The first season, month by month
Updated
Before the season
Everything on this list has to happen before the fruit is ready, because once it is ready you will not have time and the fruit will not wait. A picking window is two or three weeks, and it does not move to suit a thermometer that turned out to read four degrees low or a pallet of jars still in transit. This whole section is work done while nothing is urgent, precisely so that it is finished when everything is.
- Call your state department of agriculture. Describe every ingredient. Get the answer before you buy anything.
- Calibrate the thermometer and the refractometer, on a bench, at room temperature.
- Order jars and lids. Cases take time and arrive on a pallet.
- Settle the jar size by weighing jam into candidates, not by reading fluid ounces.
- Order labels only after the jars are decided.
During the window
This is the short part of the year and the only part that cannot be rescheduled. The temptation is to make the biggest batches the pan will hold, because there is fruit everywhere and not much time. Resist it: batch size causes two separate failures, and a run of small batches that all set is worth more than one enormous batch that does not.
- Buy fruit in the condition the product needs. Fully ripe for jam, a quarter underripe for jelly.
- Batch small and often rather than large and rarely. Batch size is a cause of two separate failures.
- Log every batch as you go. It takes two minutes and it is the only diagnostic you will have.
After it
Eleven months of selling against three weeks of making is the shape of this business, which is why storage is not an afterthought. Whatever you made in August has to still be the same product in May, and the two published failure modes that appear months later are storage failures rather than cooking failures. Where the cases sit matters as much as how the batch was cooked.
- Store cool, dry and dark. Two published failures are storage failures.
- Rotate oldest out first, which needs a lot code.
- Sell through the fall and winter, which is when the product has no competition from fresh fruit.
The cash shape
Everything goes out in the window and comes back over the following year. That is the single hardest thing about a first season and it is not a skill problem.