ReMARKable Farms: New look coming to jams and jellies...

In the Kitchen

A few months ago, my friend, Allison, called me and asked if I would like some jelly jars. Well, of course I would! She knew of a person that had some jars that he bought decades ago and was ready to get rid of them. The story goes a little like this...

Marv Obenauf had a business idea to sell a spread of honey with nuts in it. He ordered some special hexagon shaped jars. (If you didn't know, bees honeycomb are hexagon shaped so I assume that is why he wanted to use these specially shaped jars.) Once he had the jars, Marv started working on a label. Unfortunately, the labels were going to be SO expensive that it made the venture unrealistic.

We can relate to this issue. Egg cartons and labels are super expensive. We are fortunate that a lot of our delivery customers save their egg cartons and we can re-use them a few times. We also take back jelly jars to re-use. Yeah for recycling!

Mr. Obenuaf then had a different idea and that was to make leather conditioner made with beeswax. Obenauf's Your Best Leather Protection can now be found at various farm stores and Cabella's throughout the country! I think he made a good business decision in going with the leather conditioner. BUT he still had all those jars from the honey idea that he needed to get rid of. So, one Sunday afternoon, we jumped into the pickup and headed to Peck, Idaho and loaded up the bed with jars! What a generous gift and we are so grateful for the opportunity to take these jars off his hands.

Some of the jars had the honey/nut mixture in them. I just opened them all up and scraped out the honey mixture. I gave it to Alison and she is going to feed it back to her bees. Alison also got some of the jars. I think maybe she is going to make some lavender infused honey...if I remember correctly...

I did a test run with the new jars and made some raspberry jammy and they worked great! They have special sealing lids. I already looked and found that I could buy replacement lids and they are not too expensive. This may be helpful because I still have not been able to find any "regular" size canning lids at the stores!

The only downside is that the jars are 4 and 6 ounces. I usually place a label on the lid identifying the contents of the jar. The lids are pretty small so there is not enough room to put our logo. I want to avoid putting a label on the actual jar because it can be challenging to scrape off the sticker to re-use the jar. On the bright side, we have several hundred jars so it will take several years to make enough jam/jelly to use all these jars up! What an amazing gift!