Because of my living in such a tiny home, I do most of my stove top type cooking outside on a camp stove. This makes canning, especially pressure canning low acid foods more tricky for me and not very cost effective as far as fuel goes.
I DO have a stove top pressure canner, an all American which sadly sits in storage. It’s just too big for my situation.
But I do miss being able to can beans, soup, and low acid vegetables from the garden and meats too of course. Have you seen the price of canned meat?! And it’s not even organic…
I know the last time I looked there were no safe USDA approved electronic pressure canners. Something about there not being a way to assure safe stable temperatures while under pressure.
But out of curiosity I checked again the other day. And lo and behold there is now one that is! Just one.
It’s pricy, I’m not gonna lie. I totally winced at the price. I had to really think about it. But in the end, I did order it through ACE hardware online and it came in today so I had to drive the hour plus to go pick it up.
It’s big. Too big to store in my home so it too will be in storage until I need it. But I have it now and look forward to using it.
In the mean time I have been dehydrating things as well. I finished up the tomatoes from the garden, some of which I powdered to use as paste/sauce/seasoning.
I also had some extra fresh ginger root left over from jam making and dried slices of that. The ginger only took a couple hours… a lot less time than juicy tomatoes. Nothing going to waste!
So between the dehydrator and the canner I should be prepped to really save my own food next year and to be able to be more self reliant from grocery stores. Because we all know that the shit is going to hit the fan next year with the lack of farm workers, shipping issues (caused by trumps idiotic tariffs making enemies with all our trade partners) and climate issues as well.
I think my next *big* purchase will be solar generator that can be used with the canner in case of electrical outages.
My saved bean seeds were dry and ready to shell and packaged up for sharing. I absolutely love these Roma type Italian pole beans. So succulent and delicious even at a very large size. Honestly they are so productive I only need a few vines for myself! I remove the imperfect beans before packaging. They are useless and you really only want to save good ones to keep a strain healthy. A lot of seed saving/ keeping is ruthless culling of weaker seeds and plants. my saved seeds will go to people who want to trade or to the free seed library in town.
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of the post, one more thing. We had our first fall frost this morning. Of course the weather apps all said it was 10 degrees warmer than the truth.
The weather app….
Climate Wary Homesteader 