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I harvested about 15 pounds of organic carrots yesterday out of my kitchen garden. My kitchen garden is a large raised bed outside, right next to my — yes, you guessed it — kitchen! By Golly, Ned, you just won a free copy of my limited edition Guide To Parallel Universe Travel For Less.

Carrots store very well in the fridge, but I will slice and freeze about 9 pounds of these carrots for stews and soups and roasts this winter. I have carrots growing in my main garden in amongst my tomatoes and the end of this month I will sow my fall crop of carrots. My daughter will eat Mom’s fresh garden carrots raw but not “store ones”.

I harvested more calendula yesterday and hung the flowers to dry. We ate fresh green beans with our dinner.  There is quite a measure of assurance for me to grow some of our own food. Not to mention that it tastes superior to anything you can buy in a grocery store.

My daughter and I then canned 10 jars of blueberry jam. This jam cost me 6$ in jars, $2.50 in Reduced Sugar Pectin, $4.50 in fresh blueberries and about .30 cents in sugar. For $13.30 we made $30 (at least) in jam. Next year, we will have the jars and hopefully, the blueberries in our berry patch will fruit better.

Canning jam with my 11 year old was a lot of fun. She pushed the pulse button on the food processor to chop (not puree) the blueberries, she measured precisely — remember canning is chemistry — she poured the sugar quickly into the blueberry jam in its rolling boil — and her most favorite, she ladled the ready jam into the funnel on the jar. She got very good at knowing how much to ladle in to get the right headspace. I did all the hot dangerous activities with the hot jars and boiling water. We have a lid lifter — a green plastic stick with a magnet on one end — and this fascinated her to no end. She also enjoyed filling out the pretty labels and wants to be the one who sticks the labels on the jars.

It is much cheaper to entertain children then we give them credit for. And they enjoy being productive and contributing to the family’s well-being.  Canning teaches math, chemistry, language arts, domestic arts, fundamental business principles and how to be self-sufficient.  And it is not as time consuming as you might think, we canned the blueberry jam in about one hour.

This week I took my second class in home preservation. Not the kind of home preservation where you storm into the bank and make them stop all the foreclosures in your neighborhood so that your own property value doesn’t fall into the black abyss of no return.

Rather, the class covered how to can fruits and tomatoes in a hot water bath and the week before was how to can jams/jellies and how to freeze vegetables and fruits. Why take these classes?

1. It may be the end of the world and I’m gonna want some fruit.
2. It is kinda stupid to grow food and throw away what you can’t eat. Like investing in the stock market.
3. You never know what they really put in those cans you buy at the grocery store, especially anything from China.

A long time ago, I canned some strawberry jam. Otherwise, I have mostly frozen my garden produce or stored it. Last summer I tried to make refrigerator pickles that were put in jars, but stored in the fridge. These jars of pickles became fizzing stink bombs, needless to say, no pickles for us.

It is not that hard to make your own jams/jellies and can your own tomatoes and fruits. There is also pectin now for freezer jam and last weekend, I made 5 jars of blueberry freezer jam. It is much cheaper to make your own jam.  Even if you have to buy the fruit. For instance, I needed 5 cups of crushed blueberries, the pectin, and the fancy twist-on-caps freezer jars. I spent 8.69$ to make 15$ worth of jam and next year, I will not need to buy jars again. Hopefully, if the bees ever make a comeback, I will grow enough blueberries again to produce jam. It’s not looking good this year for blueberries here.

Our teacher shared many enlightened stories in case we were mentally impaired. For instance, canning in a hot water bath is never done in the bathroom. The bathtub is not where you work at. What a revelation! We also learned not to use Alzheimer inflicting aluminum pans and instruments when canning tomatoes after we did so in our hands-on classroom. I mean she actually made us use an aluminum pan to make salsa in. I could feel the aluminum robbing my capacity to remember what I was learning as I breathed in the salsa fumes cooking in the pan.

I am going to work on adding to my horde soon. Apricot jam. Blueberry Jam. Peaches. Pears. Tomatoes. Canned to store on a shelf. Hopefully, raspberry jam from my patch, but I’m worried about not seeing a lot of fruit.

Do you ever wonder if there is some kind of mass conspiracy to prevent us from being able to grow our own food? I mean, what is it with the weather? I truly have no idea what will grow in my garden this year because of this freaky weather. And how about GMO seeds- seeds that grow produce that have sterile seeds and cannot grow without being sprayed with cancer inducing pesticides? And what has happened to our bees? No bees, no pollinization, no fruit/vegetables.

When you work your tush off planting non GMO seeds and hoeing and weeding and siccing the chickens on the slugs and snails that are taking over the world and spraying NEEM oil and picking the bugs off by hand and there is not much food produced as a result, there is something going on. Don’t you think?

I figure if the aliens invade, or if they declare Martial Law, or if hyper-inflation brings out the wheelbarrows to haul our dollars in, my family and I can hide in the basement and eat jam out of the jar.