/diy/ - Do It Yourself

This thread is relevant to my interest.

My garden is rather small. Even though it fills my vegetable needs throughout the summer, only a small surplus is canned for the winter. I shall dump some pictures this evening, when I have more time, should this thread remain alive long enough.

The season just ended here, with first frost only 2 weeks ago. I did spend a lot of time in the garden the last few weeks though. I mostly prepared my garden and soil for the winter and next year, since I like to get a early start and the temperatures now are still more agreeable than they will be in February. Tilled under compost and ripened manure, covered perennial plant with gardeningcloth, lots of mulching, pruning fruit tree's, ..
I also sort my seeds (& harvest and preserve this season's ones) and do some limited planning for next year. Also have been looking into keeping some bee's, but it turns out to be very heavy regulated to a point that it is discouraging.

Pic related; doing some 'poopscoping' (cow's stablemanure).

This thread is relevant to my interest.

My garden is rather small. Even though it fills my vegetable needs throughout the summer, only a small surplus is canned for the winter. I shall dump some pictures this evening, when I have more time, should this thread remain alive long enough.

The season just ended here, with first frost only 2 weeks ago. I did spend a lot of time in the garden the last few weeks though. I mostly prepared my garden and soil for the winter and next year, since I like to get a early start and the temperatures now are still more agreeable than they will be in February. Tilled under compost and ripened manure, covered perennial plants with gardeningcloth, lots of mulching, pruning fruit tree's, ..
I also sort my seeds (& harvest and preserve this season's ones) and do some limited planning for next year. Also have been looking into keeping some bee's, but it turns out to be very heavy regulated to a point that it is discouraging.

Pic related; doing some 'poopscoping' (cow's stablemanure).

where do you get all those cans op?

and what is the minimum area required, if utilized perfectly, to sustain a single person from your experience?

(area could be inside or outside, so two answers technically)

i just had to torrent that also

>>325366
jars i mean*

>>325366
Local stores sell them. I also happened to work for someone that had bought a house and needed it cleaned out. The cellar had 400 quart jars and he gave them all to me. Although, I had a hell of a time pouring out 40-50 year old canned food from them. It almost doubled my jar collection. This year I had to buy about 200ish more.

>and what is the minimum area required, if utilized perfectly, to sustain a single person from your experience?

Probably less than 1 acre. I'm on 3 acres for gardening and I'm not even utilizing a full acre for my gardens. This is for 2 people too. With a large greenhouse for winter crops you could completely stop buying store food if you went vegetarian. It really depends on what you are growing and the methods you are using to do it.

Like if you use an intensive square foot gardening method, using companion planting, with all vertical gardening then you'll get the highest yields. Horse manure is the secret!

>>325362
I've been using yard clippings, sand, and horse manure on my gardens. I have heavy clay soil, hence the sand is needed.

>>325415
That 40-50 year old food might have still been good. I hope you put in in the composter at least.

>>325427
No, it was horrifically rotten. The cellar was moist and most of the lids had rusted through. It was all dumped in a hole in the yard. I didn't transport them to my place until after they were dumped. Even the stuff with intact lids was indiscernible as to what it used to be. There was a jar of green beans that as still sealed, but when I picked it up the beans started disintegrating into a silt inside the jar.

>>325432
i thought canned (jarred? still called canned?) shit lasts forever? i seem to remember a youtube video of an old man opening a jar of venison, said it was like 10 years old and tasted like it was canned yesterday.

I'm slowly expanding my garden as well, although it's extremely expencive because I have to put gopher wire down everywhere and build the boxes extra high so the little fuckers dont just climb into the box. Are there any delicious plants the gophers wont attack? It would be great if i could just plant stuff and not have it eatten. Removing the gophers isnt really possible, for every one i kill 10 more take its place. They are legion.

>>325459
aren't their frequency emitting devices that deter gophers?

>>325459
We used to have a pretty bad gopher problem back when I lived with my parents. From what I recall, marigolds and wormwood are both supposed to repel gophers, but I'm not sure how true that it. Gassing or flooding the holes never seemed to work very well either (we only ever gassed with carbon monoxide, my father didn't want me to use hydrogen cyanide -- perhaps for good reason). We used gopher traps like:

http://www.drillspot.com/products/37955/woodstream_0610_6_victor_gopher_trap

and that's pretty much what we and the neighbors all used. It eventually worked, but if one house isn't trying to control them, then that becomes a sort of reservoir and they never go away. There are a few snakes known to go after gophers, maybe you can relocate one or two.

Yeah Ive done traps, flooding, gum, and so on. But nobody else bothers to control their gophers so its an unending battle. I have dogs and cats that both kill gophers as well. I'll try wormwood. Time to learn how to brew absinthe I guess.

>>325455
10 years is not 40-50 years. Nothing lasts forever.

>>325455
What you see in apocalyptic movies is a lie. 10 years would be the absolute max for canned food.

>>325455

nothing lasts forever. If properly prepared, packed and stored, it can last a fairly long time. But different foods have different shelf lives. I imagine perfectly preserved meat would last the longest, but vegetables are already soft and decomposing and start to become one with their canning juices the moment they enter the can. The most obvious example of this would be wine. Properly stored Wine can never truly goes bad, but it doesn't stay wine. There are chemical processes going on inside the bottle, and it becomes vinegar. This is not the same as bacterial rot, but it is still a process that renders the food inedible. I imagine op could have drank the disintegrated beans with no ill health effects, but it would have been nasty with little nutritional value.

>10 years would be the absolute max for canned food.

My grandparents are still eatting smoked salmon that we canned from 199x.... my great grandfather use to tell me stories about how some of the rations handed out in ww2 were from ww1.

>>325499
>ww2 were from ww1.
must have been horrible

anyone have any advice on starting up peppers? i love peppers and i think they would be great for me to grow since i buy so many of them.

>>325496
The term you are looking for is "oxidation". There is oxygen in the canned food and in the wine which breaks it down. For wine that will turn it into acetic acid (vinegar).

>>325499
That's terrible.

To those reading this thread who grow > 0.5 acres of garden every year:

I am curious about your living situation. Where, roughly speaking, do you live? Do city utilities reach your house? Do you have a full time job? How many hours of work does it take for you to run your garden?

Just curious. We had a single 20' x 20' plot when I was atalented /diy/erthat we grew and ate from every year (obviously as a minor hobby) but I haven't had a garden since moving to the city.

>>325563
> Where, roughly speaking, do you live?

Rural B.F.E.

>Do city utilities reach your house?

lol No.

>Do you have a full time job?

Nope, but I could if I wanted to. Gardening takes very little actual work when you juxtapose it with a 9-5/40hr work week.

>How many hours of work does it take for you to run your garden?

It depends on many factors between people, tools, and methods. For me I do a lot of work at the beginning of the season and at the end. The rest of the time is spent doing other things. I'd say that out of the entire year this season, I've worked about 100 hours max for about 800lbs of produce (8lbs of food per hour it seems). That's from planting to canning. There's tons I could have done to work less and had more crops and higher yields. I even lost a great deal to frost, deer, racoons, and opossums. I didn't get any apples, mulberries, peaches, or plums. I normally get 100lbs plum, 50lbs peaches, 500lbs apples, 50lbs of mulberries.

Vegetable/fruit gardening is really simple and a lazy way to make food. Animal raising for food is a lot more work.

>>325415
>>324499

I have a really sandy soil, hence the need for lots of compost to get a decent 'soil texture'. Without it tends to dry out easily, not to mention the poor nutrient retention.

I also have a small hydroponic setup indoors to keep me occupied during the winter months.

>>325455
>>325499
A lot also depends on what you're calling 'canning'. Many people just boil their jars, cook their vegetables and work with decently cleaned cutlery, which might work fine in many cases. But proper canning should be done with a pressure-cooker at a temperature of about 385K. A lot of fungal spores can survive simple boiling at atmospheric pressure.

>>325496
>>325532
Never ever shall wine in a sealed full bottle become vinegar. There simply isn't enough oxygen available. This, oxidation from ethanol to acetic acid, only happens if a bottle wasn't properly sealed or porous cork of poor quality has been used. Basic knowledge of chemistry.
What may cause deterioration of flavor is the decomposition of tannins, caused by exposure to (uv-)light or fluctuating temperatures.


Pic kinda related; from seed to canned spaghetti sauce.

The steamboat Bertrand was heavily laden with provisions when it set out on the Missouri River in 1865, destined for the gold mining camps in Fort Benton, Mont. The boat snagged and swamped under the weight, sinking to the bottom of the river. It was found a century later, under 30 feet of silt a little north of Omaha, Neb.

Among the canned food items retrieved from the Bertrand in 1968 were brandied peaches, oysters, plum tomatoes, honey, and mixed vegetables. In 1974, chemists at the National Food Processors Association (NFPA) analyzed the products for bacterial contamination and nutrient value. Although the food had lost its fresh smell and appearance, the NFPA chemists detected no microbial growth and determined that the foods were as safe to eat as they had been when canned more than 100 years earlier.

The nutrient values varied depending upon the product and nutrient. NFPA chemists Janet Dudek and Edgar Elkins report that significant amounts of vitamins C and A were lost. But protein levels remained high, and all calcium values "were comparable to today's products."

NFPA chemists also analyzed a 40-year-old can of corn found in the basement of a home in California. Again, the canning process had kept the corn safe from contaminants and from much nutrient loss. In addition, Dudek says, the kernels looked and smelled like recently canned corn.

tl;dr: properly canned stuff will last pretty much forever...

>>325611
>Never ever shall wine in a sealed full bottle become vinegar. There simply isn't enough oxygen available.

Homebrewmen here.

The cork is meant to transfer oxygen into the wine at a set rate for aging purposes. You need to select the proper cork for the type of wine you are bottling.

>>325620
this is a homegrowmen thread not a survivalist thread. canned food only needs to last as long as 2-3 years

>>325638

I was just pointing out that canned goods when properly canned will last longer than the 10 years mentioned earlier in this thread. That includes home canned goods.

Also, just because you only think your canned goods need to last 2-3 years, doesn't mean that everyone else shares your sentiment.

>>325625
Indeed, but never at a rate that enables the formation of acetic acid to a point that the resulting fluid can be called vinegar (4% - about 15%). Simply running the numbers with the appropriate stoichiometric formula's can tell you so.

Cork porous enough to enable this is, as mentioned before, of poor quality and often used to (try to) speed up the aging of cheap wine, most often at the cost of quality. Longevity of the product is not a goal when using this method, and it is not worth the term 'bottling'.


Pic unrelated; another canning vertical from this summer. Has been posted before on /ck

>>325650
>pic

Don't lay jars on their sides like that when canning. You need the headspace to be full of air. When the jar's content heat up it expands. The air in the headspace also expands. The lid's seal then vents out some of this air. After the canning process is done and the jar's contents are cooling off everything starts to shrink again. The air shrinks too and the lid sucks tight to the jar creating an area of low pressure.

When food/liquid matter is touching the lid it can get sucked between the lid and the rim of the jar. When this happens the seal may not be proper. Later this can allow the seal to break and the contents be contaminated. If the jar lid is too tight and no air can escape during the canning process the jar will not properly seal and could break while the internal pressure gets too high. Normally the lid will buckle instead of the jar breaking, but jars do break under these conditions.

So, with water bath or pressure canning you need to have 1/2 an inch of air space and the jar needs to be standing up correctly. You also need to hot pack the food so to remove as much air from it as possible before canning. Otherwise, the food can create foam or float up and cause problems with the seal.

>>325650
All corks are that porous. They are meant to be. Corks that are not that porous are not cork. They are synthetic.

Wines made with grapes are not actually meant to be stored and aged for longer than 20 years. Past that age, they will no longer taste like they were meant to. The only wine on earth you can properly age past 20-25 years is black elderberry wine. Since it is not made with grapes, it is considered a country wine.

Non-country wines that are aged past 20 years are completely pretentious in every sense of the word.

Do not confuse aging wine with storing wine. This is a big mistake in nomenclature. Aging wine is undergoing change. Stored wine is being preserved as long as possible.

The corks you mention are not of poor quality. They are exactly as they need to be. When you age wine in bottles, you use natural corks or glued corks. Once the wine has aged for x amount of time and tastes right you further seal the bottles via bottle wax. This arrests transfer of new oxygen into the bottles. If you do not do this then your bottles of wine will keep sucking in oxygen and will turn to vinegar.

>>325668
Oh, I forgot one more reason why you shouldn't lay the jars on their sides.

As stated, the jars vent out their contents when heated. When food is floating up and touching the lid or is touching the lid while laying on the side, the food itself can be vented out into the canner instead of just air. When this happens there is a real thread of the steam vents getting clogged. The jiggler or pressure valve can become clogged. If this happens, you will not know how much pressure is in the canner and the pressure can continue to build, causing a potentially deadly explosion.

>>325668
>>325678
I am well aware of this, but thanks for pointing it out anyway should any other anons try canning this way.

I bought new jars that turned out to be half an inch to high for the pressure cooker I had at that time. I used two extra jar clamps not in the picture during sterilization to ensure no food would get out of the jar or in the seal. The canned food also already was near boiling when it was put into the jar, so it still created a vacuum afterwards when it had cooled down completely (,even though indeed it would have been a 'stronger' vacuum should air have been allowed to escape the jar).

I was pretty sure about the vacuum beforehand, only about the cleanliness of the seal I had my doubts. Opening one of the few jars i did this way a month later confirmed my hopes for a decent seal. I am confident the others are also sealed well enough to be preserved throughout winter, even though I didn't do it by the book.

>>325688
Regardless, I recommend not posting that pic again. It is how bad methods get perpetuated.

>>325611

oh my god. that picture. that wind block with poles and plastic. why didnt i think of that. it's brilliant. it solves all my problems!

but did you not skin your tomatoes? When I leave the skins in, they become hard over time.

>>325836
I'm not him, but I don't skin my tomatoes either. I only remove the hard part where the stem was. I run all my stuff through the antique food chopper you see being used in this image (I was processing jalapeno peppers in this pic). The food chopper essentially dices up the skins. No one notices them. Larger square areas of skin on the other hand can become a texture problem for some people. Which is why I make sure I use the food chopper.

>>325366
>>325415

nonsense, you can have year round food on 400m2 (or 0.09 acres) for one person. Last season, i grew 100 k of potatoes, ~75k carrots, ~ 10 k of corn, ~50k beans, 30k of spelt, ~50 k tomatoes, ~50k cucumbers and zuchini, around 30 pumpkind, 5k of garlic, 25 k oignons, tens of salads, 15k Jerusalem artichoke, custard marrow, eggplant, spinach, bettes, brussel sprouts, white and green cabbage, cauliflower, strwberries, raspberries, melons and watermelons and a bunch of other stuff,

and it was a really shitty year (not much sun, lots of rain). all that on 300m2 (0.07 acres)

also, don't use greenhouse unless you really have too. stuff grows well in a greenhouse, but you loose à lot of the taste of the food.

>>325836
Blight gained a foothold in my soil and I got little to no harvest last year and the year before. I built it primarily to keep my plants dry when it rains.

We had another wet summer this year but it worked out fine and I had a plentiful harvest, while I hear a lot of fellow gardeners in the area have lost their tomatoes yet again to blight. So I am rather content with how it worked out and it was well worth the €60 it cost. The majority of that money went to some decent corrugated plastic sheeting later on in the season, to give it a bit more structural integrity and make it a bit less unsightly.

>did you not skin your tomatoes?
No, I didn't. Everything gets mixed thoroughly and sieved twice in a later stage of preparation. What remains is a fine puree with no discernible pulp in it. I posted a second vertical with more pictures concerning the preparation in which you can see the sieving(, though yet again some small but important steps have not been photographed).

>>325889
>nonsense

No it isn't. All you read was "Probably less than 1 acre. I'm on 3 acres for gardening and I'm not even utilizing a full acre for my gardens." and then started shitting out stats. You entirely missed the rest of the post like,

>It really depends on what you are growing and the methods you are using to do it.
>Like if you use an intensive square foot gardening method, using companion planting, with all vertical gardening then you'll get the highest yields.

Also, I'm betting you are a fucking liar and don't even have a garden and are making up shit you read online. Give us some pics of your plot. I'm calling you out, bitch.

>>326084

Please stop being a dick in the gardening thread.

>>326108
>no pics to post

Liar confirmed. Sage for troll thread.

>>326084
funny guy, cause as of this year i'm an actual farmer.
sorry no pics cos i don't have a camera or a phone, plus where i live i can't have dsl so only slow internet

again, probably less than 1 acre =/= 0.1 acres

i was using companion planting, but not vertical gardening. i wil also add that i grew everything organically so no chemicals involved.

you on the other hand seem like an enthusiastic amateur who made this thread to smear his newfound knowledge on everyone.

>>326158
>you on the other hand seem like an enthusiastic amateur who made this thread to smear his newfound knowledge on everyone.

That's not the OP. Congrats on getting trolled.

>>326260
thanks

>>325889
>>326084
>>326108
>>326150
>>326158

Aww.. This is why we can't have nice things.
Every gardening thread on /diy seems to end this way. I consider it progress that religious fanboyism towards hydroponics wasn't the reason this time.

>>325889
>>326084
>>326108
>>326150
>>326158

Aww.. This is why we can't have nice things.
Every gardening thread on /diy seems to end this way. I consider it progress that religious fanboyism towards hydroponics wasn't the reason this time.

>>326278
4chan is bipolar because it is anonymous. Once you get past that fact you can learn to ignore the bullshit and not even reply to it of give it any notice at all. Just hide the offending post(s) and move on with the discussion.