Open-Fire Canning

Some things bring back memories and I couldn’t help but to think about that cool damp hole beneath the pumphouse while I sat outside under the fly peeling pears.

My brothers dug that hole. Hand dug. A couple of boys with shovels in their hands.

I never measured the dimensions of that hand dug cellar. Looking back, thinking back and guesstimating, it was around 10’ by 12’ and deep enough that a 6’ person could stand without bumping their head on the rough-cut pine floor joists overhead. The cellar stayed close to the same cool temperature year ‘round and made an ideal place to store all those shelves of jars filled with canned vegetables, jams, and jellies. Potatoes kept fairly well but someone had to regularly pick through them to get rid of the rots. That someone was me once I was grown enough to carry a bucket up and down the cellar steps.

We were, unbeknown to our family those 60 plus years ago on my personal life-calendar, what modern folks now call preppers. 

It was a way of life for us … prepping for the coming years, living daily out of our stores, and annually rotating and replenishing our stock. Our family was good at it too. My mom and dad knew what we needed to go another year. We always put up at least what we needed and there was always some reserve left over when the new stuff made its way to the shelves.

I don’t know who came up with the idea or when the practice first started. I suppose I could Google the history of canning and find out. I do know that, by the time I came along, my folks knew all about it and depended upon it as a way of life.  It was our means of storing food for personal use out of season when it doesn’t grow. Canning vegetables and fruit outdoors over an open fire was knowledge and skills that my mom learned from her parents and my dad learned from his.

I am, where my lineage is concerned, at least a 3^rd Generation practitioner of these skills.

One significant difference between water-bath canning and pressure canning is the length of time that it takes to do the cooking part of the process. All the other parts of the process are the same. The reason pressure canning time is so much less is that the amount of heat inside the container is increased by pressure. Water boils at 212 degrees. Add 10 pounds of pressure and that same 212 degrees becomes somewhere between 240 and 260 degrees … more than enough heat to cook the food and destroy anything that might make you sick (or worse).

There’s a big difference between a 35-minute cook time in a pressure canner and a 3.5-hour cook time in a water-bath container. Where a pressure canner uses the increased temperature caused by pressure to safely process (can) vegetables and fruit, the water-bath canner uses what seems to be an extreme amount of time at boiling temperature to safely accomplish the same task.

We kept the canner at a rolling boil for 3.5 hours regardless of what we were canning … not 3.5 hours from the time we started the fire under the canner. (Let me mention that we DID NOT can meat or fish.)

Another significant difference is that a water-bath canner can be made out of any suitable sized container that will hold canning jars. Our family wore out several 55-gallon oil drums. We always kept one in reserve knowing that the one in use would eventually rust out. We used only oil drums. We’d cut the top out of a drum. Then we’d build a good hot fire in it to burn out the oil. Once the oil was burned out, we’d give the drum several good washings with Tide detergent before giving it a good final rinse.

DO NOT use drums or containers that held chemicals or toxic substances.

Yet another significant difference that I can think of is that you simply do not set a pressure canner on a grate over an open fire. Pressure canners are sensitive pressurized bombs. You must be able to carefully regulate the temperature beneath them to keep the pressure where it is supposed to be. You must constantly keep an eye on the pressure gauge. The worst that can happen to a water-bath canner over an open fire is a boil-over caused by too big a fire. That same too big a fire might cause a sensitive pressure canner to blow its gasket and cause some serious bodily injury.

Some folks set their canning drums on concrete blocks. We didn’t. We set ours on disc spacers that had been salvaged from an old disc harrow. A couple of firings and concrete blocks tend to crack and fall apart. That could be disastrous with a drum full of filled quart jars cooking away. The cast spacers refused to give up the ghost when the going got hot.

This business of open-fire canning is something that prepper-folks should give some serious consideration. It has a definite off-grid application. It has a definite grid-down application. There are numerous skills involved in the process … skills that need to be honed long before a real catastrophe hits. The necessary tools to accomplish the task aren’t difficult to come by.

We are coming up on our Ten-Month Anniversary as full time small cabin dwellers. We’ve settled into the small cabin in the woods lifestyle and can’t imagine ever returning to living in the midst of all the hustle, bustle, mayhem, and mania associated with life down there at the other end of the county. These woods suit us just fine. 

Running the road back and forth four days a week finishing up at the other end of the county is behind us now.

It’s a done deal. Shirli and I are now both officially retired.

Beginning A New Chapter

We’ve not published any updates on our doings here on the blog in a couple of months.

For those of you that have been following our small cabin in the woods adventure, pardon our absence from this side street in the electronic world.

The dynamics of the past couple of months have been quite intense. All our personal energies have necessarily been focused on finally arriving at the point where we are no longer making that long commute to the other end of the county. Finishing up has been a grind on us. That daily one hundred plus miles a day commute has been a grind on us.

We were about ground down by the grind.

We did it though!

We finally arrived at that hard fought for point in time!

It got to be some really hard going toward the end but we made it to the monumental leap!

It took nine months of finishing up down there. We moved into the cabin and became full-time small cabin dwellers on October 20, 2016. Down there, nine months … almost to the day … later, is now a finished chapter in our personal history.

Shirli and I are both officially retired.

The reality of this grand event has only just begun to settle upon us.

We are liking it. We are liking it a lot.

The thrust behind doing what we have done was to create a lifestyle that was simple and sustainable … a lifestyle devoid of the stress and mania associated with modern life lived on the hamster wheel where the runners are constantly running but getting nowhere in a hurry … a lifestyle that allows us to simply live and enjoy life at our leisurely pace … a lifestyle that allows us to do things that are important to us.

And here is the kicker in the deal … to do it all within the financial boundaries that most common working people have to work with and then live our retirement years comfortably on our small retirement income.

We have succeeded in doing what we set out to do!

What now?

We have a few cabin projects to take care of now that there is time to work on them. They will get done. It’s hard to imagine starting on any of them until we have taken a few days to unwind and decompress from the last part of that hard-uphill climb.

And now to chronicle a new chapter.

Our Seven Month Anniversary

It’s hard to believe that this weekend we are in marks our Seven Month Anniversary at the Cabin On Huckleberry Hill.

October 21, 2016 was the day that we became full-time small cabin dwellers.

We have mentioned before that this major change didn’t happen overnight. Getting here was a lengthy process that we carefully walked through one step at a time. It did, in fact, take right at five years to get from our first yard sale to loading the last load that came with us to the cabin.

Downsizing is a monumental (and collective) task. Especially after years of stacking things up, storing things away, and being constant collectors of things. A lot of weighing and evaluating is involved in the process. A lot of discussion takes place. The process makes demands upon those participating that could be a real deal breaker for people. Both of us had to let go of stuff that we considered important to us.

Both of us had to make sacrifices to achieve our collective goal. Something like this adventure is a mutually participatory thing for couples. One or the other will have a tough time making it happen with an outcome of mutual contentedness for both.

Our downsize is not as drastic as it is for those that decide on a tiny house built on a tandem axle trailer or a pull-behind RV. Though not a wheeled vehicle, our cabin is still portable should there become a need to hire a roll-back to move it to another location. There is still a lot of flexibility in the mobility department.

12’ x 24’ with a 12’ x 4’ porch is still quite small.

These are the outside dimensions.

288 square feet inside minus the framing, finishing, added walls, appliances, counters, shelves, furniture, and a few etcetera’s equals something that is just right for an oldering couple that doesn’t look for reasons or opportunities to be in separate places away from each other. There’s hardly a day goes by that the two of us aren’t engaged in doing the small space shuffle. It’s a dance that you pick up quickly when stepping down from close to 1300 square feet to something as diminutive as our little cabin.

The porch needed screening the day we bought the cabin. We live in the woods in a climate zone that is perfect for mosquitoes and wasps. We have assorted varieties of both insect categories as well as an array of others. Some of the others sting or bite. Some are just aggravating nuisances. 

There was too much else that needed our attention so the project was put off.   

The initial design of the cabin didn’t take into consideration the idea of screening the porch.

Some measuring, cutting, and nailing was necessary to prepare the porch for the screen. I still have both sides of the porch to trim out with lattice strips. I make my own strips rather than buying them pre-cut. It took less than half of a treated 2”x6” to rip the strips that I needed to trim out the front of the porch and the door.

I built the door. Forget buying one ready-made that will fit. This is a purely custom door built to fit a custom doorway that is nowhere remotely standard on a structure where the original builders had no idea about how to use a level to check for plumb on the 4”X6” beams that support the loft and roof.

Making things work was part of the fun in the project.

We do, at this point, have a suitable sit-spot on the porch where we can watch the befuddled mosquitoes, wasps, and other flying creatures on the outside of the screen while we sip our morning coffee, listen to the happy birds, count the tomato sandwiches growing in our little garden, or watch the clouds in the sky.

Freedom Is Not Just Another Word

Personal economics played a large role in our decision to do what we are doing.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing. We could have. Doing what we were doing to maintain a traditional sticks and bricks, in a mostly nice and comfortable neighborhood, was doable if we wanted to keep ourselves chained to the monotonous and mundane grindage inherent in what is viewed by most of the populace as the normal way to go about living life.

That grindage was more than we could accept. Especially at this stage of our lives. Continuing to grind away was simply a compromise that we were not willing to make. Why stay tied to a whipping post that demanded stripes on our backs and consumed our earnings as the reward of suffering the stinging whip. Why keep doing something that left us with pitiful little time to enjoy the better things in life that are important to us?

The economics of the deal involved a lot more than the dollars and cents of the matter. The dollars and cents part did have a place in the equation. There was a lot of important more, other than the dollars and cents involved, that prompted us to begin the reduction process those several years before we let the cat out of the bag and anyone had a real clue about what we were doing. We mentioned our interests to a few people. Most of the few stood there looking at us as if we had suddenly grown huge warts on our noses. So we kept our interests to ourselves and kept stepping the steps until it was time to jump.

The important more?

It involved the issue concerning the outflow of life-energy in comparison to the inflow of the essential life-elements that generate and create the margin within us that allows us to live as humans being rather than humans doing.  Realizing that we were coming up WAY short in this department, coupled with being fed up with the stinging whip, were the essential motivational factors that presented themselves to us.

Positive change rarely happens on its own.

Negative changes have a way of throwing themselves on us regularly. We adjust to the negative changes and often consider them part of the normal flow of life. Positive changes are calculated, the angles of adjustment carefully thought through, adjusted from time to time to keep headed in the desired direction, and stepped out one step at a time.

We will, on March 21^st, have been full-time here at this little cabin in the woods for 5 months.

It’s far from anything that remotely resembles a glamorous cabin. 

It’s definitely not something you’ll see advertised in the glitzy cabin fad advertisements. There are a few finishing projects that await our attention. But, in moving to the cabin with its overwhelming 288 square feet inside the walls (336 square feet if you figure the small front porch into the total), we are discovering a contentedness that we’ve not know before. The words, “I love our little cabin,” are spoken often here by one or the other of us.

We readily admit that culling through and getting rid of stuff … downsizing … either through yard sales or outright giving away … was a challenge that we had to step up to and meet head on. It was really tough at first … watching stuff leave. It didn’t take long for it to get easier. The more the stuff left the less encumbered we felt. And, truth be known, we still have more than we honestly need to live comfortably. This reality presents us with another challenge … another round of sorting and culling to further simplify our lives here at the cabin.

It’s paid for. It’s ours. And it affords us the opportunity to pursue important personal common interests.

One of those interests concerns this nomadic nature that the two of us share as personal character traits. This aspect of our characters was very difficult … practically impossible … to entertain as long as we were shackled to the post that I mentioned earlier.

Sure.

There were occasional little short trips and weekend excursions that we went on. But there was always that strong iron chain padlocked to our collective ankle with its other end strongly attached to something that owned us. We always enjoyed our short trips and excursions. Everybody needs a break from the humdrum and grind. What we noticed is that every short trip and excursion fed fuel to our nomadic natures … fuel that made the fire burn hotter. Short was never long enough. Short was never good enough. Short was always a compromise.

We looked at an assortment of options that would help satisfy our nomadism.

We spent years considering and studying how we might go about helping our nomadism find fruition. There are several viable options to choose from. There are a lot of people with this jones so none of us have to think we are pioneering in this area. We thought of ourselves, at first, as an odd couple when we started talking about doing this. Discovering that a lot of others are out there on the road, some of them full time and have been for a LONG time, took the oddness out of it for us. We were, in fact, studying on this only months after signing the papers on the other house in the mostly nice neighborhood. That’s when we came to the stark realization that we no longer had the freedom to simply jump and go at the drop of the hat.

This is where Fred, our paid for 1993 Chevy G20 high top vehicular friend and road home, comes into the picture. Fred is mostly ready to hit the road. The major interior conversion work has been done and we are down to simply doing some tweaking to a few things before heading out on a long and unhurried mosey.

Spring Buds

Winter, for all practical purposes, is behind us in this part of the world.

Truth is, winter never really found us this trip around the sun.

We had a couple or three episodes of, what for us, was the cold stuff. There were several short spells where that extra underlayer felt good when the wind was chilly and blowing out of the Northern Regions.

But for winter? It wasn’t much of one.

Except for the triple back to back to back bouts of Upper Respiratory junk that hit us like sledge hammers.

It’s not unusual to have a mild winter like we’ve had this time around. It is, however, extremely unusual for us to find ourselves traipsing back and forth to Urgent Care. Oh. And the deal with the injured Peroneal Nerve that has made a significant … hopefully temporary - going on three months now and still hobbling and limping … alteration in this important thing called Bi-Pedal Locomotion.

It’s great to see things turning green. I was thinking that we were having a False Spring but it sure looks like an Early Spring in the making.

It was the Black Willows that started greening up first. The first leaves of the Red Maples are popping red color as the leaves emerge before turning green. Some of the wild huckleberries are still blooming. Some of them, especially where they get a lot of sun, are completely leaved out. There’s more than enough tree pollen causing a lot of sneezing, wheezing, and cussing. Tree pollen. The downside to Spring breaking loose.

We are not completely done with the cool stuff that filters down before dissipating. A light frost shone on roof tops this morning. There could be a couple more of those before the middle of April.

If we were holding ourselves to a set schedule to get some needed projects finished, and others started, we would be several months behind schedule. Between these winter bouts of URI, and learning to get around on a foot that doesn’t receive instructions from the brain properly, pushing any kind of self-imposed schedule in and around the cabin really hasn’t been practical. It’s been enough to manage and maintain our 4-day commute finishing up what we’ve been doing in the employment department. Those LONG days are soon to be wrapped up and stored away in the historical section of the David and Shirli life-library.

I started tilling the new garden spot a week after that first bout with the URI thing. (It was during that bout that I rolled my ankle and did the nerve damage.) I must have looked something like Chester Goode (Dennis Weaver) on the early episodes of Gunsmoke wrestling that tiller around. We have three rows of potatoes planted in the new ground and are waiting on getting closer to late March and early April to plant some other things that a possible frost would make a mess of.

Just below the rows of potatoes are some thornless blackberry plants that we salvaged from our other place.

We also, somewhere in experiencing our contrary winter mix, managed to form and dig what will eventually become a raised garden bed in front of the cabin. We’ll start planting it like it is, keep adding carbon rich soil building material in a lasagna fashion to it as we go, and gradually grow a nice bed of soil.

Moving to a new area is an interesting proposition, especially when it is a small community. New faces stand out in small communities where everybody knows everybody from way back there. Small communities can tend toward being clannish and closed. We’ve not found folks to be rude, unfriendly, snobbish, or stuck-up. Curious and careful? Yes. And rightly so. We respect that. It is, after all, a crazy world we live in these days and it seems the craziness is only getting crazier. The thing about a small community like this is that you either came here by birth, married into the community, or (like us) chose to leave the hustle and bustle behind and moved here for the solitude and simplicity.

It’s all good.

Locals aren’t in a hurry to get to know us.

We aren’t in a hurry to get to know the locals.

We consider it a mutual respect thing.

We didn’t move here to try to persuade anyone to our way of thinking. That’s the quickest way, in a small community, to shoot yourself in both feet. And we’re too dang old and set in our ways for anyone with a grain of sense to bother with wasting their time trying to persuade us to their way of thinking.

Breaking New Ground

This is going to be an interesting project for us here at The Cabin on Huckleberry Hill.

It is a project packed full of challenges.

The challenges aren’t anything like landing people on the moon and bringing them back alive. These challenges are more in line with discovering the essential elements that create balance and harmony between that layer of earth, the plants growing in it, and these bodies that will eat the plants that are grown in that layer of earth.

The earth here at the cabin is not the same as the earth down at the other place. The topsoil here has a lot more sand content. Sandy soil is not a bad thing. Sandy soil drains well during wet weather. It also dries out faster during dry weather.

Healthy soil produces healthy plants that lend their healthiness to us to help produce healthy bodies. There is a definite relationship where these three are concerned.

It’s pretty simple arithmetic. 1 + 1 = 2.

The problem isn’t the simple equation.

The first challenge is discovering all the small assorted percentages involved in the first 1 to make it a whole number. There is a lot more to healthy soil than dirt. The second challenge is to meet and overcome the assailants that will chew or waste away at the second 1 before we have an opportunity to chew on the second 1.

It took several years of careful attendance to develop our gardens at the place down south.

The first bed that was hand-dug was an utter disappointment. The earth was far from anything that could be considered healthy soil. Its life had been literally sucked out of it by decades of traditional row-crop agriculture followed by decades of sod covering. We basically started with something that resembled a growing medium … one that wouldn’t grow a patch of turnip greens … and went from there.

Those beds, after a few years of focusing on building soil, started producing abundantly. They kept producing abundantly until the honeybee die-off. After the die-off, we pretty much gave up on trying to grow anything that needed the activity of pollinators. We could, without the honeybees, grow beautiful plants. But, without the bees, the beautiful plants wouldn’t produce fruit. Before the die-off, we grew all we could eat, can and freeze, give away, and more than that.

We aren’t talking about acres of garden.

At one point, we had 2,000 square feet of garden in 3 plots. These were all done traditional row fashion. We eventually cut it back to 400 square feet in raised beds following something of the style used by Jon Jeavons in his bio-intensive methods. The 9 raised beds were much more manageable and user friendly than our 3 original garden plots. Each of the 9 became a micro-garden that was easily maintained without the use of a noisy tiller. They also made it a lot easier to practice crop rotation and successive plantings. Those 400 square feet kept us in fresh seasonal garden produce before the honeybee die-off.

What happened to our wild honeybees?

We are convinced that the honeybee die-off is related to the introduction of neonicotinoid based pesticides sprayed on the surrounding agricultural fields. Those are some really bad players when you read up on them. We talked about putting in a hive or two to help with our pollinating but decided against it. Our bees would also visit those nearby fields and end up dead.

More than that?

Very few people ever accepted our invitation to come pick. Even though the picking was free of charge.

It seems most folks these days don’t want to be bothered by this sort of simple pleasure. We would leave the extra to decompose in the garden where it returned its health to the soil to help feed the next crop that would feed us.

The physical dimension of growing food crops is an integral aspect of this business called self-reliance.

One of the aspects of gardening in this mild winter climate is that it is possible to have something growing in the garden year-round. This is a lower-coast perk that we remind ourselves of when the dense humidity and searing heat of summer set in. We do get an occasional winter blast that is cold enough to kill cool weather loving plants. We had one of those blasts a couple weeks back that put an end to our lettuce and burned the tops off our carrots. The collards stood up to it though.

There is more to this integral aspect than the physical dimension.

A lot more.

Our gardens satisfy more than our physical beings. Delving into this more might seem too foofoo or metaphysical for a lot of folks. 

So we’ll just mention the more and leave it at that.

Nature's First Invitation

Make a personal investment in the woods.

It doesn’t have to be a vast tract of woods.

You don’t have to move to the woods to experience it.

We must admit, however, that moving to the woods suits our personal dispositions much better than the other modes of living we’ve known. It would be extremely difficult for us to return to what we often referred to as living in the ruburbs.

Ruburbs?

The area just out past the suburbs full of lookalike houses.

The area that was once, in my memory, the rural farmlands separated by overgrown fencerows and large woodlots where I wandered for miles around with a well-worn hand-me-down .22 single shot. The property owners didn’t mind. It was a way of life for us. That way of life is sadly gone. That area is gone. Replaced now with a hodgepodge of small acreages with huge houses and lawns.

Any woodlot will do.

You don’t have to own it.

You just need to be able to get on it.

Preferably with the owner’s permission if the woodlot is privately owned. There’s also Municipal, State, and Federal lands that offer opportunities for folks to invest themselves. These latter three may very well have an assortment of restrictions that users need to be aware of and pay attention to. Making fires and messing with the habitat can, for good reasons, be sticky issues. Respect the restrictions.

Every woodlot, even a small one on the edge of town, has something to offer. Even if it is only for educational and photographic purposes. Especially when the woodlot has been left undisturbed as a natural area long enough that the natural elements of nature have had an opportunity to prevail against the ravages of human progress. That’s the way it is with nature.

Nature, given the opportunity, will reclaim itself from the effects of the dozer, excavator, and plow. It’s amazing how that works.

Use the natural world but don’t abuse it. Draw from it without devastating it. Learn to co-exist with nature rather than striving to conquer it.

I think, at this stage of human development, that this is probably one of the hardest lessons that any of us humans can learn. The reality that the natural world is an ally to be cared for can’t be overplayed or overstated. The natural world, after all, has supplied human beings with all the essentials for life on every continent for the entire existence of humanity.

So much of life today involves constant hustle and bustle … hurry up and get it done … day in and day out. That pace has a way of following us when we exit the concrete sidewalks and paved streets and wander into the woods. We go into the woods in a hurry. We move around in the woods in a hurry. Then we leave the woods in a hurry to go back to the hurry that we went to the woods to escape.

We, as a result of hurrying, miss a lot. There is a lot that we fail to observe. There is a lot that we fail to experience. We miss and fail that lot because nature’s first invitation was left unanswered.

Nature’s first invitation?

It is something that seems unnatural and unproductive to us at first. Once we get onto it … once we realize that it is perfectly natural … once we tune ourselves to its wavelength … it’s hard to turn the dial to any other station.

Slow down.