Cinda Webb

I got to go pick kumquats and lemons last week at the Stanford Estate (aka the brother and sister in-laws’ home). The kumquat tree was loaded with fruit and they let me have almost all of it. When I got home I weighed the kumquats and found I had over 30 pounds of fruit. Some of the fruit was shared with other preservers but the majority had to be processed by me. I made kumquat marmalade, dried kumquats, preserved lemons, and peeled and juiced lemons. We have eaten preserved lemon risotto, lemon chicken, lemon pesto, and made lemonade!
The special label on some of the marmalade is to honor the special grandmother who owned the kumquat tree. Millie Stanford just passed away at age 91. Hopefully eating some of her fruit will help us to live such a long life.

Whenever you can something, or freeze, or dry, or just plain store something, you need to label it. I have pulled a bag out of the freezer and thought that I had discovered something from a past epoch – frozen turkey from which Thanksgiving??
There are many ways to label a product. The easiest is a permanent marker written on the bag for the freezer or lid of a canning jar. It is hard to get all of the details of a canning project on the lid when you are hand labeling. So I usually print a label.

I have a Brother Label Printer, model QL-700, that came with some software that helps you design labels. My husband purchased it for about $50 at an Office Depot. We ordered additional labels from Amazon. It is not the easiest software to use but once you get a format you like you just save the label and use it as a starting point for your next project. There are different size labels you can purchase for this machine. The above is a 3.5 inch label which is too large for a canning jar so I use a round cutter to slice off the edges and it makes a nice looking label then.

If  you want to make nicer looking labels, there are Avery labels that come with templates. Avery makes labels for both regular mouth jars and wide mouth jars.

And if you really want to get fancy try this site:
http://www.jamlabelizer.com/