Last Week, in photos.

Hi ho, to the garden we go…a canning we will go! If I only knew how to add musical notes to the post… Oh yes, and thankfully and giving thanks to the Lord, our garden has been a magical menagerie of clover, weeds, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, green beans, squashes of all sorts, cucumbers, potatoes…and a host of other wonderful vegetables this year. Now that the garden is producing full swing, we’ve pulled out both canners, the boiling water bath cookers, jars, you name it. My counter tops are a delightful mess of jars and completed canning projects.

I just finished canning 14 quarts of pickle relish, these, and there are more than likely double this amount of tomatoes waiting in the refrigerator to be made into salsa and tomato sauce.

There’s nothing better than growing and preserving your own food. There’s no greater sense of accomplishment and pride than seeing a pantry full of your home canned food. I follow the USDA site and receive notices of recalls and notices from multiple food processing companies to pass along to 2 yahoo groups I own. We are so thankful that we’ve chosen our self sufficient lifestyle, raising our own meat, growing and canning our own vegetables and fruit. We support our local farmers, our friends who have roadside stands, local farmer’s markets. We know that their standards of farming equal ours and, quite honestly, when we purchase fresh, we purchase from them. I know that our garden is raised organically, no chemicals, no GMO products, nothing but a lot of hard work, fresh compost from our own farm, and big, juicy produce in return.

I won’t say that canning is easy. In fact, at times, it’s far from it as you pick fresh food from your garden, prepare and package it for the canner. Sometimes it’s tedious, sometimes one’s back and fingers ache from the preparation process. But, I can think of at least a half dozen or more positive notes to canning one’s own bounty. Think of the benefits.

Benefits you say? Absolutely!! We advocate “grow your own” and “DIY”. Why?

1. You know what is in that home canned food. You process food safely. Do mass merchandisers do this? Most likely not, considering the number of recalls that are posted weekly.

2. You know how it’s been handled and processed. No one’s hands have touched the contents of the food other than yours.

3. Lower your food bills. Have you noticed the rising cost of fresh food and meat in the grocery stores? It’s outrageously high and will only increase in price as time goes on. We’ve not purchased meat in almost a year. I was shocked at the sticker price of simple, cheap 70/30 ground beef at being close to $4.00/lb. When did that happen? 98 cents for a can of asparagus? I think not!!

4. It provides a cushion against store outages, short paychecks or no paychecks, Create your own stockpile for “in case of” and sleep better knowing that your family will be fed if times are rough.

5. You can be assured of the food quality and taste. Canned properly, home canned is much healthier, maintains it’s fresh taste and nutritional value.

6. For many, canning and preserving one’s own food is a necessity. In remote areas, access to grocery stores is not always an easy task and at times, not do-able at all.

7. A sense of pride. You grew it, you processed it, you eat it! 

8. Gifting and sharing. Nothing says love more, than sharing a jar of homemade jam and a loaf of fresh baked bread from your oven.

9. It provides you with a link to the past. Our grandmothers and mothers most likely preserved their excess. I can remember playing store in my grandmother’s root cellar, picking and choosing mentally, which food I was going to buy for that day. Granted, I didn’t know what everything was, but the colors were certainly pretty lined up on her shelves. My mother didn’t can, other than to make our winter batch or three of jams or jellies, but she stored food in the freezer. I have reverted to my grandmother’s lifestyle on her farm, and every time I open the pressure canner and remove those hot, boiling mason jars, I wonder if she’s smiling down from heaven at me. Somehow, I think she is.

    this is my dad and I, Grandma and Grandpa

Oh my! It seems like forever since I’ve written on my blog. For that, I need to apologize to all of you. It’s been a whirlwind of doctors’ visits for myself and for my husband, medical procedure after medical procedure, and when one feels like a living pincushion, there’s no energy or will to write much without sounding whiney and complaining. Rather than do that, I’d rather not write at all.

I’ve had so many issues with pain that couldn’t be resolved, couldn’t be pinpointed to a certain causative factor, not in one specific spot, that it made my physicians and consulting physicians wrinkle their foreheads in puzzlement. I finally decided that it HAD to be my spine. After all, I am a retired RN and I just knew it was from the bulges and herniations in my spine, all the way from my cervical spine down to the L-S spine (my tailbone). So, in my infinite wisdom, I visited a neurosurgeon with the admonition “please, just fix it”. He took such excellent care of my husband and I knew he would take just as good of care of me. I trusted him, liked his mannerisms, the way he treated his patients, the level of his skill. After running umpteen tests, he concluded that the pain might have some basis as thought to emanate from the spine, but that it was not the root cause of my problems. He, instead, sent me to a rheumatologist. My first thought was “why?”, and he told me that he thought it was torticollis or possibly fibromyalgia. Torticollis, I might understand because my shoulder muscles were tight as drum strings. But, fibromyalgia, no, I don’t think so. The rheumatologist spent close to an hour examining me, asking questions, had me fill out a questionnaire, and did indeed, come up with the definitive diagnosis of fibromyalgia. After her explanation of what fibro is, how it affects the body, my several year long history of certain ailments and what-have-you, it is indeed fibro. Crud!!! (and double crud to boot!)

I knew a little about this, having had worked with another nurse 14 years ago who also had fibro. I didn’t understand the logistics of it, empathized with her pain and lack of energy, did as much as I could to help her with her patients as well as mine, but I just didn’t understand what it truly was. This is going to mean a lifestyle change for me and as I learn more, I want to focus on teaching others too. it’s a little known about condition, experimental medication regimens to help with the pain and the root cause of the pain, and learning more about energy saving work habits and dietary needs. As much as I wish someone could and would wave a magic wand over my head, and those of others who deal with this on a day-to-day basis, it can’t be fixed, it can’t be cured. Live with it girl…and that I shall do, only in a positive way.