Farmgal and I have been together for a while now. We’ve learned to work well with each other and we’ve taught each other a lot of skills and knowledge. Food preservation’s one of those areas where it’s clearly her doing the teaching and me doing the learning, but I’m gradually becoming less incompetent at it. Give me another year or two and I might even be able to preserve food unsupervised…

Of course, as a single guy way back when, my knowledge about food preservation was limited to basic bachelor survival techniques: Check best-before dates, look for the little pop-up button on store-bought jars, don’t eat it if you can’t recognize it. In fairness, I was living in an apartment in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories at that time, so I had no garden and did not have access to local produce. As a geologist, I was also more interested in the rocks than the plants growing out of them, so foraging never really occurred to me.

These differing interests – food preservation and geology – came together on our first food preservation project as a couple. It was the summer of 1999. Farmgal and I had been together for several months and on one sunny weekend, she announced that she wanted to make rose-hip jelly.

As a bachelor unwise to country ways, this perplexed me; why would you want to make jelly out of flower parts? Still, I looked forward to having an outing with my wonderful woman, so I gave her a hearty “Okay”. We piled into the truck and departed Yellowknife. We headed north on the Ingraham Trail, which loops around Yellowknife Bay and off to the northeast for about sixty or eighty kilometres before petering out (in the winter, it continues as an ice road up to the mines).

We had been driving just a few minutes, however, when we spied the objective. A number of wild rose bushes were growing on a flat, sandy stretch of land off to the right. Farmgal was keen to check out the bushes, and upon doing so, pronounced them entirely acceptable. She quickly showed me what part of the plant to pick and toss into our bowl. At this point, I felt compelled to point out a small concern. “Sweetie, we’re in the middle of a gold mine.” It was, to be precise, the Giant gold mine.

Giant was part of the reason I was in Yellowknife, and part of the reason Yellowknife was there at all. Prospectors had found gold there back during the Klondike Gold Rush, as they passed through on a long and arduous route to Dawson City, Yukon. In the nineteen thirties, larger deposits were found and the first mines opened up. Giant followed suit just after World War II. The mines begat the mining town of Yellowknife, which in time grew to be the capital of the territory.

If you’re Canadian, you’ll probably know of the Giant mine for one of two reasons, neither of them happy. One reason is a particularly bitter strike that wracked the mine and the city in the early nineties. The deaths of nine replacement workers, killed in an explosion triggered by a striking miner in 1992, was the worst of this strike, yet the dispute still dragged on until the following year.

The other reason you might know of Giant is its arsenic. Arsenopyrite was part of the gold ore being refined at the mine, and so arsenic was part of the waste materials being discarded. A lot of arsenic trioxide – a quarter million tonnes of it, in fact – ended up in massive vaults underground, and the federal government is now engaged in a long-term program to keep that stuff from getting into the water table and Great Slave Lake. Lesser qualities of arsenic were also found in the waste rock disposed of in piles adjacent to the mine. This stuff could leach into soil or water, or get blown around by the wind.

So – to return to the main story – I said to Farmgal, “Er, Sweetie – there could be arsenic in this soil, and by extension, the roses.”

We discussed this for a few minutes. Farmgal really wanted rose hips. I really wanted to avoid a relatively unique form of food poisoning. We eventually concluded in a non-scientific manner that the soil didn’t look too discolored by mineralization, that the plant life didn’t look to be stunted from metal toxicity, and that we probably weren’t going to give ourselves lethal doses of arsenic from the relative small quantity of rose-hips required for the jelly. I was also assured by the unspoken fact that I didn’t think I was going to like the jelly anyway.

So we picked our rose-hips, and moseyed back into town. We stopped at a store to pick up a few jars at the usual ridiculous northern prices, and headed back to the apartment, where Farmgal pretty much did all the work and I pretty much just watched.

The finished product was not what I expected, although I’m not really sure what I had expected – something green, maybe. The jelly was, however, a beautiful, translucent pink. It was glorious on toast or ice cream (and it didn’t kill us!). We’ve made more since moving down here to the farm, and continued to enjoy it whenever it’s available. It just doesn’t quite have the same interesting story, is all.

So – any first-time food preservation experiences to share?