Saturday mornings usually mean a big day ahead: lots of cleanup, lots of laundry, some special projects inside, and a couple of big projects outside. I may have to tinker with the cars or swing the ladder up against the house; I will have to make bread and refill the woodpile on the back porch (36 cubic feet of wood for a week’s heat—not bad, I’d say). Saturdays are always busy. Later on maybe I’ll take the kids exploring or settle down for a little reading. But at our house, it’s work in the morning, play in the afternoon. The morning sunshine feeds ambition—I’ve got things to do.

But just now, on my way past the dining room, I see these cold jars basking in the fresh sunshine, and I have to grab for the camera. It’s like music in the light. It’s analgous to our lives, maybe. It’s a homemade life, but it’s as fresh and delicate and real as a piece by Satie.

Of course sometimes we will go through that many jars of canned food in a single week. (Remarkable, isn’t it? Almost as if we had seven children.) At that rate the pantry can fill up pretty fast with washed and empty jars. We tranfer the empty jars back down to the root cellar, but with hundreds of jars to store, that fills up too. So Jess likes to keep the jars circulating. And canned chicken and canned beans are a great first step for a hot supper, too.

Since beans start out hard and chicken starts out raw, you have to pressure can them for a certain amount of time to make sure they’re safe. Jess has the Ball canning book that imparts all those secrets. I know that if you don’t can meat correctly you can get salmonella or other nasties; but as far as I can tell none of us has died yet from eating home-canned meat.

You’ll note the jars of chicken appear about half full. They start out full; when she’s canning, she slices the chicken breasts into strips the long way and packs ‘em in. But they cook down to the quantity shown here. And since we don’t eat a ton of meat, one jar half-full of cooked chicken is plenty for a big supper for all of us, plus the portion I’ll tote to work next day for lunch.

We’ll have to make do with our patchy snow and mud. In the mean time, not to rub it in or anything, we’re grateful to have a root cellar.

I was at the tax man’s the other day and saw his copy of the Wall Street Journal. The front-page, above-the-fold picture was of a couple of folks in a barren supermarket, picking up what they could get of what was left. It was just a few forlorn lemons, as I recall. I hear that back east the weather is so bad, people are burning all their books by Al Gore to keep warm.

In the meantime, we have our own grocery store at home.

This is an old picture of our root cellar. Now it’s so crammed with supplies that we have step up on the shelves and pick our way back like spelunkers to get to the dishwashing soap, say, or the condensed milk, which are on the back shelves. My orders are to go pick up 25 5-gallon buckets next week to store more of the staples up and out of the way. Okay.

It’s a nice feeling. Once our propane tank is refilled, we should have all we need to survive for up to four months should we be cut off from the outside world. Power, hot water, food, popcorn, and everything. Provided nothing breaks that I can’t fix, and my daughters learn to take shorter showers.

Remember the giganto-pumpkin that was hogging up the mud room floor? Jessica attacked it the other day. She sliced it into chunks as big as her hand, boiled the chunks (in three separate pots), skinned ‘em, and gave them to her trusty assistant (me) to mush ‘em up. I did so, because most of the time I can operate the food processor without injuring myself. Then I dumped them into gallon freezer bags. It filled up five of them, and we threw them into our overflowing freezers.

Five gallons! Ah ah ah. (Remember the Count on Sesame Street? That’s how he laughed.) Five! Ah ah ah. That’s a lot of pumpkin pie. And pumpkin cookies, and pumpkin muffins, and I don’t know what all she puts it in. Maybe pumpkin foie gras. She’s quite a cook.

And it’s quite a pumpkin to give us five gallons o’pumpkin mush. Next year we’ll put manure on our own pumpkin plants and hopefully get a pumpkin larger than a softball.

Yes, it’s true; you can freeze milk. We do it every time we buy it, since we go through so much (about four gallons a week) and we’re so far from the grocery store. Local cow’s milk is prohibitively expensive ($4 a gallon!), and we’re not willing to spring for a goat we’d have to milk twice a say (I’m still emotionally damaged from milking cows day and night for three summers as a teenager). No, for now it’s store-bought milk for us, at least until I get the mortgage paid off and can be at home to milk. Better yet, unitl the kids start distance education and THEY can be at home to milk.

Milk jugs can freeze because of those circular doohickeys on the side of the jug. They’re put there, I think, to add some surface stability to the jug; but they’re also made to allow for expansion should the milk freeze. It works like a charm. The gallon jug freezes solid overnight; the contents turn somewhat yellow, and the expansion circle reverses, expanding way out. You can see that here, in a jug I just took out of the freezer. The whole jug bloats up, but it doesn’t burst. It just sits in the freezer till we’re ready for it. We’ve had some milk in the freezer in the root cellar for a couple of weeks. (I’m sure it would keep longer, but we do need our milk. Our Yahoo Granola just doesn’t taste the same with tap water.)

The trick is to get the milk out of the freezer the night before you need it. We put it on the counter to thaw at room temperature (we sit it in a plastic plate to catch the water from condensation), and in about fifteen hours it’s white and liquid again, ready to go.

I don’t know, maybe freezing store milk releases some of its chemisty-set additives they put in at the lab in Jersey City. But if so, it has’t effcted os viri muchh yetta;dlk ggggg

Here we have quite possibly the oddest photograph yet posted on The Self-Reliants. If you can guess what it is in two seconds or less, you win! Time’s up, it’s carrots. I had to stir up these few from their long winter’s nap so I could get a picture. They look curly and squat like most of our home-grown carrots from previous years, but there were some splendid specimens this year too. I wanted to get a shot of some of the behemoths Jessica pulled out of the garden, but they came out of the ground and went into the sawdust lickety-split, before I had a chance to record their monstrosity for the ages. (What’s that, you say? Just photograph them when she takes them out again? Won’t happen. When she pulls them out it will be approximately four minutes before they get hacked up and tossed into soup, and at that time I will still be at my employment, counting the seconds ‘til 5.)

We’ve heard tell that you can actually store carrots in the ground, and pull them up as needed over the winter. In our neck o’ de woods that won’t happen either, since when the snow gets going it will take a backhoe to get down to ground level. We pulled these guys up and now they’re sleeping in the root cellar. But I’m so encouraged at this year’s crop that I’d like to plant twice as much next year. It’s great to have a garden that actually produces. Wait, is that a pun?

Well, this year our garden pumpkins were dinky (again), and I was going to say I didn’t know why– but I think it do. They need feedin’, and we didn’t feed them. All the manure went to the other plants and flowers, and our pumpkins struggled along as best they could.

Enter Jean, an older lady friend of Jessica’s in town, and her spacious garden with its dumptruck load of manure every spring. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another garden as productive as Jean’s, and her friendship with Jessica has certainly borne fruit. As here: This behemoth is the biggest I’ve ever seen outside a county fair. We’ll be putting manure on our pumpkins next year.

As for Halloween this year, we’re far enough out in the sticks that we don’t take the kids trick or treating. (And anyway, anybody lurking in the woods at nighttime around here is liable to get shot.) We’ll be taking them to a Trunk-or-Treat in town. But the kids have all drawn and painted our cantaloupe-sized pumpkins from the garden, and left this guy for Dad. When I get a chance I’ll draw on it, and then after the tooth-rottin’ festivities Jess will wash them all off and can them. That’s a lot of pumpkin for pies and cookies. No sense wasting it for a lopsided Jack-o-lantern.

Here you see Jess piling jars on top of each other because we’re out of shelf space–a good problem to have. And Jess still hasn’t canned her pie apples nor the 75 lbs. of pinto beans she bought the other day, and will can in her spare time (ha!). It’s a good thing to have lots of food in the root cellar.

Anyhoo, here’s a batch of apple cider processing on the wood stove. Jess has two pressure canners and you can’t fit both of them on the stove if you’re also trying to heat up the next batch o’cider. So when Jess was gone one evening I put the cider-heating pot on the wood stove. It worked brilliantly until I shifted the pot and the cider splashed out onto the hot metal, filling our home with the lovely aroma of burning apple juice. And it left baked-on spill marks on the metal which are still there, yuck.

Jess was smarter. She put the canner on the stove, instead of the pot o’cider. The canner has a sealed lid and only contains water, which don’t stink if it’s spilled. The canner starts boiling quicker than it does on the stove. So we’ll be doing this next year. If I can get the charred cider off before then.

It’s a homesteading blog, so you knew that come fall, a lot of the posts would be about canning. And you were right! So last week it was pears, and here they are fresh from the orchard. (We’ve already eaten the plums, or turned them into canned plummy-garlicky sauce we eat with egg rolls). Here’s the big secret Jess learned last week:

You don’t have to peel pears to can ‘em.

Did you feel the ground move under your feet? Is your worldview altered? Is it an entirely new view on life? No? Then you’ve never spent a whole day peeling pear after pear in order to can them. All you do is blanch them for 50 seconds or so, and the skins slide right off. No pears were peeled in the making of this photograph. Jess is excited about this since it cuts down on the amount of time required to can pears (they already have to process for 35 minutes per batch). She has one more box of them to can today, and then it’s on to applesauce again.

You’ll also note the eclectic nature of our pear-jar collection. We are inveterate cheapskates and we need lots of canning jars; so if people offer us jars we take ‘em. It’s canning jars; who cares what they look like, as long as they do their job? Come to think of it, that applies to a lot of things in life.

Canning’s a lot of work now, but on a cold winter’s night there’s nothing better than hot soup, biscuits slathered with butter, and cold canned pears from the root cellar.