By Beth Hendry-Yim
By the end of summer, when the sun begins to dip lower on the horizon, when the days get shorter and I need a quilt at night to stay warm, I am done with drying, canning and freezing. It’s a shocking confession I don’t share easily or lightly. But when the first day of autumn comes along, I am tired of working over a hot stove, burning my hands on jars and lid rims, and constantly attempting to rearrange my freezers to fit one more bag of berries and/or apples!
I’m my own worst enemy. I keep doing it! Every year. Putting up enough food for John and me and the dogs to last till the next year’s growing season, and enough to share with my children and their family. I know I should slow down. John and I don’t eat as much as we used to, my kids don’t always appreciate the work that goes into preserving and in an emergency, my house may be a target for apocalypse survivors!
At one time I froze over 200 pounds of blueberries, 50 pounds of strawberries, corn, beans, asparagus, local meat by the whole carcass or side, and baked goods for quick and easy snacking. All for a family of four. This year, I was in a rhythm, cutting back a bit, maybe not doing quite as much. It felt good, like I had spaced the workload out, and planted successively so I had a constant, manageable harvest. Trouble is, I didn’t keep track.
John takes the produce I’ve put in bags or jars down to the freezers; he’s good at organizing everything to fit. With his taking on this task, I missed just how much he was storing away. But the other day, I took a couple of bags of corn downstairs myself to add to my stash. I opened the freezer door and a bag of grated zucchini jumped out at me, barely missing my toe and scaring the little dog into running back upstairs. It was our biggest freezer, the one that holds most of our garden produce. The other one we use for meat, at least that is my intention at the beginning of the season. Unfortunately, the 100 ears of corn, 100 pounds of blueberries, 40 pounds of strawberries, many bags of roasted and packed tomatoes and basil, grated and bagged zucchini and 100 pounds of apples (for Willie’s special diet) overflowed the freezer. Upstairs, I had to empty a cupboard so I could fit the jellied blackberries, grapes (from last year’s bumper crop), and marionberries, dehydrated carrots tops, chard, onions, kale, leeks and herbs. The canned goods went into John’s office/bedroom, stored amongst his medical books and supplement samples.
I acknowledge that I have a problem. I have an issue with scarcity. Call it food security paranoia, fear of not enough, or doomsday dread. It started when my kids were younger. We were living on student loans and my daughter developed anaphylactic allergies to more foods than she can have. I’ve always been terrified that she’ll run out of options. Yes, she’s 36, an adult, a mother to boot, but I carry that fear with me from when she was young and there were fewer options. I make no apologies or excuses. Nowadays, she isn’t the only one I’m concerned about. It’s all of us. I fear supply shortages, crop failures, cacao and olive trees dying en masse. I put up food, buy in bulk, hoard precious staples like rice and flour and freeze a whole lot of food because I want my family to last if the unthinkable happens and we need to wait for the smarter people to finally agree on solutions.
Baby boomers, like myself, haven’t really faced shortages. Yes, this year it was stone fruit, last year it was grapes (we aren’t drinkers so that didn’t impact us at all) and I hear apples in the Okanagan don’t have a transport chain to get them to market. But, so far, we’ve always been able to get the staples.
Still, I like being prepared. I like knowing that we will survive, albeit dropping a few pounds along the way, for about three months on what we have stored in the pantry and freezers and that we have organically grown, healthy food at our fingertips. For those of us living on Vancouver Island or any Island, it’s even more of an issue as we are dependent on supplies coming from a distance across water and rough terrain, it’s important to augment our usual grocery store purchases with local products we grow ourselves and with produce we can continue to harvest throughout the winter months. Nothing beats reaching into a bag of frozen blueberries and sucking on their sweet juiciness, whizzing them up into a delicious smoothie or adding a few bright yellow frozen corn kernels to your stir fry.
If you are feeling a bit like me, fed up with preserving, putting up, bottling, fermenting, canning, freezing, cutting, bagging and drying, stop worrying there’s still time to put up more. Apples are ready to be turned into cinnamon laced apple sauce, pears canned in rich syrup, plums cooked into sauces and peppers, tomatoes and onions transformed into salsa. You can do this! After all, opening up that freezer and pantry door, looking at the bags and bottles of fruit and veg and greens, not only feels secure, it also looks pretty! I will admit to opening doors mid-winter just to gaze upon the wealth!! Bring on the zombies, I say, I’m ready!
About the Author
Beth Hendry-Yim is an award winning writer, author, Nana and self professed lazy gardener. She has written on climate change for several publications including Island Parent and Natural Life, and has reported on less pressing issues for The Navigator and the Nanaimo News Bulletin. She wrote and self published, Fresh Start: A Workbook and Guide to Healthy Living and is currently working on a book about gardening, grandchildren and climate change, in that order. Her love of gardening is driven by a passion to connect with Nature and create a sanctuary for her children and grandchildren for the coming years of + 2 degrees. She lives in Nanaimo with her son, his wife, their two young girls, husband of 40 years, her heart dog, Willie, and his sidekick Sadie, and the billions of tiny creatures living in and around her garden that make food production possible.
