Community cannery
At
this time of year, fruit is often free for the asking. We went on
a tour of the Castlewood community cannery this week and stumbled
across a quartet of ladies who had gathered enough apples from trees
going to waste to fill a huge vat of apple butter. Their tale of
frugal scavenging reminded me that one of our neighbors has an orchard
of apples that fall to the ground and rot unless someone collects
them. Off Mark went with an empty basket and a dozen eggs, and
home he came with enough apples to turn into a year's worth of apple
sauce.
I opted to preserve my
apples at home since I generally put
food in the freezer (and process it a bit at a time, a quart here,
and a gallon there.) But community canneries make a lot of sense
for folks who don't want to buy (and maintain) a pressure canner, or
who do most of their year's preserving in one fell swoop. The
Castlewood Cannery will sell you cans for less than a quarter apiece
(if you live in Russell County), or let you bring in your own Mason
jars (charging you a few pennies per jar for use of their facility.)
The canning ladies
regaled me with tales of the bounty they had canned there, ranging from
the usual to cornbread, sausage, and apple sauce cake. I could
tell that spending a day at the Castlewood Cannery would earn me years
of free wisdom, along with the cheap use of kitchen facilities.
To find a community cannery in your area, visit this
website.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We have one here in Hillsville, but still haven't gone to it. After seeing how our electric stove sagged under the weight of a full canner last week, I'm thinking we might be doing our canning work there next year.
Had I known you and Mark already had enough apples to last all year, I'd have brought you some blueberry syrup instead of apple butter!