When I saw the first Ontario strawberries in the market this week, I felt a twinge of inner panic. Like a primal tick or ancient worry, the idea that I won’t have enough time to capture this year’s strawberry bounty sprung to life. It felt as if I’d dawdled on my way to the start line and the race had already begun. Seasons, like birthdays, come and go at breakneck speed and those Ontario berries reminded me I needed to hatch a plan. Within a few days I was poring over a big pile of preserving books and a smaller stack of loose pages.

Sorting through preserving recipes is like planning a garden, and selecting those you want to make akin to choosing what seeds to buy. You juggle the reality of last year’s production with dreams of the season to come. It’s a pleasure that takes me back to childhood and the arrival of the Sears’ Wishbook catalogue each fall (and doesn’t that date me?). I can still remember the sweet and lingering anticipation of what Santa might bring as my brother and I devoured its pages.

I’m also a self-confessed organization freak. I come by it honestly from 15 years of teaching and keeping large numbers of young people moving in a somewhat orderly fashion and similar direction. Add to this an appetite for stationery, pens, highlighters and coloured markers that rivals my appetite for food—a trip to Laywine’s as exciting for me as going to a great restaurant—and it’s no wonder my preserving plan unfolds as a colourful and structured outline in a notebook (Rhodia only, please).

I do this as a means of inventory-taking that’s both practical and wishful. There’s still plenty of room for spontaneous straying—mine is not an OCD obsession. Tempting recipes often present at peak season begging to be tried. Some things will get made, others won’t. Not everything on my childhood wish list made it in to the sleigh.

For instance, I know from last year’s production that I need to double up on some favourites—peach and rosemary compote, Shinn’s pickles and Spy applesauce—that disappeared from my shelves far too quickly, but chili sauce I have in abundance so can strike it from this season’s list. A new preserving book and a handful of recipes from online sources help to fill out the wishful part of the plan.

If you look closely at the image above—and can decipher my Gothic script—you’ll see a lot of entries for jam. Despite its occasional tough lessons, I love making jam and love it even more on toasted rye bread at breakfast. I can’t recall my last purchase of the store-bought stuff and I’d like to continue that way. I’ll definitely be making Bernardin’s carrot-cake jam because it scores me big—albeit fleeting—points with my nephews, who adore it. Many people swear by freezer-jam recipes, particularly for strawberries, but I confess I don’t like their flavour or thin gel, no matter the ease.

The appearance of strawberries at the market coincides with the arrival of canning supplies in the hardware store. I roam that section to stock up on equipment. I’ve never made a jelly and it’s a task whose time has come, so I’m looking forward to purchasing jelly bags and a holder. While I’m at it, I need a new magnetic wand for fishing the disposable inner lids out of the bottom of a pot of boiling water—an ingenious invention. Incidentally, my most prized possession is a Maslin preserving pan from Lee Valley that my dad gifted me. It’s the perfect size and cooks like a dream.

I also haunt hardware stores to see if any new shape or size of jar has arrived. I’m partial to 500-millilitre jars (1 pint for you imperialists) but I also like getting an assortment of jars for gifting. There’s a lovely squat jar, sold in a four-pack, that costs a bit more but makes a beautiful presentation. Several years ago I was totally smitten by a display of Weck jars (traditional European canning jars with glass lids) at San Francisco’s Ferry Market.

I also love beautiful labels and search art galleries and specialized stationery stores for particularly lovely ones. It’s worth noting that I now only buy labels that adhere to the disposable inner lids because I hate soaking and scrubbing glue from jars. I’ve also dropped much of the external gussying up of jars because with preserves—as with people—what’s really important to me is what’s inside.

This year, I’ll be using a new-to-me ingredient because several recipes I want to try call for calcium hydroxide. It’s sold in pharmacies, I’m told, and ensures crispness, one of the most desirable qualities in a great pickle.

Speaking of which, pickled onion rings are a new addition to this year’s recipe list, just for James. He loves onions and I love him. Enough said.

In laying down my preserving plan, a seasonal pattern is revealed—things get much busier in late summer and early fall. That’s an ancient fact as reliable as the feeling that accompanies it: so many preserves, so little time.

What will begin it all, this very week, are rhubarb and strawberry jam and strawberry syrup. James doesn’t love maple syrup (yes, you read that right) and I need something for his weekend breakfast pancakes. I’ll then have a short respite until the Niagara cherries appear.

The truth is that the advent of a new season has me chomping at the bit. I’m full of enthusiasm and preserving gusto, and want to flex muscles that have been on winter break. I can hardly wait for the satisfying ping of jar lids sealing, and to set my own stores for another season.

Mid-to-late summer finds me yearning to satisfy a deep and instinctive urge to preserve. This has as much to do with my being a product of the Niagara region as with genetic inheritance. My grandmother was a prolific preserver, but I am ashamed to admit that the sense of thrift that informed her work is less important to me. Simply and sadly put, a bottle of brand-name chili sauce costs less now. But I remain undeterred, and preserve because it is both irresistible and seductive.

Preserving provides small seasonal pleasures, connecting me to my past and capturing what is good, perfect and in great abundance. Home-canning gives me a delicious and intimate taste of a place. Modernists recoil, but all seems right with the world when jars are delicately clattering in the boiling water of a preserving kettle.

My grandmother had six children, four of them boys—an important detail when considering food supply and demand. Like most women of her generation, born in the shadow of the First World War, she championed frugality. Growing up in an unsettled world made preserving inevitable. Store-bought goods were a lavish expense and not widely available. I wonder if, under these conditions, preserving—urgent and entirely practical—was more a chore and less a pleasure?

I try to imagine my grandmother, already faced with a full domestic day, shouldering in a bushel of beets ready for pickling. Undoubtedly she derived deep pleasure from preserving. I know this because it was one of the last things, along with driving, that she surrendered to advancing age. The last time I went down to her basement, there was the small shelving unit holding her final harvest, proof of the comfort of habitual practice and a feeble assertion of a waning self-reliance.

I have a childhood memory of surveying my grandmother’s basement from a perch on the top stair. It was the during the peak of tomato season and below me was a warren of seething activity. My father, along with a few of his siblings and their spouses, were busy canning. Bushels of tomatoes lay scattered around, a large kettle stood on a gas jet ready for blanching, plum tomatoes bobbed in the water-filled laundry sink like little red buoys while everyone gathered around an old melamine table skinning and packing tomatoes in jars. My grandmother’s house was steeped in tomato stench and debris. Shards of translucent skin, crimson pulp and pips stuck to the most astonishing places.

As a young child, I had the luxury of carousing with my cousins, taking just the occasional peep at the apparent chaos in the basement. Once I hit my teens, it was impossible to talk, beg, sulk or scream my way out of this labour. Feeling like I was caught in Dante’s inferno, the backs of my lower arms tender from the acidic juice running down them, I could not look lovingly on the shelves of jewelled jars in our cold cellar and admire the work of our hands. I could not appreciate the deliciousness contained in those bottles, the sweet meatiness of those tomatoes or the mid-winter elixir that is a canned peach. More importantly, I failed to appreciate that the shared labour of preserving bound us as family in a tender weave.

My grandmother didn’t just can tomatoes and peaches, she made myriad pickles, relishes, fruits and jams too. I adored her pear jam. My uncle David inherited 11 bottles from the final batch my grandmother prepared, and I envied his modest treasure and often tried to sneak a jar.

On the subject of jars, my grandmother’s frugality extended to the containers that housed her preserves. The jar was simply a means of transport, so she supplemented her canning jars by saving the few glass bottles that came into her house. The beautiful pale, maple-wood hue of pear jam would shine out from a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar. I’m still a glutton for that jam’s ripe sweetness and ladle, rather than spread it on to hot buttered toast.

Only the embers of this tradition remain in my family. My father and uncle still put up small batches of special relishes and pickles, but my dad has recently let it be known that he will no longer produce the one I fondly refer to as “Grandpa’s relish.” The name refers, not to my grandfather’s prowess at making the pickle, but his great love for it; he’d always be sailing the Great Lakes earning his keep during preserving season. I think my father had carried on making it knowing that I couldn’t imagine tourtière at Christmas without a large spoonful of the sweet-tart, turmeric-spiked accompaniment.

So I find myself fanning the flames of the preserving tradition. Embracing a ritual as my family slowly loosens their hold on it, the homely art provides me with some small sense of continuity. I devote much of September and October to preserving. Mango chutney, peach and rosemary compote, chili sauce, pear jam, fresh tomato sauce and Escoffier’s relish (a roasted red pepper pickle) are now part of my repertoire. I love the joys and—yes—the aggravations of preserving; jam, in particular, remains a challenge. I lack the ambition and industry of my grandmother and, while the fantasy of filling a cold storeroom with row upon row of jars is appealing, it’s entirely unnecessary. My production resembles the size of my grandmother’s last harvest so I simply clear a small space in my pantry for each season’s additions.

While nostalgia may be the trigger that gives me the urge to preserve, others are revisiting this simple, unpretentious art as a rebuttal of the fast, the ready made, the characterless and the generic. Brand identities are being fashioned out of preserving materials, the bottles and their contents evoking homemade, traditional and more leisurely values. I have to work harder than my grandmother to forge a substantial and authentic relationship to food, to community and to my local seasons. Preserving is one small measure in support of those ideals, and this year’s harvest of jars in my pantry a reminder of substance in an increasingly trivial world.