Homestead Pantry Tour | Self-Sufficiency and Food Storage

[Music] [Music] i'm becky from the seasonal homestead if you're new here welcome i thought i would tell a little bit about myself before i hop right into the pantry tour because i feel like that explains why our family does what we do and why we put up so much food several years ago i had a lot of health problems and i got medical help but that help didn't actually help me get better so i turned to my food as a source of healing and over the course of a year i was able to slowly get better so what i did that year was i expanded our garden i grew as much food as i could myself and the other thing that i did is i cooked as many foods as i could from scratch i got so addictive to gardening and putting up my own food and all those things because it made me feel so good so the next year after that i set a goal to grow 100 of the vegetables that our family of six eat from our backyard garden and our garden at the time was 5 000 square feet and so i learned a lot that first year we made it nine months without going to the store for vegetables one of the things i learned was that you can't survive on canned food alone in order to have enough food for the year we have our canned food storage we have our dehydrated food storage i also have two freezers and we have some ferments in that i keep in my fridge i have one in here that's still fermenting and then i also have a really good amount of fresh vegetables that are still in my garden i am in us zone 6b and we have a mild enough winter that i am able to keep a lot of things in my garden when i've shared my pantry on instagram before usually i get several commonly asked questions and i want to address all those questions but i'm going to do that at the end of this video so i'm going to make a note below in the show notes if you want to hop right there if you have questions i'm going to answer all those questions at the very end of the video now that we have that explained let's get started with the pantry tour all right i'm going to start from top to bottom so here at the top these are pumpkins and they are long island cheese is the variety up next over here i have some black beans and then after that i have barbecue sauce i think these three rolls are all barbecue sauce and then ketchup got a couple rows of those and then right here i have a variety of jams i have grape i think i have strawberry a few strawberries in the back this is blackberry and then this one is peach black beans i couldn't fit all of them up here so i put more down here then these are all apple butter these are cranberry sauce and these are a little bit darker because i made those with coconut sugar and i won't do that again because it doesn't taste as good these are more cranberry sauce but this one's done with honey and maple syrup and they taste much better then i have pickled banana peppers and this is some relish and then some dill pickles from this year here we have salsa salsa salsa all the way down to here we eat a lot of salsa and for my canned stuff i am we're eating from this year-round so this is i've made a lot more than this and we've already gone through a lot of it but then we have pizza sauce is next all the way over to here so this one right here is cajun cowpea soup it's a little bit of a spicy soup and it uses a lot of the cow peas that i grew this year it also has meat and vegetables that i grew so this one was pressure canned of course but it's nice to have a couple of these for like a quick meal i don't do a lot of pre-made soups like this but i have a few of those on hand for when we're really busy then right here i have chicken broth right here vegetable broth this is also vegetable broth i just have a variety of sizes for whatever i'm making and then right here i have beef broth so down here i have applesauce and these are all peaches canned in a really light syrup down here at the bottom i have sweet potatoes i have two crates full and down here i have even more this year was my best year ever for sweet potatoes and we grew 220 pounds over here i have regular white potatoes actually grew a variety of types but i'm going to pull this out here but in room temperature these sprout really easily so we use up our regular potatoes pretty quickly so that they don't go bad and then for the rest of the year we'll just eat from the sweet potatoes because they'll last us until at least june alright up next we have winter squash this is butternut squash and then over here i have some onions and these are both storage types that's why they are lasting for a long time over here i have garlic this is a hard neck which is why it's tied together and not braided this one is called music and i'll show this one down here while i'm on the garlic this is a soft neck these you can braid and i don't remember what type they are but that's okay okay up next i have tomato sauce and we don't use too much of this because we already have a lot of seasoned pizza sauce so i only have a couple jars of those then we have whole kernel corn over here i have grape juice more applesauce and then over here i have a variety of beans that i didn't can yet these are just black beans these are more of those cow peas that i talked about before i can these in the soup i'll probably be saving these for seed and then some kidney beads that i'm going to save for seed back there i have some herbs that are dried down here this is i didn't label this but these are grape fruit leathers the kids really love these i just dehydrate them and over here these are preserved lemons these are still kind of fermenting and being preserved so that's why they're not in the fridge yet in the back there i have some peppers this is dried basil and oh there's more beans back there and then over here these are my dried peppers i just cut them into slices and i dry them like that because they rehydrate a lot easier that way i also have some sliced dried tomatoes back there and over here we have more sliced dried tomatoes and then i have some tomatoes that i just can whole and these are all canned whole and then these ones down here these are all diced so they're really easy to add to like soup or chili okay down here these are all dried apple slices i like to do these half gallon jars because they fit more and i can fit about 10 apples in a jar in dried form so the nice thing about dehydrated food is that you can take a lot of food and condense it into a small area so if you have a small space the dehydrated food will work really well for storing a lot of food i think i said food a lot in that sentence i have a lot of food all right so next these are pumpkin seeds also known as pepitas these are the green type and you have to grow a certain type of pumpkin called a naked seed pumpkin to get these green ones without the hull so i have several of these in jars and then lemon balm back here i have some those are dried blueberries i have more herbs and things back there this one's peppermint and i have some dried squash these are dried green peppers and then it looks like i have more dried squash back there this is just all the varieties of dried foods these are dried leeks i've actually had these for more than a year and they're still good which is another benefit of dried food is they keep for a really long time and i actually for these i don't even have an oxygen absorber in there which takes out the oxygen if i'm storing for less than a year i just put the lid on and they usually last but if you're storing for longer than that an oxygen absorber will help it to last longer so these are whole peppers and then i have lemon balm back here looks like more leeks and that's about it for the dried foods alright so we're right at the end here this box is just filled with more butternut squash i have a lot of that i think i had over 150 pounds this year and then the sweet potatoes as i mentioned before and over here there's no more canned food over here but i have a couple more little squash these are called honey nut i think they were supposed to get a little bit bigger but that's just the way they turn out and then i have more pumpkins and then i just keep some extra jars here especially after this year with the jar shortage we really wanted to make sure that we had stocked up and then up there this is just where i keep my seeds question number one why do your jars have no rings okay i'm gonna get one okay so you'll notice my jars they do not have the screw top ring that goes on the top when i can my food i do put the screw top ring on i can the food you wait 24 hours and then i take my lids off do you have to take your lids off no you don't have to take your lids off but i do choose to because one thing that can happen is it can form a false seal so you may think your food is properly canned if that ring is holding the lid on but it's not usually the lids on these have a little uh pop thing where you can tell if there's air in there but sometimes that'll just happen as your jar is setting on your shelf that is really unusual but i've heard it can happen so i think it's sealed and then sits on your shelf and it starts to because of the air in there it can start to ferment and when things ferment it starts to produce gas in there and eventually the jar would explode the other thing is sometimes when you're canning food can get stuck underneath this underneath the ring it's not very likely that food siphons out and gets stuck under there but it has happened to me on occasion i like to wipe it off and make sure that there's no mold or anything growing underneath the next question is what are those white and black plastic caps on some of your jars so here is one of the white cap jars i have this on my dehydrated food and what it is is it's not meant for canning so i don't use these plastic caps for canning where i do use them is here on my dehydrated food i don't need a canning lid and a screw ring top just having it in one piece and reusable is really nice for me so that's what these are and how i use them i also have black ones that are the ball brand okay question number three aren't you worried about an earthquake and all your jars smashing to the ground i don't see a lip on the shelves or anything to hold them in okay i live in an area where earthquakes are not a common occurrence and so for me i'm willing to take that risk and not have my jar strapped into the wall for me it's more of a headache to have something there than to have something not there and it's actually i feel it's more likely for my kids to come in and grab a jar and have it end up crashing to the ground because i have this barrier there will i have it like that forever maybe maybe not in our new house i plan on putting a small lip at the top of at the front of the shelves possibly that's a possibility but i've heard people mention to me you can just put like a bungee cord over the front and to me that's just not very practical and it's just much more likely that my jars are going to fall that way than from an actual earthquake so i personally i choose not to do that and i'm willing to take that risk the next question is what is the temperature of your pantry and is it in a basement no it is not in a basement in years past my pantry was in our walkout basement and i missed that so much it was 55 degrees almost year-round unheated basement and it was a perfect temperature for storing some of the butternut squash and for storing the sweet potatoes where we are now we are renting and this is a one-story house it this room is just room temperature which is about 65 degrees fahrenheit i've had a lot of these vegetables in here for almost three or four months already and they're still good i think there is a big misconception out there that if you don't have a root cellar and you don't have a basement you can't store food and that is just not true will food store for longer in a root cellar in a basement where it's more ideal conditions absolutely it will store longer there i'm not sure how long this is going to last this is just going to be experimental but so far i've been really happy with how long the squash has lasted even my onions have lasted quite a long time so that is all for the tour thank you so much for your time and watching this i hope you found it beneficial and helpful for you and you are inspired to go do your own homestead pantry it's been a lot of fun always a little bit tired by the end of the year but after every winter i always think it's so worth it so good luck and we'll see you on the next video [Music] you

Channel: The Seasonal Homestead

Views: 1,187,403

Rating: 4.9534817 out of 5

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Id: olk8al-QQ2g

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/apatheticjester]

What I don't get about this stuff is how do you rotate it, do you just never eat fresh food and work through the inventory?

[u/[deleted]]

Good that they're self sufficient. But that's a lot of sugar and salt in nearly everything.