Strawberry Picking

If you are going to make jam, don’t use the junk strawberries from the grocery store. Pick right from the plant. These are far sweeter and have a much better flavor. The reason they don’t sell them in the store is their shelf life is very short. Make your jam within 24 hours and you won’t have a problem.

Every late spring to early summer in Minnesota we get huge amounts of wild (up north mostly) and farmed strawberries. My family has own small strawberry garden, but if we need more it is easy to find a strawberry farm. Start your own search for a farm near you at pickyourown.org. Be careful, though, strawberries have a very short season on the farms. By short I mean just a matter of a handful of days. Make sure you call in advance so you don’t miss the season. Also, call for prices. You will be surprised at the difference in pricing.

If you make the time to go to a farm and pick, you will have collected pounds of strawberries in a pretty short amount of time. Use them to make your jam, freeze them for smoothies, make them into pies, or eat them fresh.

In a short hour and a half, we picked about 23 pounds of strawberries.

How to Make Strawberry Jam

The first step in preserving your strawberries in any way is to pick through each one pulling off the stems and washing in cold water. We put some aside for eating over the next day or two and then took 13 cups for our homemade strawberry jam recipe. The remainder were frozen.

I highly suggest finding a box of Pectin and following the instructions. It is very cheap and easy.

Third, add sugar and basil (per the pectin box’s instructions) for flavor. Bring to a rolling boil. Then add the pectin and boil hard for one minute before hot packing sanitized cans.

Boil the strawberries HARD. You won’t burn it. A hard boil is when you can stir and the boiling does not slow down. This batch was not hard-boiled enough and the jam separated a little bit.

Fourth, pack the cans leaving a small amount of headspace on the top of the can as shown below.

Finally, set the lids and bands on the jars. Then water bath the cans as required in your pectin boxes instructions (Probably 10 minutes). This will pasteurize the jam and make sure it lasts for the year.

This article is part of our Foraging Minnesota series. Check the entire series out, or visit these other similar articles:

• Dill Pickle Recipe For Water Bath Canning
• Drying Herbs Fresh From The Garden
• Chokecherry Jelly Recipe
• Home Made Crab Apple Jelly
• Maple Syrup
• Drying Garden Herbs
• Small Batch Salsa
• Preserved Roasted Tomato
• Garlic Basil Tomato Sauce