One of America’s great farm traditions is home canning. We spent the whole weekend carrying on the tradition. It’s a lot of work now, but worth it to have our own home-canned fruits and vegetables when the snow is 3 feet deep!

First we picked several buckets of raspberries and canned 44 jelly jars of raspberry jam. The last jars of jam came out of the hot water bath on the stove at 2:30 am.

The next day we made salsa. We went to our local farm stand and picked out a bushel of Roma tomatoes, a half bushel of sweet peppers - green, yellow and red, and a half bushel of red and sweet onions along with a quarter bushel of jalapeno peppers and Hungarian hot peppers in reds and yellows. Thie kitchen was overflowing with fresh vegetables.

The tomatoes we dipped into boiling water for a minute, then peeled each one, drained the juice, and chopped it up for the salsa. We chopped the onions, sweet peppers, and hot peppers to go with the tomatoes in a ratio of 4:2:2:1 (tomatoes:onions:sweet peppers:hot peppers). It took us two whole days to can 57 pints of salsa.

First we cooked the salsa. We sterilized the jars in boiling water. Then we used a canning funnel to put the salsa into the jars. We wiped the tops of the jars, added the lids and screwed on the bands. Then we placed the jars of hot salsa back in the boiling water for 15 minutes to process. After that we took out the jars and as they cooled, the lids began to pop. Each time a lid pops, that means the jar has sealed and will stay good on the shelf for as long as couple of years – but it never lasts that long around here.

We made three different canned salsa recipes that we found online, and tried two variations of each recipe to make it mild, medium or hot and give slightly different taste. We labeled each jar with a code for the different recipes and variations and kept a chart on the computer so we will know next winter which recipe we like best.

Canning is hot, exhausting work and we can’t quit until the job is done – but having our own locally grown food is wonderful when the snow flies!

April showers bring May flowers, which bring wild strawberries in early June. Uuummm!

Patches of wild strawberries are abundant throughout the fields at Wild Rose Meadows. The key is to first find a patch of ripe strawberries, and then to pick the berries that are exactly ripe. All wild strawberries taste good, but when picked at exactly the right time, they are exquisite. Plump, juicy, sweet, glowing bright red against the dark green backdrop - they are wonderful.

Wild strawberries are much smaller than their domesticated cousins. The berries vay from the size of a pencil eraser to the size of a marble. A person has to pick a lot of wild strawberries to get full. Wild strawberries taste even better than domesticated strawberries. After picking and eating a few, our fingers are bright red for the rest of the day, but we don't mind.

The cows like wild strawberries, too. When we walk through a pasture where the cows have been, the strawberry plants stand out, but there isn't a berry left on the plants.

The stone wall of the old barn soaks up the afternoon sun, storing heat for the rhubarb patch that grows the full width of the barn. The rhubarb gets an early start in the spring. We fertilize the rhubarb early and keep it watered, so by the end of April we enjoy the first good taste of home-grown produce after a long winter of store-bought greens.

We cook the rhubarb by cutting stalks into one-inch pieces and boiling them in water. We barely cover the stalks with water because rhubarb stalks themselves contain a great deal of water. Then we add 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sugar for each pound of rhubarb. The sliced stalks boil until soft.

We like eating rhubarb as a sauce with a meal or as desert. We also bake rhubarb in a 9 x 13 glass pan with a crust of oatmeal and cinnamon to make rhubarb crisp. But one of the best ways to enjoy rhubarb is make Gram Jam.

Gram Jam is an old family favorite. Grandma Mary cooks up a big pot of rhubarb and when it comes to a boil, adds strawberry jello to turn the rhubarb into strawberry jam. Then she cans the strawberry jam in pint fruit jars to give to family members. It tastes just like strawberry jam, only better. Everybody in the family calls it Gram Jam.

Grandma Mary learned the recipe from Grandpa Dave’s mother, Grandma Van, who learned the recipe from her mother, Grandma Gribbell, back in the 1940s. Gram Jam is just as popular today in our family as it was 70 years ago. We freeze a lot of rhubarb in the summer so we have plenty of rhubarb to cook up as Gram Jam in the winter. We love that rhubarb patch at the end of the old barn!