Canning Time at the White Home

When Ellen White returned from the campground to Norfolk Villa, in Granville, flowers were blooming in all their glory, and the fruit season was coming on. When they had moved to New South Wales ten months earlier, it was near the end of the fruit season. They had to gather odds and ends of everything they could find to get them through the winter. It took some doing to feed a family of a dozen or fifteen adults, with two to four visitors nearly every day. Now as the fruit came on, they prepared to move into a heavy canning program. On Thursday, December 20, as she wrote to Edson and Emma she gave a little insight into the involvements:4BIO 178.2

Well, we are now in the midst of fruit canning. We have canned one hundred quarts of peaches and have a case more to can. Emily and I rode out five miles in the country and ordered twelve cases of peaches, one dollar a case. A case holds about one bushel. The ones we canned are the strawberry peach, called the day peach here....4BIO 178.3

Emily has canned fifty-six quarts today of apricots, and we have twelve cases yet to can. We did have such a dearth of anything in the line of fruit desirable, that we are putting in a good supply.—Letter 124, 1894.4BIO 178.4

A month later she could report, “We have canned no less than three hundred quarts, and no less than one hundred more will be canned”—some from the peach trees in their little orchard. She commented, “If I continue to keep open a free hotel, I must make provision for the same.”—Letter 118, 1895. She reveled in the fruit in the Sydney area, especially the peaches and the grapes.4BIO 178.5