Taking Stock of my Stores: February Edition

It has been months since I added to my food storage.  The canning frenzy began last summer with the arrival of the first fruit of the season.  There was apricot jam and canned peaches to start.  Cherries became wine and later a few boxes of plums transformed into more wine and plum jam.  When the garden started coming into it's own there were pickles and salsa and eventually tomato sauce as well.  In the fall I rounded out my stores with a few jars of applesauce, apple pie filling and a few jars of canned pears and pepper jelly.  Into the freezer I piled in lots of frozen broccoli and green beans and many bags of frozen peppers. I also added fresh garlic, shallots, onions and potatoes to my dry storage before it was all said and done.

Slowly but surely I have been working my way through my stockpile while at the same time enjoying an astonishingly low grocery bill.  Many of my meals are nearly all home grown.  I have potatoes with many of my meals - mostly fried up with onions and garlic for breakfast, but also baked or boiled with my dinner.  The frozen broccoli and green beans make a nice accompaniment for my dinners.  The canned fruits are good when I am craving a sweet snack and the jams and jellies regularly find their way into sandwiches that I take with me for lunch.  The pickles are an anytime crunchy snack and I have found a small market for them with my coworkers.  The handful of jars that I have sold at work make all that time canning them a little more worth my while.  As for meat this year I am still working my way through my half a hog that was butchered last winter, a couple more chickens from my first foray into meat birds and a few random packages of venison that need to be ground up or made into jerky.

Right now my current tally of canned goods looks like this:  Apricot Jam - 7 half pints, Plum Jam - 9 half pints, Pepper Jelly - 7 quarter pints, Canned Peaches - 7 pints, Canned Pears - 6 pints, Applesauce - 5 pints, Apple Pie Filling - 5 pints, Salsa - 24 pints, Pickles - 19 quarts, Tomato Sauce - 14 pints, Chicken Stock - 16 quarts.

In the freezer I have: 3 whole chickens and 8 bags of various chicken parts, 4 bags of pork chops, 3 lbs of Italian sausage, a good sized shoulder roast, a package of ribs, a tenderloin and some pork skirt steak, 1 package of venison steaks, 3 packages of venison stew meat, and 5 packages of venison that need to be ground up.  There are also 21 bags of broccoli, 16 bags of green beans, 4 gallons of peppers, and a quart of frozen pea pods.

In dry storage I have 1.5 lbs of shallots, 24.5 lbs of yellow onions, 4.5 lbs of garlic and 21.5 lbs of potatoes.  There are still 12 bottles of plum wine left plus what is waiting to be bottled in the carboy.

If you want to see what I started with in the fall check out this post: Taking Stock of my Stores

Overall I am pleased with the amount of food that I was able to provide for myself with just my garden and chicken coop.  I still have to buy fruit if I want to can it for my for my stores, but if I can find a piece of land to call my own, that will change.  I still have enough food to last me several more months from the looks of things so I am getting better at estimating how much I need to preserve to last me the year.  I still need to work out having a larger variety of things, but I think what I canned this year was a good start.  My only problem now seems to be working out the storage space for all the jars of home canned goods.

An added benefit of preserving my own food is that I can use the jars over and over again saving me even more money in the long run.  I am finding that canning my own food is a highly cost effective and nutritious endeavor.  I like knowing exactly what goes into my food and where it comes from.  I also like the low waste side of the coin.  I don't have a lot of trash to throw away because all the containers just get washed and reused in the next batch of whatever I need them for.  It also makes storage a little simpler because everything is the same size.  All in all it's a win win - for my own health and for the health of my environment.