necessity and not a choice, when canning meant the difference between eating and going hungry in the winter.