Using sound judgment to be more self-reliant.
There’s never better a better time to learn how to safely preserve food at home. Home food preservation helps you stock up and save money, whether you’re growing your own food or buying in bulk. It adds variety to meals, and the flavor of home preserved foods can knock the socks off of most commercial offerings. You control what’s in your food.
This post will give you an overview of different home food preservation methods, so you can decide which options work best for you….
Perfectly ripe strawberries are yummy, but strawberries also top the “Dirty Dozen” list for highest amounts of pesticide residue. We’re lucky enough to have an organic strawberry farm nearby that uses no pesticides, so when strawberry season comes around, we stock up! In this post, I’ll share how to store strawberries 12 different ways, plus how to keep strawberries fresh. We cover freezing, dehydrating, homemade fruit leather, strawberry kombucha, freeze drying, strawberry jam (regular and low sugar), and strawberry wine and mead.
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To can food at home, you combine canning safe glass jars, lids with rubber gaskets, food that’s safe for canning and the right heat processing. Home canning allows you to preserve almost any food – even entire meals – but you need to follow the rules. In this post I’ll discuss how to can food at home safely, basic equipment for home canning, canning tips and recipes.
Some people avoid home canning because they’re afraid of botulism poisoning, but following the right guidelines will help you prevent foodborne illness. Botulism spores are everywhere – from the deep ocean to mountain tops. You’re likely breathing them right now. It’s only under specific conditions that they become dangerous. In this post we’ll cover botulism causes, symptoms and treatment. You’ll learn how to prevent botulism in home canned food so you can can safely.
There’s a growing interest in how to homestead and become more self-reliant. While the days of earning free land by farming it for a period of years is long gone, there are still many ways that most of us can incorporate homesteading principles into our daily lives.
Note – Although it sounds romantic and adventurous, “free land” often came at a high cost to those original homesteaders.
My great-grandparents were part of the original homesteading movement out west. I remember my mom telling me a story passed down through her family about a young boy of 11 who was left to hold a homestead claim on his own for a year so his family could have more land.
The boy survived, but the loneliness changed him and he was never quite right after the experience. The “good old days” weren’t always good.
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