Urban Homesteading - We Canned Tomatoes!

When Co-conspirator Jess called me last week to ask if I wanted to come over and help her can the 800 tons of vegetables she had gathered up from her garden, I was:

1. Relieved - "Canning Vegetables" is pretty much the "Selling Cookies" of Urban Homesteading Merit Badges. Basic, assumed, and passed down from generation to generation with handfuls of anxiety and expectation. I was relieved, because if Jess showed me how to preserve fresh fruits and veg, I could take myself seriously as a Homesteader. I could then move on to all kinds of other old-timey things like making my own cheese and dehydrating tomatoes in the sun...
2. Anxious - Even though I have fond memories of my mom and her sisters and friends steaming up the house with their canning adventures in the summer when I was a kid and none of us ever died, the word BOTULISM kept rolling around in my ears.
3. Nostalgic - for the memories of my mom's huge canning pot, the weird looking canning sieve, and the beautiful Ball jars that held mom's favorite bread-and-butter pickles, stewed tomatoes, and raspberry jams (and later decorated my wedding).
4. Thankful - That Jess knows how to do this stuff, and that she is willing to teach! And also thankful that her neighbor gave her two big buckets of free tomatoes that I got to use, since my garden consists of a big basil plant in the window sill.

So anyway, I said YES, and last night I headed out to Western Springs to can it up with Jess and her friend Jessica. Jessica's mom was kind enough to let us invade her beautiful kitchen for the night (thank God for kitchen islands and counter space!).

We just made very simple crushed tomatoes. Just the 'maters, and a 1/4 tsp of citric acid powder in the bottom of each jar (to maintain consistent acidity. Or something. An extra precaution.) just before you add the hot tomatoes.

This isn't exactly a how-to. I'm definitely not confident enough in my knowledge to instruct anyone yet (remember botulism?) but think of this as an overview of the process. It's not as intimidating as it seems.

First, you have to prep your tomatoes.

Yay for free tomatoes!

Cut off the tough or questionable bits and give em' a quick pulse.

Then simmer them up in a pot.

While your tomatoes are prepping, heat up a CAULDRON canning pot of water:

Big Pot of tomatoes on the left, canning pot of water on the right.

Then take a nap while everything gets good and hot. (Just kidding, don't leave stuff boiling while you nap).

Sterilize your jars! (and your lids) Canning tongs are a must.

Jars taking a hot bath in the canning pot with the support of the jar frame.

Sterilized jars with citric acid powder in the bottom, patiently awaiting some action.

Using a canning funnel to get the tomatoes into the jar with surprisingly little mess.

Ta-da!

Go team!

There are a handful of other steps involved, like poking air bubbles out of the tomato-filled jars, reboiling the filled jars, and clapping with glee when your newly-canned tomatoes start to "PLINK!" as their vacuum seals officially clamp tight.

Note: Jess says that it is very important that newly canned jars REMAIN MOTIONLESS for 24 hours after they are tucked in (covered with a towel). No one she consulted could tell her why this is (our best guess is to give the vacuum seal a full 24 hours to convince itself that it is totally sealed), but in any case, I didn't get to bring my beautiful jars of red goodness home with me last night. Next time I see Jess, I'll get to carry home 11 jars of awesome.

We got started around 7pm and were tucking in the last few jars around 10:20ish. Simple, efficient, and yielded 23 jars. We just couldn't quite eek out the 24th jarful. Oh well. my share of 11 should keep our household in pasta sauce for most of the winter at least (for the cost of $8 worth of jars!).


Go forth and can!

Home Made Laundry Detergent - Jess's Notes!

Last week I wrote a quick summary of Jess and my experience making our own Laundry Detergent from a recipe Jess found on Bonzai Aphrodite. We had a few questions from readers about some of the ingredients, and whether home-made detergent saves money.

Jess has far more experience with the ingredients and the cost analysis than I do, so here's what she had to say:

Washing soda is a product of baking soda - but different and needed! It can be found at hardware stores (usually) or at like independent grocery stores. Our local produce/international foods store carries that as well as Borax. I've seen Borax at Target. I think Wal-mart carries both as well, but I'm not sure since I don't shop there.

Does making detergent yourself save you money, since you have to buy all those ingredients?

I think the savings come into play if you use your ingredients to pull double duty for other cleaning products, then the versatility really stretches the dollar much further. I think the amount of detergent you can make for the price is cheaper than store-bought, but you are also spending your time (minimal) making this stuff and you have to decided if that's worth it. I'm not even sure what Tide cost these days because I've been using 7th generation for so long now and I know the homemade is way cheaper than that!

Cool. But does home-made detergent really work?

I just did a load of rugs that soaked up water from our flooded basement and they came out nice and clean, so I think the detergent is doing its job! Hope that helps and you are able to take your own adventure!

Thanks for your extra info, Jess!

More homesteading adventures to come...

The Urban Homestead

Well I have been feeling semi-disgusting all weekend due to various allergy-related ailments, so I got to dig into this book that I checked out from the library last week:

The Urban Homestead, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, is a beginner's handbook for people who long for a bucolic eco-friendly homestead, but also want to take advantage of all the awesome green-living benefits of living in the city. Think "Little House On the Prairie", but for multi-unit buildings. Coyne and Knutzen encourage us to plug into the real community opportunities the city provides, be thankful for public transit infrastructure and walkability, and then get creative and see how you can make your current space as self-sufficient and earth friendly as possible.

I gotta tell you, I am LOVING this book. I may even go out and buy it. I can't renew it because there is a que of other desperate urbanites eager to get their hands on it's treasure trove of very doable ideas.

When I read about it online, I figured all their ideas would be out of my reach. I live in a one-bedroom apartment with zero access to a yard, balcony, or an external fire escape. We can't even have window boxes. I can't build a grey-water system. I can't grow my own fruit trees. I can't raise chickens. I have no desire to install a composting toilet. And I probably can't install solar panels on anything I own.

But guess what I CAN do?
- Collect my "heating up the shower" water to water plants, soak nasty dishes, or gravity-flush the toilet
- Make my own yeast and bake my own bread from scratch
- Grow salad greens and herbs in the window
- "Guerrilla garden" in the alley, or sneakily in the fire escape windows
- Make my own jam, vinegar, vegetable stock, butter, cheese, or yogurt out of things that would usually be dumped in the garbage
- Make a teeny-tiny compost bin to use just for my indoor window boxes
- Make all my own cleaning supplies
- Start making a list of things to look for in a future apartment or house

And this one little book has instructions for ALL of those things, and a zillion more ideas to custom-build your own urban homestead.

I feel really compelled and twitchily excited to try these things.  "Why bother?", You may ask. You can buy perfectly good butter, tasty and healthy bread and salad greens in any grocery. Maybe it is part nostalgia. Pulling radishes out of our garden, snapping fresh peas into my mouth, gathering wild raspberries from the brambles that grew on the edge of our yard, sitting impatiently at the counter waiting for the fresh bread to be cool enough to eat - my childhood was full of this kind of "homesteading" stuff. I watched my mom can vegetables and make home-made bread from scratch when I was a kid, but it never occurred to me that someday I would want to do those things myself.

If I dip even further into the psychology of my urge to homestead, I'd tell you that it saddens me to think that in one generation, we've completely lost the ability to make our own stuff. My mom MILKED COWS. She made butter and ice cream. She drove a tractor, grew vegetables, composted, and knew about crop rotation, darning socks, chopping wood, and preserving food. All of these things were part of daily life on the farm. She brought some of those things into our family life and our little garden. So did my dad, but I never once saw him darn a sock or pick any vegetables. He could change the oil in the car, though, and knew how to repair just about anything that crumbled or broke around the house.

I, on the other hand, do not know how to keep a basil plant alive in a pot on the windowsill. And sadly, I don't have the chance to learn about those things from my parents. Thank God for the internet.

I don't have an expansive yard. There are no wild vines growing anywhere near our micro-home on the third floor of this prissy courtyard building. But I do have a kitchen, some creativity, and a hubby who will support my ridiculous trial-and-error attempts to bring the simple life up to our little corner of the world.

So stay tuned, good readers! I have a whole list of projects to try out for you. Grow my own yeast culture? Don't mind if I do!


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