Preserving Someone Else's Harvest

Here's the first round of pretties: strawberry-raspberry preserves and apricot jam.

As mentioned before, I live for the summer farmer's markets. There's two stands in particular that we always visit first, before running through the rest of the booths. One booth is a berry farm (current produce is blackberries, blueberries, and end-of-season raspberries), and the other is a great family farm that's known for its cherries, apples, peppers and squash, but they also have some stone fruit, eggplant, melons...

The problem with going to the farmer's markets before breakfast is that I get a lot of fruit. Far more than I can eat, even in my mid-summer fruit bonanza. I'm not sure why it's sooooo cool to buy an entire flat of raspberries, but it is. It just is. Maybe it's because you actually know what to do with several pounds of delicate summer goodness. Or you have a household of teenage boys (do they eat fruit, or just eat in general?)

I've wanted to try canning for a while, but I don't think of it as something you get into casually. You need the jars and the timei to make the stuff and the giant boiling water pots and... well, then you also need someone to eat the stuff. My mom never canned, but I remember Grandma's red wine jelly every winter. The grocery store down the street was closing, so the jars were 25% off... opportunity knocked!