In early September, as the summer and fall were beginning to greet each other in the mountain landscape, I heard rumor of fruit trees Down Valley — just below Telluride — that were filling out with a bumper crop of apricots.
Tipped off by a forager in the know, I drove Highway 145 out of town one afternoon, pulled over alongside the road and the banks of the San Miguel River, and was greeted by old homestead trees planted and left long ago. And sure enough, their boughs are decorated up and down with soft orange fruit, blushing pink where they’ve been growing in the sun, and small enough to fit half a dozen right in the palm of your hand.
Within minutes, I’ve got a harvest, a whole bounty of small, half wild fruit. But what does one do with a bevy of apricots, or a whole bundle of fruit of any sort?
I knew just who to call: Kathleen Morgan, a peripatetic fruit-gatherer and local advocate of all things pickled and preserved. Morgan’s vast knowledge of the local fruit landscape comes originally from the community — word of mouth:
“Ten or twelve years ago I had a pickle and jam company. And by making products and being at the Farmer’s Market, people would come up to me and say: ‘Oh My gosh, have you seen such-and-such a tree? Have you gotten this fruit? Would you come and pick my apple tree?’”
Meeting those fellow enthusiasts, Morgan says, “opened my eyes to all this fruit that’s around us, just a little bit below Telluride. In Telluride, you can get crabapples in a good year as long as there’s not a freeze in the spring. And then people told me about the apricots in Placerville, and they only happen on a good year: on a year when there’s enough moisture and they don't get frozen. I mean they can get frozen in June and then there are no apricots.”
This gorgeous outpouring of apricots is a special moment, a bounty fed by an enormous snowpack this winter, spared a late, deadly frost and nursed all summer by long days of sun.
Faced with too much fruit to simply eat fresh, Morgan takes the season’s bounty and puts it up for the long months to come.
“So, say for example I’m making a peach sauce or peach-apricot sauce or some applesauce. I’m going to cook that fruit down and add some spice to it. I want it at a good temperature — not a roiling boil — but I want it at a good simmer. And I use a metal funnel and put it into jars.”
When the jam is made and the jars are hot and full, it’s time to preserve them.
“I have a water bath that sits on two burners, it’s rectangular,” Morgan continues. “It comes out of the Amish Community in Pennsylvania. I heat up water to a simmer. You don’t need a rolling boil.”
Then, depending on altitude, can size, and the product in the jars, Morgan lets the jars simmer for however long the recipe instructs. The heat kills bacteria and activates the seal on the jar. With scalding hot water, tongs moving slippery glass and anxiety about bacteria, the process can be intimidating.
“People come to canning with a lot of fear that they’re going to blow things up or kill people. All good fears to have!” says Morgan.
But a good recipe can go a long way.
“At the base, I have recipes that come from State Cooperative Extensions. They’re the most reliable source of science-based preservation methods,” says Morgan. “People say ‘Oh, I have my great-grandmother’s pickle recipe.’ And I say, ‘that’s great but let's look at what modern day science can tell us.”
You can find information about your region’s university extension office at extension.colostate.edu.
Armed with a bounty of information and a bevy of fruit, you can stock your pantry all fall for the long cold months to come.