Filling The Store Cupboard And Not The Freezer

 I am so glad we grow and raise most of our food, I do feel there is a shift taking place more and more people are taking an interest in growing there own and learning how to preserve and store food.

storing your harvests is an important part of Self Sufficiency, there is no point in putting all that time and effort into growing and it is a lot of time and effort, then letting it spoil or you give it away then have to buy in. 

I got into preserving food many many years ago and had lots of fails and disasters while learning, the biggest being with freezing, oh that is such a minefield area get it wrong your food is spoiled, power goes off, your food is spoiled, the door is left open food is spoiled, bags get squashed and torn, containers become brittle and break, then there is freezer burn, labels coming off, leaving you to play guess what it is ?

Another issue with freezing food that is becoming important, it costs you every day to keep that food, preserved, Freezers cost money to run and electricity costs are rising and very unstable, If you produce your own power and you do not have to rely on the nation grid, you are going to be more conservative over what you freeze and how many freezers you run.

We have too many freezers, I am ashamed to say we have 6, four large chest freezers  one small chest freezers and a tall upright,right let me put all these freezers into perspective. I am not a freezer hoarder promise.

We raise Buffalo for meat, we keep about half a carcass for ourselves, we also raise goat meat, pork, lamb and chicken. All this meat takes space for storage and the freezer is a convenient easy space to store. 

I want to reduce our six freezers down to 4, one of the large freezers is old and uneconomical to run, same goes for the tall upright freezer, it was one of the first new electrical appliances we bought together. Even though they work fine, there energy rating will be off the scale.

I am now making more of an effort to use other methods of preserving, clear those freezers down reduce our energy consumption.

I am ramping up with Canning

 

Deyhdrating

Pickling

 Curing

Bottling

Smoking

Juicing

I have started uploading videos on what I have started with,

Canning Tomato Soup

Curing Goat Hams

There is a link on the top right of this page that takes you to my You Tube Channel, or you can search it same name as my blog, hit subscribe and you will not miss any of my future videos.
 

 

 

New Addition to the Family

 

Meet Poppy

She has just joined our family, ex breeder from Many Tears.

It has been a year since we lost our beloved Tess also an ex breeder from Many Tears who was deaf and blind.

Poppy 5 years old and blind, we are hoping with treatment she can regain some sight.

Her resemblance to Tess is uncanny, we are now at the stage we’re we felt we are ready to do it all again.

Poppy has never lived in a house and she is finding lots of things scary but given time she will settle.

She has a whole new world to discover and together with Paige and Mia she will have lots of adventures 

Just Play Nicely Please.

 This post should have been put up a week ago, but I was delayed because my I pad would not play ball with blogger, its been happening more and more, I have now decided to go back to using my laptop but of course I then have to move photos off phone and I pad to laptop and none of them wanted to play nicely together. 

Then to top it off this week I had health issues not going into details but it made doing anything very difficult and uncomfortable.

enough of my health I am battling through it and getting or trying to get back to normal.

We got round to  having the two weather goats slaughtered, and got a great lot of meat, we don't normal keep them on to this age but its been a challenging year and time run away with us, but we needed to press on as we don't want to be housing and feeding animals over winter that we should no longer have

following on from the success of lamb bacon earlier in the year, I did a load of goat meat bacon 6lbs of it

it has been some the most tasty I have tried, short video above of it being cooked, hear that sizzle. There is a full video of the whole process over on my Youtube channel, link up on the top right corner. 

We are also making some Country Hams with two of the legs, video to follow soon, and I smoked the bones to make into stock.

I did manage to collect a load of Elderberries and turn them into a syrup.

and I was gifted a lovely lot of Rosehips

 

They have gone into the freezer until I have a spare moment to turn them into syrup.

I have been clearing bits of space in the freezer too, making room for goat meat.

all the packets of bacon bits got canned up.

along with some of the Buffalo meat.

I will be uploading a new Vlog tonight on YouTube I have to do it overnight as our connection is not the best, 

It would be great if you could subscribe to my channel as lots of stuff gets uploaded there that perhaps doesn't get mentioned here.