It’s berry season here in zone zone 4. Strawberries, blue berries, raspberries, black berries. When the glut hits, I take advantage and stock up and preserve. Preservation doesn’t have to be hard, or tricky.
Freeze them. As easy as it sounds. You need to wash them, remove the bad ones, remove stems, toss them in a freezer bag and into the freezer. I’ve tried the Ball freezer jars, I didn’t like them. They got brittle when they froze, and of the original 4 only two survived the first year. So, my go to is still freezer bags. Cons: This uses a lot of freezer space if you try to put up enough to keep a family happy. If your freezer is powered by the grid, there are obvious problems when the grid is down.
Dry them. Again pretty easy. I found our dehydrator at a garage sale for 5$. It’s of the cheaply made, round with a hole in the middle style. I was sure I’d overpower it in a week. To my surprise it’s taken everything I’ve thrown at it. I did have to make some screens for drying the small stuff. That was as easy as tracing the outline of the tray onto a bit of window screen and cutting it out. Of course you can throw more money at the problem and buy one of the super fancy, efficient dehydrators. I won’t tell you not to, I hear good things about them, but if you don’t have the time or money, you can take the easy route and still get a lot of fruit added to your storage. My goal this summer is to try making a solar dryer with an old window, again to avoid the obvious problems of relying on grid electricity for my berry storage needs. Drying has a plus of making the fruit smaller and lighter, so it requires less storage space. I have dried berries in all our BoB’s.
Berry jam. If you want to be adventurous, this third method offers some fun challenges. This requires sugar, a large pot, possibly some spices and lidded jars to hold the finished product in. There are lots of recipes out there for berry jams. Use them if you’re a recipe type of person. I’m not. I tried to follow recipes and I ended up with 2 years of berry syrup. Not a disaster by any means, which is a positive for this method, it’s hard to go wrong with berries and sugar. But, as soon as I started doing it by feel, I got jams that were much firmer and just as tasty. “By feel” means, I use what I have, and just cut it all up and toss it in the big pot. I pour in the sugar, dusting everything thoroughly, it’s probably between a half cup and 2 cups, depending on how much fruit I’m trying to cook. (I’m usually making small batches with around 1-3 pounds of fruit.) Once the fruit and sugar are in the pot, turn on a med or med-low heat, you want this sugary goodness to simmer down, quite a bit, until the juices are syrupy and the volume has at least halved. Once the jam feels like the right consistency, I do a few taste tests and then pour it into clean, hot jars. (Hot so that the hot preserves won’t crack the glass jar.) Don’t rush the simmer, it can take a few hours. That brings me to the con of this method, it takes a lot of heat. If done indoors it can heat up the house, if done outside, it can use a lot of fuel. Once in jars though, you could can them to seal them for longer life. Canning requires it’s own post though, so to keep it simple you can just put a lid on the hot jam and let it cool. Keep it in the fridge and it will last for a few months. If you want to get adventurous, spices like cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg go well with berries. Toss them in during the simmer for good effect.
If you like berry juice, you can often find growers with buckets full of “seconds” that they are willing to offload for sharp discounts. Also, watch for gleaning programs, some fruit growers participate in them. To make the juice, basically you just boil with a little water and sugar then strain through a cheesecloth. I find my food mills make this step easy. Berry juice is great for flavoring storage water.
Remember, stock up when they’re cheap, buying in bulk can get you cheaper prices from some growers. I get better results with locally grown berries, less travel makes them sweeter. And if you think you’re going to be foraging enough berries to can, hopefully the guest post yesterday has removed that silly thought from your head. Cultivate a friendship with, and financially support the local berry growers in your area. Growing a few canes yourself can be a lot of fun, and ahem, fruitful.
12 comments
Great article! Gave me a lot of things l hadn’t thought about because, to be honest, berries were never my thing. Jam, jellies, canning, again just not me. Domestic goddess l’m not. However l did give the berry idea an honest shot at it at the homestead this year. l bought blueberry bushes, blackberries, and grapes. l thought it would be a great item to have for the kiddoes PSHTF. The grapes are doing ok but probably won’t fruit this year. The blackberries l planted next to the fence by my neighbors existing bushes hoping they would better pollinate. We did get about a dozen berries. Alas the blueberries are nevermore. Seems they LOOKED like they were within reach of the sprinklers, but were not. So l will be trying again next season with those. For some reason though this year we had an abundance of blueberry upick farms show up. We went from 2 to about 10 this year.
Question l have is canning berries the same as the little fruit cups you buy in the store? (sorry never canned anything in my life) The good news is strawberries here can be kept alive the whole year providing you keep them watered well and watch for turtles. My squirrels didn’t bother them but man the turtle did.
Gat, you *can* can berries so they turn out like those sweet little fruit cups. Most of the time, mine are closer to a jam consistency.
If I was aiming for berry cup style, I think I would wash and trim the berries and put them raw in the glass jars, then boil up a syrup out of honey or sugar in water. Pour that boiling syrup over the berries then can them. This might take pressure canning, to ensure proper safety. I’ll have to get back to you on that detail. I’ll get a canning post out soon so we can discuss this more at length.
When I was a kid in Maine, all of my relatives “put up” various foods for the winter. A few berries made it to the freezer, but preserves were most common. Strawberry Rhubarb jam, which is the best thing that I can think of, was probably one of the most common.
The biggest problem with putting up berries, as I recall, is that my little sister and I ate every berry off of every bush for miles. Worst varmint problem ever.
just curious what trap do you use for THOSE “varmints”? LOL
Cartoons, popsicles and a big cardboard refrigerator box .
We’ve got one of the cheap, round, dehydrators too. Got ours well used and have used it tons for years and it still works just fine.
I’m in a Zone 4 also. I have more raspberries than I can deal with in my little yard. My parents have at least 5 times as much in their yard. I Gave plants to my Mother-in-law both last year and this. She’ll have more than she can handle in a couple of years. Not sure why she planted lupines near them though…
Anyway. The strawberries are about 3 weeks late here, and the raspberries still have at least a week before their ready as well. Last year I had been picking raspberries for a couple weeks by this time. Spring was early and winter was late. I almost got a second crop. I cut all those ends off though. I wanted a real crop this year. :)
Hey Calamity – how about a DIY on making a solar dryer and instructions on how to use it? That would rock!
Hey Jarhead, unrelated l know but l finally watched Soylent Green.
OMG! 150.00 for a jar of strawberries? Think l might have to take up canning! lol
That is in the works my good Jarhead. It’s quite the project, it’ll probably take a few posts over the course of this summer.
This has been a bad year for berries here. Grapes got attacked by japanese beetles, strawberry transplants died from shock (I guess?), blueberries that I planted aren’t happy and might die, and birds and beetles are enjoying the blackberries.
OTOH, I was still able to get 1/2 gallon of blackberries and they’re still coming in slowly but surely and I’ve had several free “bird sandwiches” for lunch over the last couple of weeks. I guess it’s a fair trade.
I also have one of those second-hand, no-brand-name, round, white dehydrators that my dad gave me. I also found that I needed finer screening for the small bits, like corn niblets. So, I got a mesh splatter screen at the dollar store, perfect round size, with a bit of a lip at the edge.