It comes around every year … kind of like tax prep time, and is just as welcome.

I’m talking about canning season.

Indeed, I plant our garden with a mix of great satisfaction and angst. I don’t mind having a garden, or tending to it; but I truly despise planting it.

I think farmers get a huge gold star for just thinking about climbing into their tractors and managing all those monitors, bells and horns, and apocalyptic sirens that befall their ears and their minds just to plant a crop … only to find when they finish the field that all they can see for their time and copious efforts are a bunch of tractor and planter tracks.

It would make me drink.

And I don’t even drink.

But after all of our backbreaking and arduous hand planting into crooked garden rows (you can grow more in a crooked row, right??) and they begin producing, it becomes evident that we’re going to have to do something with all of those vegetables.

It’s then that the pressure canner emerges from the depths of the basement.

Oh, how I love to hate that thing. While it saves me time with the whole food preservation process, it’s all that tedious and time-consuming picking and snapping of green beans … and picking and shelling of peas … oh, the shelling of peas.

It took me 40 minutes one morning to get 1-1/2 cups of peas.

Once again, I don’t drink, but I’ve wondered if anyone has ever made some sort of green pea-based beer that can numb the pain of that laborious process.

As I began the process with the green beans this year, I remembered when I first used a pressure canner some 35 or more years ago. I hadn’t been married all that long, but thought I would give this process a try, even as spooked as I was by the thought of something building up pressure in my kitchen.

Usually that’s reserved for my attitude on mending day.

I was trying my hand at canning peaches. I followed the directions to the letter (after all, I’m a law-abiding citizen), and got everything ready to go for the very first batch of anything that had ever graced the inside of the canner. I measured and put the water in. I put the prepared jars in. I put the gasket in the lid and put the lid on the pan. I turned the burner on.

And then I went and stood in the doorway to the next room. If that thing was going to blow up, I was planning to be in the next town.

Turns out it didn’t blow up, and the whole agonizing maiden voyage process was successful enough for me to try it again. And now all these years later, I’m still at it — even after taking a long hiatus for a while when our children were born and when they were toddlers.

I tried canning green beans one year when they were all toddlers, and I can tell you that it would have been easier and less messy to bring a wild boar home to meet Mom and Dad.

It made me appreciate a closet with a lockable door on it … so I could escape with a six pack of anything and an ice cream pail for … well, you know what for.

I planned to be in there a while.

I have used a pressure canner often over the last 35 or more years, and now my more “mature” mind looks at the language of using such a contraption. Words like “jiggle” (I have enough of that happening on my person even without dragging the pressure canner into it); “weighted gauge,” which makes me think of the bathroom scale — I still maintain it’s harassment in the work place to use the word “weight” in anything we do. I’m looking forward to hearing that question in the grain cart tractor this coming harvest, “Did you write down your weight?”

(Grrrr …)

A visit from our tax accountant might take less time; but I’d still want to be standing in the doorway to the next room, ready to run to the next town in order to escape the carnage.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net.