Using many preservation methods...

[Kristianna]

Is there anyone here that "does it all"?

I am trying to think of all the ways to preserve food:

drying
canning
freezing
root cellar storage

Are those the only ways?

I have home canned and I have frozen garden produce in the past. I once tried dehydrating with a used dehydrator that we picked up, but that was less than successful. I purchased a non-electric food dryer/tray thing from Lehman's because it was sale-priced. I have not used it, yet.

ultimately I'd like to know how to do all of them and I'd like to have a certain amount of my food storage done in the various methods so as to not have "all of my eggs in one basket".

K

P.S. I have only water bath canned since I am afraid of my new-in-the-box canner.

[Jenny]

Hi Kristianna,

I've done all those methods, although now since we don't have electricity I don't freeze things. Well, in the winter lots of stuff goes in plastic buckets and boxes outside, under the house or in the cache to stay frozen during the winter. But I don't put up produce anymore in the freezer like you're talking about. For meat, however, I always liked wrapping meat in plastic wrap, then freezer paper to store in the freezer. Seems like for berries I usually spread them out on pans in the freezer, then when frozen I put them in zip lock bags.

Now for berries, I usually make jelly, jams, fruit butters, or catsup. If I can get any amount of blueberries, I put them in a bucket or some container, then cover with honey. They'll store wonderfully that way. In the winter after a big fresh snow, I take a bowl and go scoop up some fresh snow, then pour some of the fruit honey over it. It's the best snow-cone in the world! Such a fun winter treat!

I just made a huge post about dehydrating vegetables. Did you see it? I use homemade drying racks and the kind like the one you probably have from Lehman's. Here's the link to the post.
akhomesteaders.proboards44.com/index.cgi?board=foodcache&action=display&thread=1164845274

Meat's pretty easy to dry, and you can get as fancy or simple as you like with it. When we lived in the interior, every spring we used to set up big drying racks outside and cover them so the bugs wouldn't get to the meat as we were making jerky. We'd dry all the caribou and moose we had left. I usually soaked it in a brine first. It was so delicious. We always intended to ration it so it would last until the next hunting season, but we always polished it off way before summer ended.

There are some good books out on root cellaring. We don't have a root cellar here yet (dug one for our new house though), but our ole' timer neighbor does and we use his sometimes. Mice are bad, though. We keep spuds and carrots pretty good, though. He has a hole inside the root cellar where we keep carrots. A layer or dry dirt or sawdust, a layer of carrots (without touching), another layer of dirt or sawdust, and so on, ending with the dirt. If we don't eat them all, they keep nicely into early summer. Spuds are rotated in boxes. Mice get the turnips and rutabagas after awhile, but not right away. We've tried keeping cabbage and cauliflower in the root cellar until I can get around to doing something with it, but the mice always get it immediately. I can't even keep it there a few days.

For pressure canning, if you have a new one with an instruction book, you'll do fine. If you have the Ball blue book, that's great to have, too. If you tell us what kind of canner you have, and if you want to post some questions, I'm sure you'll get lots of answers. I can help and so will others. I think cookiecache said he was doing a video on canning wild meat, so he'd probably be able to offer some good tips.

[Jenny]

Here's a book we bought years ago: "Root Cellaring --- Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables" by Mike and Nancy Bubel. Very good book with information ranging from varieties that keep well and how to harvest correctly so food keeps better, all the way to different types of root cellars and how to build them.

[Kristianna]

Thanks, Jenny, that's great information!

I want to root cellar and we'll probably build/dig one when we finally get to our land. We only have 1/3 of an acre here.

I don't even know what brand of canner I have. I'd have to go look. I should just make myself do it. I should make a bunch of chicken soup just in case anyone gets sick and then can it. Would that be a good first project?

I planned to do green beans and a couple of other things this past summer, but some personal situations got in the way and I let my garden go.

But, I am excited for this years garden and hope that it will be very successful. I've expanded it by using lots of raked leaves to smother the grass. I hope it works.

Also, I sometimes can things during the winter. I use grape juice to make grape jelly often in January when I am not exhausted from the harvest and tired of canning. I had a hand-written schedule at one point telling me what to can in what months and there were only a couple of months that I wasn't cannig something.

I guess if I wanted to have dry beans cooked and ready to use I could can those at some point during the year. But, I haven't done that before. As I said, I've only done the water bath method.



K

[alaskafarmer]

Hi Kristianna,
We have a root cellar and it one of the best things we built. I guess it would come in third: our cabin being first, since we needed a place to live - second would be our sauna, nothing feels so good, no matter the weather! And then the root cellar. I just love it! We live off the grid and therefore have alternative ways of doing things. For awhile we didn't have a fridge and used the root cellar for everything. Now we use it to keep cabbage, carrots, and potatoes. The cabbages don't keep as long, but the potatoes and carrots will keep until we harvest the following year and still taste great. We have also built shelves in it and I store all of my canned goods there in case we would leave for a weekend in the winter and the entire house would go down to -40 degrees! We have to keep a light bulb going in the root cellar when our generator is running in order to keep it at about 40 degrees. We are really happy with the root cellar and it has served us well for 6 years now - I couldn't do without it!

Becka Minnema