Sharing the craft and wisdom of preserving

MELISSA Davey is factotum supreme as owner of The Preserver’s Pot in Smythesdale.

She harvests burgeoning fruit trees, combs through recipe books, experiments with flavours and sticks the labels on her jars and bottles of jellies, jams and preserves.

Her food philosophy for her business and lifestyle is devoted to reduction of food waste.

As a stay at home mum for 17 years on a budget is was all about cooking from scratch and using everything.

“When I am preserving, I might cook quinces to make quince paste but I will then go onto use what I’ve cooked to create another product, so I might use the cooked quince as a base for a fruit wine,” Ms Davey said. “The scraps left over go to the chickens or into the compost bin.”

Plastic free July isn’t enough for the Davey family, they are a year-round plastic free household with buckets, bags and bins set up for separating and collecting recycling matter.

The fact that almost everything is packaged in soft plastic is abhorrent to Ms Davey.

“I have always been a really big recycler to the point where I give my husband and children really big headaches,” she said. “I will not buy from supermarkets where fruit and veg are packaged in plastic, I prefer to shop at a fruit and veg store where the produce is unwrapped.”

Growing up around country relatives inspired her to try her hand at preserving.

“Especially Auntie Florence, who I still love dearly, would make jam and we would go out into the garden, climb the plum trees and try not to eat to many while we were picking,” Ms Davey said.

“She would give us a bucket to go down to the blackberry bushes to fill, there was always the smells of that fruit cooking.”

When Ms Davey and her young family moved to Linton she discovered the wild plum trees and the blackberries in the area she realised “I can do this myself now.”

As a self-taught cook she loves the challenge of seeing what she could make for the dinner table, nutritional, healthy and something her husband and kids would really like with lots of flavour.

Now that The Preserver’s Pot is established Ms Davey wants to be involved in sharing her knowledge.

It is not just advocating to keep the heirloom tree in the backyard, it is convincing people the fruit on it is delicious, not necessarily straight from the tree, but cooked or preserved it can turn into something really yummy.

“If you have a glut of home-grown fruit or vegetables don’t look at it despairingly, whatever you have grown you can do something with it to give it more life and eating pleasure,” she said.