Gardens tend to prosper on Vashon Island, which means many of its growers are right now wondering what to do with all their extra bounty. While residents have a strong tradition of donating their surpluses to food banks, an increasing number of gardeners are experimenting with preservation, a strategy supported by Vashon’s Food Preservation Tool Library.
The three-year-old group lends dehydrators, pressure canners, water-bath canners and vacuum sealers to residents contemplating their first-ever batches of rhubarb jam or tomato sauce. The check-out fee is $5, plus a $50 deposit, although tool keeper Sheila Brown says she’d happily negotiate with an aspiring preserver who couldn’t come up with the money.
Brown points out that there’s a political dimension to the project, which was spearheaded by Vashon’s Food Security Working Group.
“We’re trying to help people realize we can’t always depend on the supermarket,” Brown says. “If there was an earthquake, it would be quite awhile before King County came to our rescue.”
But not every tool user is set on stockpiling rations for a possible disaster: Brown recently lent the library vacuum sealer to a woman who’s planning a backpacking trip; her son proposed she travel with bread frozen in vacuum-sealed plastic bags. Brown says she won’t know whether the scheme worked until the sealer’s returned next week.
Although entrusting fancy tools to amateur preservers sounds like the setup for another kind of disaster, Brown says the library’s equipment has always come back in good working condition.
“Criminals don’t want to borrow pressure cookers, if you get my drift,” she says.
