What have done towards your prep?

[Mortblanc]

I do some canning, or bottling as you would call it, but not to the point of being an expert.

Right now I have about 20 bottles of assorted tomatoes still on the shelf from last years work. Living alone now I only bottle the pint size so there will be less waste.

I inherited the skill from my Mom and the process she used would scare the pants off most modern bottlers that must follow the government standards to the letter and deal with a pressure cooker.

My Mom would not have a pressure cooker in the house. She considered their danger level above that of TNT. She could point to numerous scars on her relatives arms as the result of pressure cooker use and she knew at least one person that had died when their cooker turned lose.

All of what we canned at home, and it was extensive, was done with the simple hot water bath method. We had a family of 6, with three growing teen aged boys and Dad was very active for a university professor. He did lots of gardening and outdoor work and ate to match it.

We did tomatoes, 250-300 quarts per year.

runner beans, 200-250 quarts per year

Baby Lima beans, 100+- quarts per year

also assorted jams, jellies and preserves and assorted other vegetables.

We also had two large freezers we stocked with meats and a mixture of fruits and vegges Mom preferred to freeze. She especially liked to freeze maize both on the cob and cut off the cob. Strawberries and peaches were also frozen favorites.

Note that Mom never canned meats due to the need for the pressure cooker in that process. Meat was always frozen for storage. If there was a power outage in our area it was never for long and the deep freeze would maintain preservation temp for some time. We never lost meat due to power outage.

I have dealt with power outage while using a deep freezer several times after moving up here with the Yankees, and found that running a gen-set for an hour a day will maintain the freezer temp even during warm weather as long as you stay out of the freezer and tape the seals. My small gen-set will run 6 hours on a liter of fuel so that would hold me for nearly a week.

Mom could get away with the water bath method since she cooked the crap out of anything that she opened. Some say that you can not cook some of the toxins away but we never had any problems.

She was a "stay at home Mom" and could boil runner beans for the entire afternoon and kill anything that might be hiding in the bottle. None of the quick warm up and eat the stuff half raw like is done today. Long cooking, plenty of cured meat for seasoning and a good dose of salt. I will note that Dad lived to be 80 and Mom is still running the show at my sister's home at age 93.

None of us ever died from her bottled foods and very few jars ever spoiled on the shelf.

Another thing about the Mason jars is that their expense is spread over many seasons of use. They last indefinitely if used with care. Breaking a Mason jar was nearly a sin at our place. You felt guilty for weeks after you smashed a Mason jar!

I understand that your access to bottling lids is unreliable. You can probably get what you need from American sources on Amazon.