Garden Riches

 

After putting the canner and supplies for another season, I thought I would share with you a picture of our canning shelves in the storage room of our basement. As you can see, they are pretty well stocked with preserves for the upcoming year(s). For many of the things I preserve enough for multiple years worth of food because we don't always raise them like beans, squash, cucumbers and such. Other things like tomatoes, fruit, and pickled goods, I fill jars as they become available and I have excess to preserve. We do give away a fair amount of our canned goods to family and close friends as gifts so there is enough for them too. 

It is a bounty of good eating.

It also isn't all of our stash. Upstairs in our walk-in pantry, I have a custom made canning rack that holds around 100 jars. Typically, we store a variety of stuff up on the pantry shelf in no certain order and then replenish it from time to time with stock from the above shelves. Generally as I get a basketful of empty jars, I will bring them down to these shelves and swap them with full jars to take up. On the lids of each jar, I write what it is and the date I preserved so I can use up old stock first. Generally our oldest of any product above is to the right and the newest stuff is to the left. 

By canning season next summer, perhaps half the jars you see above will be empty ones waiting to be filled again and the process repeats itself. This is the system we have developed over the years and it works pretty well. I would like to build one more rack for canning jars to the left of the picture above but in order to do so, I would need to replace our chest freezer that occupies that space currently with an upright freezer. I still might replace our freezer someday but the reality is that as our flock has started leaving the nest, we just won't need as many canned goods anymore and I will eventually have to start downsizing my system. So until then, I will probably just get by with what we have. 

Which still is a lot of good eating!