Tag: gardening

Canning can help make your produce last all year. My grandmother, who was a cafeteria lady at the local school, was an avid canner. In her basement, she had an entire wall of deep shelves that were shoved full of well organized canned products in the root cellar. During the growing season, my grandparents would eat the produce they were growing by starting with the what was picked first and then going toward the new pickings. Eventually, they would have so much produce, however, that my grandmother would take her mason jars and her pressure cooker and go to town with all of the fresh produce her husband had brought in. Following the pressure cooking, she would put reasonable expiration dates on the jars and take them down into the root cellar. Then, even in the dead of winter, their home grown produce could be enjoyed.

Preserving your own food can be a good way to make yourself partially or fully self-sufficient. Recipes can easily be found online for how to can your favorite food, but the basics are similar for most foods. When you use the pressure cooking method, you have to get above 240oF for a length of time, which depends on the food and typically ranges from 10 minutes to as much as 30 minutes. There are many things factored into this time limit but it’s best to follow it and adjust accordingly if the instructions differ at your altitude.

The time limit on canning comes from the amount of time required to kill off the bacteria that occurs naturally on fresh produce. In normal conditions these bacteria will just cause the food to spoil over time, but when the bacteria are heated to the boiling point of water (212oF) they form spores. These spores are then dormant until the seal is broken between the lid and jar by opening. Once you open it, these spores are released and ingested. These bacteria then can cause serious illnesses like botulism.

Canning can be a great way to preserve the foods your grow at home. Depending on the model you get, the pressure cooker may not be very expensive (under $100) and can be used for many years to come. The mason jars can also be bought new and reused inexpensively or purchased second hand and reused. Don’t feel weird about reusing old jars either because you will be completely sanitizing them when you can your foods anyway.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was talking about the system of growing some of your own food that was popularized during the world wars. These gardens popped up on private and public lands to alleviate resource strains in the United States food supply. Today in the face of avaricious agricultural conglomerates, we must have our own victory gardens to supplant the poisons they willfully put into our foods.

My grandfather prior to his passing always had a giant 30 by 100 foot garden in his backyard. It was so big, in fact, that you can see it in older satellite pictures of his town and in more recent pictures you can still see the outline of where the garden used to be. Growing up during the depression, he helped relatives who had a farm even though he lived in town. Even though he was sent overseas during WWII, he still did some work on growing plants when he was at home. Once the economy began to boom in the post-WWII era, he still had his own garden in his backyard in addition to working at an aluminum factory that was almost an hour away. And, he cultivated that same garden up until a few years before he passed.

While he was able to do that much (I blame the German work-ethic), even a small corner in your backyard is suitable. If you eat large amounts of tomatoes, peppers, or strawberries, consider growing a few plants of your own. Not only will it be much cheaper to buy a plant and grow it at home for several years than constantly purchasing new produce from the store, it will also be much healthier. There are charts online that show which plants should be put next to each other to get rid of pests without the use of any pesticides. You can also use compounds that are nontoxic or low-toxic like garlic or borax (yes the laundry powder). These plants can be grown completely organically with little to no extra effort except one extra trip to your nursery to get the plants.

Chickens can be incorporated for an organic symbiotic relationship. Chickens eat bugs, and chickens eat weeds. This benefit of your feathered friends will cause you less work and save you money because you won’t have to feed them as much or pull out the weeds and any pesticides you do use, won’t need to be applied as often or as heavily. Then, the chickens will fertilize your garden through their excrement. This benefit will require you to use less fertilizer, less often while not requiring any extra cleanup work. Finally, the chickens (as long as you have a few females) will produce eggs. The eggs are a benefit because not only do fresh eggs taste better but if you have a rooster you can keep the circle of life going by hatching more eggs. So really the chickens would become a part of your garden and only make your job a little easier.

Today is a great day to get started! Think about how you can make your own food at home instead of relying on the agricultural conglomerates who are just there to take your money. Work on your own victory garden today!