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

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