Canning

Currently, I live in a small urban apartment but I eventually want to move someplace where I can have a pretty extensive food-growing garden and put up some of my produce.  My husband has even started to get excited about this future project.  In preparation, I am going to learn how to can food.  In years past, I would have gone out today, bought a bunch of canning jars, a nice, high end pressure canner, a couple of books, and gone to town.  Right now, however, we’re in gazelle intense debt repayment mode (to use a Dave Ramsey term), and that simply isn’t in the budget.

I’ve been reading a couple of books from the library and watching some youtube videos instead of buying a couple of books.  I even managed to get my first lot of canning jars as a barter for a Bumbo chair that I rescued from the landfill!  We already own a huge pot which we currently use to brew beer, so I’ll use that as a water canner.  While boiling water canning rather than pressure canning limits what I can store to some extent, it’ll give me a chance to get my feet wet.  What I want to put up is amenable anyway.  Tomorrow I’m going to make apple butter!  I managed to find a bunch of very cheap apples which will be perfect for my purposes.  If I can manage, I’ll take some pictures.

One  thing I’m learning about doing things like this on a budget is that the more you talk about it, the more you find resources.  One of my coworkers has been canning, and owns a big pressure canner.  When the season starts, she calls all the local farms to find seconds and cut-rates and puts up enough to get her family through the winter on a shoe-string.  She agreed to let me come help her can this year, in exchange for willing hands.  I’m also excited to pick her brain for who she calls to get deals.

Before my decision to be a homemaker, I never would have taken the time to build community this way – money would have allowed me to buy my way out of making relationships with actual people.  In the end, though, that’s the choice we have: relationships with people and a life giving economy based in the home, or relationships with corporations using money and an extractive economy that tears us from our homes.  Part of the vocation of a homemaker is building community, and I’m surprised by how naturally that flows from focusing your life on the home.