Kelly

Otherwise I can get vegies from the supermarket. They do have ‘local’ produce meaning from australia, but compared to the health food shop it is likely to be from another state (or another country).

Right now isn’t really the time to learn canning because there aren’t many things in season and the supplies needed aren’t as easily found. Since last frost has passed for the majority of the country, the majority of things you’d be buying are coming from storage so they aren’t at the height of freshness. If you do wish to learn to can right now, apples, winter squash and potatoes are good candidates.

I must say, locally grown produce has taste, whether conventionally grown or not. A friend occasionally gives me well traveled certified organic produce and it, compared to anything local, is tasteless.

If you want to extend your own growing season, get a copy of Four Season Harvest by Elliot Coleman and learn how. While we are down here in Tennessee and are able to grow things year round (January is a bit lean), you can do the same in the northern tier states with a cold frame, small greenhouse, or even some row cover and careful variety selection.

I try hard not to can and prefer traditional methods myself. I suspect only dried and fermented fruits (i.e. wines) were consumed out of season. But I must tell you, if you eat strawberries only when they are in season, they are heavenly when you have them after a 10 or 11 month strawberry fast!

The most difficult thing for us (I’m a transplant originally from NYS) is to learn to eat what grows here. For us that means things like okra, beans, cushaw, summer squashes and not so much winter squash like pumpkins and butternut (both of which I LOVE!).

Enjoy the local eating journey!

BPA leaches into things whether it physically touches the food or not. The more you process it the more likely it is to leach so water bath canning would be preferable to pressure canning for instance. I personally freeze regular canning jars all the time whether they are special freezer ones or not. Just be sure to allow enough headspace for expansion. If you are not going to process the jar you can buy plastic lids that are BPA free and fit all standard canning jars. I get mine from http://www.azurestandard.com because they have the cheapest prices I’ve found. If you are going to make apple & tomato sauce you may want to look at a roma strainer. It makes grape juice, applesauce & tomato sauce a snap. You don’t even have to peel the apples! Just steam them lightly and run them through the strainer and it takes out all the seeds and peels for you. HUGE timesaver. I try to put up about 200# a year because the kids eat so much and it makes awesome fruit leather. You can even do 50/50 applesauce/yogurt which is fine at room temp and the kids think they are getting a candy bar. MWAH HA HA. Applesauce fruit leather is a great way to use up any jam you might still have too, just add it in to flavor it.

I thought of a couple more questions…

1. A couple of you mentioned the BPA in the lining of the canning lids, but that won’t actually touch the food will it???

2. I like to freeze my applesauce (since I make a *raw* applesauce recipe, I don’t want to cook it for canning), but the ONLY freezable canning jars I’ve found are Ball jars in the 8oz. size (those beveled glass jars). I suppose I could use baggies and just make sure it’s totally cool when I spoon it in, and that would store better in the freezer anyway, but I like spooning it out of a jar better than a baggie. Does anyone know where I could find bigger freezable glass jars?

Thanks again for all your help, everyone, please keep your great tips and ideas coming!

Kelly

I use a variety of methods of season extension and food preservation. We have about an acre of garden and I grow over 100 varieties of fruits, veggies and herbs. I don’t grow a lot of each (for instance, I usually grow 1 plant of over 20 different varieties of tomatoes), but have found that growing more varieties offers insurance for the big swings in weather we’ve been having in recent years. Currently in the garden I am still harvesting kale, broccoli, parsley, mache and root vegetables including carrots, beets, rutabagas, sunchokes and parsnips. The mache will hold all winter in the garden and still be fit to harvest in spring. I’ll freeze some kale for winter use. The sunchokes and parsnips will stay in the ground all winter, dug until the ground freezes hard and then dug again in spring. Carrots, beets, rutabagas, potatoes and onions all share space in the root cellar. The potatoes and onions sit in open bins, the others get packed in leaves.

Celery and parsley move into the greenhouse, until deep cold when they move inside to a window sill. Fresh herbs grow year round in a kitchen window.

I can a lot of tomato products – sauce, salsa, stewed tomatoes, “V-8″ juice, tomato juice. I also can jellies, fruits and green beans.

Squash and cabbage will hold for months in our “cool storage” room.

I freeze most other produce – we prefer the taste. We are close to being able to cover our use year round on veggies, but I have canned and froze local fruit in season. Corn, peas, blueberries, strawberries, cherries, zucchini, applesauce (some apples will hold a long time in cool storage), winter squash (when it will no longer hold in cool storage)…uh…trying to remember.

I dry mostly herbs for cooking and medical use, some fruit and fruit leathers, some tomatoes. I raise and use dry shell beans – super easy.

We’ll be getting a quarter of grassfed beef next week (they were all baffled when I asked for beef tallow), and I’ve gotten local chicken, eggs, duck and other meats. We now have two freezers to cope with harvest time.

I’ve experimented with sprouts and lacto-fermentation, but it’s not a big part of our diets yet.

I highly recommend the books mentioned above (Root Cellaring, Four Season Harvest) as well as Stocking Up, Wild Fermentation, the Ball Blue Book and Mary Bell’s Dehydrator Cookbook. I’ve started talking about some of what we do on my blog, but it all takes time so there is much I would like to share but simply haven’t gotten the chance.