Spring | Summer | Fall | Winter

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We shelled the peas on the back porch, throwing the green hulls with their satiny inner linings out into the garden to disintegrate. The Ball book did not know about Pea Pod Soup. The peas were washed and par boiled three minutes. The jars were rinsed with boiling water, filled within an inch of the top with peas, a teaspoon of salt added to each quart. Rubber bands and lids were put on but not tightened. This was a finger burning hot job, for the cans were hot and both the lids and the rubber bands were simmering in pans of water. The jars were lowered into the hot water bath with the tongs and cooked for I hours.

Sometimes we had two or three water baths going. When the time was up, using the tongs, we lifted the quarts out onto a pad of old sheets, finished sealing them. Aunt Merica always turned them upside down to be sure there was no leak; if there was, she ran the back of a knife around the top's edge to crimp it tighter to the band), and left them to cool. Next day they were carried to the cellar and placed on the freshly swept shelves to await winter.

Corn was never pulled the night before the morning of canning. They were afraid it would flat sour. Flat sour was something you feared. Once the corn was shucked and silked, with the special brush we kept on the top shelf of the left hand door of the kitchen cabinet, Aunt Merica cut it off the cob. I hung around, waiting for her to discard ears she considered too hard for canning. These I put into the oven of the black iron stove to roast. Once golden brown -- it took many back and forth trips to the kitchen to open the oven door and check my corn -- I would sit out on the top step of the front porch and almost groan with pleasure as I ate row after row, ear after ear.

Butter, lima, and green beans, beets, cucumbers (as pickles) and tomatoes were canned as they got ready. Gathering, preparing and canning could easily take up the whole day, especially during the height of the season. Some vegetables could be gathered and cleaned in late evening for the next day, but others came right in from the garden to be canned immediately. Such was corn.

We gathered tomatoes in buckets and we gathered them by color. Into some buckets we put the heavy dark red tomatoes; into others the deep orange or the clear pale yellow. Each would be canned separately. Small, misshapen, scrawny fruit went into containers for juice. Cherry tomatoes were just for fun. Beans were picked after the dew dried off: it would cause rust if we walked among the vines while they were wet.

We sat on one of the porches in good weather or in the house in bad to shell butter-beans and limas, to string and break the green beans. With a knife that wasn't very sharp I cut out any brown spot or any place where the bean beetle ate. My fingers hurt from breaking off the tips and pulling the string all the way to the end of the bean. But that was easy compared with pinching open the tough shells of the butter, lima and October beans and making their fat seeds fall out. Tomatoes, beets and the few new potatoes that were canned because I wanted them, were washed on the back porch.

We dealt with one vegetable at a time: one morning for beans, one day for tomatoes, another morning for corn; each as it came in. Tomatoes were put in hot water for a minute or so to loosen their skins. It was generally my job to skin the tomatoes and the beets (which had to be cooked until tender before the skins would slip). Aunt Merica cut them into quarters; Mama packed the cans. A morning's work might produce a dozen cans. It was a long day's work to have two or three dozen to show Daddy when he came in from work.

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