Jarhead

 

The backstory.

I had just finished up with fitting out our new walk-in pantry when news of Covid in Seattle hit the news. It just hit me that there may be a long period of shut down just like in China occurring here so my wife and I both went out to two different stores that day and stocked up on shelf stable foods. We filled out pantry completely up in one day. As it turned out, it wasn't a week later when our grocery store was nearly emptied by frenzied people stocking up and it would be months before it returned to a fully stocked condition. I was fortunate in that instance though neither of us thought to stock up on toilet paper. Live and learn.

I should have made the connection that with more people stockpiling food, that it might cross over into canning supplies for gardens but I didn't. By the time our garden was producing that year and I decided I needed to get some more jars and lids, they were completely sold out and would remain that way for the rest of the year. I filled every single jar we owned and would have filled up more if I had them. I think it was eight months later in the garden off season when I started seeing jars and lids on the shelves again and so I decided to stock up. They last forever and with an orchard started and more things being grown in our garden all the time, I knew I would eventually use them.

The new jars sat in boxes piled next to my old shelves for another year before I finally decided it was time to do something about it. So I went to my lumber yard to pick up a stack of pine 1"x8"x8' boards only to find out that they only had a handful and every single one was split, shaped like a U or cupped like a rainbow. So I ended up getting a couple 1"x10"x10' boards and a stack of 1"x8"x6' boards. The latter, I didn't know they even carried such an odd length (probably why they were in stock) and they were more efficient to use since my new shelf was going to be three feet wide. The 10" wide boards were overkill and cost me more but saved me another trip at some indeterminate time in the future when they finally restocked their supply. I ripped them down to size and got to work.

Above you see the new canning shelf set into place. The original shelves I built to hold quart or pint jars but we rarely use quart jars anymore. The new one I built for pint jars only. For some reason, by the time I got out to the garage to start building, the height of it grew two inches in my head so it was too tall and I had to "adjust" the height as you can see in the top picture by cutting off the top. But I got it in place and screwed to the wall and unloaded all the boxes of jars. I then empties the other shelves of empty jars and moved them over to the new shelf as well and then organized everything we had so it was all grouped together in kind. 

So our garden season is done for this year and all those new jars will just remain that way until next summer but they are there and I know someday, they will be filled with things that we preserved from our orchard and garden. It is also comforting to know that if another pandemic comes our way, we won't starve for awhile. Messy behinds are a possibility but empty stomachs won't be.