On Orcas Island, people show up at Audra Lawlor's door with boxes filled with plums, apples, quince, or whatever their yard gave up that week. Some of it arrives by ferry from neighboring islands, and some of it comes from folks who want nothing more than a jar of preserves in return.
Orcas is tucked in a rain shadow that hands it more sun than the Washington state coast just across the water. That climate once made the island a fruit basket for the whole region. By the late 1800s its hillsides were planted thick with orchards. When the railroads arrived, eastern Washington got irrigation, and the island's orchards were left abandoned. A good number of them are still standing, some well past a hundred years old, and they are the reason Girl Meets Dirt exists.
Audra came to them by accident. She grew up in the Northwest, spent ten years working on Wall Street, and left in 2011 with her husband, Gerry, two dogs, and bought a five-acre farm down a one-lane road with no particular plan beyond getting their hands dirty. That first fall, the seven fruit trees already on the property gave her more than 200 pounds of apples and pears, and neighbors kept arriving with more. She had never preserved anything before, but taught herself, and by 2013 the kitchen was stacked with boxes of jars she'd made simply to keep up with the fruit.
She cooks in wide copper pots, which come up to heat quickly and give her the control to pull a batch before the fruit loses its shape. She skips commercial pectin entirely, instead opting for a long maceration time in unrefined cane sugar and a squeeze of lemon. The result runs darker and thicker than other preserves, and there is a great deal more fruit in every spoonful. That sort of care and craft shows up in every jar.
Her Shiro Plum with Mint was among the very first preserves she made and went on to win a Good Food Award in 2016. It's good on toast, good against goat cheese, and good brushed over pork or lamb the way you'd use a mint sauce. The Rhubarb Lavender comes from deep red Valentine rhubarb, lightly infused with English lavender from her own garden, and it is lovely on a buttered baguette or spooned over ice cream. Gerry made a whole season of it himself once, learning the recipe when Audra was pregnant and couldn't stand the smell of the stove.
In winter, when the trees are bare, Audra is still out in the orchards, cutting back the old limbs so they'll fruit again. Come the next fall, it'll be endless boxes again. Or a neighbor leaving pears on the step, and a crate of plums riding the ferry over from the next island. Audra takes whatever the season hands her and gets to the pots.
A lot of the time, her kitchen smells of pears and hot sugar, the copper pots working the fruit down. There is always more coming in from a neighbor who leaves pears on the step, or a crate of plums riding the ferry over from the next island. Audra finishes one batch and reaches for the next crate. ⚘
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Photos: Girl Meets Dirt
