A misery of riches: An ode to the canning closet

Apr 15, 2024

Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt has lived on his great-grandparents’ farm in North Pulaski County for 40 years. This is the latest in a series of columns about day-to-day life on the land where he raises heirloom tomatoes and other crops for local restaurants and the Hillcrest Farmers Market.

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My grandmother had a canning closet in the hallway of her old house on Adams Avenue in McGehee. From the hallway, it looked like any other closet, but when you opened the door, it was only 2 feet deep with shelves of quart Mason jars filled with okra, Kentucky Wonder pole beans and Bradley County tomatoes. As a small child, I imagined that the closet was really a secret passageway that led to a hidden garden somewhere.

I grew up in North Little Rock, and my parents’ house had a canning closet as well. Behind my father’s World War II Army uniforms were homemade shelves from floor to ceiling packed with the same Mason jars filled with Kentucky Wonders and other produce. My parents kept a garden out back, bordered on one end with a trellis covered by a sprawling Concord grape vine. In late July, my mother would hang a sheet over the doorway separating the kitchen from the rest of the house and put a big vat full of jelly grapes on to boil, and soon the smell of grape steam would fill the house. We had no air conditioning back then and despite her sheet tacked across the doorway, the rest of the house was soon as hot as the kitchen.

There was a spot out by the North Little Rock airport that was full of wild blackberries. The summer heat would be stifling, and we would have to wear long pants with rags soaked with coal oil or some other concoction wrapped around our ankles to ward off chiggers. Between the briars, the chiggers (who were oblivious to our rag repellant) and the heat, it was pretty miserable. And snakes! What is it about blackberries that attracts snakes? That was the only time I have ever actually stepped on a snake — fortunately just a young rat snake. But we would fill our buckets with sweet, seedy berries and the juice would stain our fingers and lips. Well, maybe it wasn’t that miserable.

By summer’s end, the canning closet would be full of beans and okra but also pints of grape jelly and blackberry jam, delighting my brother and me with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the coming year.

Now, I am the one putting up food: canning Kentucky Wonders and heirloom tomatoes, pressure-cooking quarts of homemade spaghetti sauce and always putting back some grape or strawberry jam.

When I was young, I remember marking the passing of each generation. When my grandparents began to die, my parents were no longer young, and I realized they would be next up. Now they are gone and I’m up. It’s the same with canning. Now it’s my turn to provide, to preserve the crop, to put it back for winter, always stocking up for the future — until it’s me that’s up.

In the 30 years or so I have been market gardening, I have never seen such plenty in my fields. In the first month of the heirloom tomato harvest, we have picked nearly 3,000 pounds of No. 1 grade tomatoes and several hundred pounds of No. 2s. The No. 2s are the ones destined for canning, so I lop off the bug holes and split skins, turning what would be junk into something truly beautiful. I grow a deep golden tomato variety, a dark red or ‘black’ variety and a beautiful golden tomato with vivid red marbling that I grew from seed I saved from a trip to Mexico. Combined in a fruit jar, the contrasting colors are bright and vivid. I’ve put back 35 quarts so far.

I never understood why my mother and grandmother wanted to keep their summer canning in the closet. I built shelves all around the kitchen where I enjoy the company of my produce all year. When the snows come in winter, the jars are a joy to look at and when I open one of them, it smells like summer. No matter how dark and cold February is, those jars are a promise that life is going to return.

My heirloom tomato harvest has become a tsunami. First I had enough to take care of my restaurants, then I needed to go to Hillcrest Farmers Market to sell the bounty. With still more to sell, Gary Proffitt at Edwards Food Giant has been taking a couple of hundred pounds each Friday and Saturday. Meanwhile, my Kentucky Wonder vines are thick with beans. Somehow, with help from my girlfriend Suzanne, I’ve found the time to snap and string 28 quarts of pressure-canned green beans.

The words “a misery of riches” escape my lips frequently these days.

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