Preserving Your Harvest to Become More Self-Sufficient

I want to learn how to preserve my bounty from my small garden and my farm stand purchases, so I've purchased a few books, a large stock pot, and some canning jars. This is a start to my adventure to learning some strategies to become more self-sufficient and be able to make healthier food choices.

If you want to be more self-reliant, then it’s time to learn how to be more self-sufficient. The more things that you can learn to do for yourself means that there are fewer things that you have to have others to do for you. As you learn new skills that allow you to become more independent, you will find yourself relying less and less on other people. For example, I've had a running toilet for quite some time and I finally took to YouTube and have learned how to adjust the interior elements of the toilet to keep it from running.

It's exciting and satisfying to learn new things, and I encourage you to learn new things, too. As a result, your internal self-reliance will grow with your confidence in your innate ability to get things done. So, it’s time to adopt a do it yourself lifestyle fueled by a positive can do attitude and learn an important thing that you can do to become more self-sufficient.

Preserve Your Own Food

Yesterday, I talked about how growing your own food is an excellent way to become less dependent on the food supply chain and its problems. However, growing your own food is only one step in becoming food self-sufficient. Once you have your own homegrown food you need to be able to preserve it so that you can enjoy its nutritional benefits at a later date.

Food preservation techniques have been around for thousands of years. Prior to the advent of refrigeration just under a century ago, these techniques were the primary ways that everyone used to preserve the food they had. Luckily, these techniques are still available for each of us to use in our search for greater self-sufficiency.

Canning is an excellent way to preserve food. All that is required are canning jars and lids, along with a pot large enough to hold the jars. You simply place the food you want to preserve in the jars, seal the lids and place the jars in a hot water bath in the pot. As the jars heat in the water, they expand, forcing out the interior air and causing a vacuum. This vacuum seals the lid, keeping the interior contents oxygen free. Canned food will keep safely for up to a year when properly stored in a cool dark place

Another even more ancient way of preserving food is drying and/or smoking. The idea behind both drying and smoking is to remove water from the food item being preserved. The only difference between them is that smoking removes some of the water, while drying removes nearly all of the water. Smoked foods will last for weeks. Dried foods will last indefinitely and simply need to be reconstituted with water in order to be edible.

When I took my class in Italy, they showed us the underground room used to hang and dry the prosciutto. There were also braids of garlic that hung on the walls. The gardener shared her strategies for keeping a planting journal, rotating crops, and using a greenhouse to start plants. It was fascinating to learn about olive oil, cheese, wine, and pasta making techniques used on the farm.

It is fun to take these lessons and incorporate them into a simple lifestyle...into my Intentional Life.

Do you have any favorite canning techniques you could share? Come on over to the Facebook page and share: www.facebook.com/ahousewithfourrooms

Cheers!

Lisa

P. S. Here's my affiliate link (at no cost to you) to the canning jars I have:

Disclaimer: Any products, programs, or personal recommendations made in this or any communication from A House With Four Rooms for 3rd parties will likely result in some form of compensation from a said 3rd party.

Always do your own due diligence and use your own judgment when making buying decisions and investments.