Safe From the Cold

The temperature dipped down to 28 yesterday morning before the sun came up. I went out to check on the tomatoes mid-morning. They were nice and toasty under their concrete blankets:

I left the blankets on all day as it never got much above 60. The blankets are light enough that they don’t damage the plants. I’ll take them off today as it is supposed to warm up considerably. We shouldn’t have another frost this week.

I got my carrots processed:

Two 10-pound bags of Costco organic carrots yielded 19 pints. I was being lazy and ran the carrots through the food processor to slice them, but some of them were so skinny that they ended up being “chipped” rather than sliced. Oh, well. They are destined for soups and stews this winter so it shouldn’t matter.

I love my All-American canner:

This is the one that the husband brought home from the neighbor’s shed. She was moving and asked him to help clean out the shed and told him he could have whatever was in there. I already had a smaller All-American so he knew what it was worth. A new canner this size runs about $400. We put $25 worth of new parts into it and now it is the backbone of my food preservation system. I can do 14 quarts or 19 pints at a time in two tiers.

My kitchen is perfectly designed for canning. The stove is in the middle of the island and accessible from both sides.

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I did not sew yesterday. I had to go to town in the morning, so I stopped at Joann Fabrics to do some research. I’ve figured out what I need for the insulated curtains. I will start by making four of them for the living room windows. I also have a table and set of chairs that came from my grandmother’s ice cream parlor in Ohio. They are out on the porch. About 10 years ago, I painted the chairs and re-covered the seats, but we got Lila shortly after that and she had anxiety issues and chewed up one of the chairs. I am going to take the seats off, replace the foam on the damaged one, and re-cover all of them with new fabric.

A wedding is a good reason to get all of the home improvement projects done.

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I added another podcast to the queue yesterday. This one is called Home Processing from Pasture to Plate. The host runs a mobile butchering operation in Texas. He is also part of the Living Free in Tennessee MeWe group, which is how I found out about the podcast. Monday’s episode was about another mobile processor, also in Texas, who is being harassed by the state for supposedly violating state meat processing laws; however, the law that she is accused of violating contains a specific exemption for her type of business. She was forced to shut down and now—if she wants to fight this—faces an expensive legal battle to prove that she wasn’t in violation of anything. This is bullying by the state, pure and simple. I am a bit surprised that it happened in Texas, but then again, this kind of stuff is cropping up more and more frequently.

I’ve mentioned before that we don’t have enough meat processors here in Montana. One of my relatives in Ohio, who also farms, told me yesterday that he didn’t raise pigs this year for the very reason that the processors there didn’t have room in the schedule until January. We got the last processing date in November for our pigs, and that’s at a processor two hours away.

Joel Salatin has noted repeatedly that all of these commercial food preparation/preservation laws are so complex and expensive to comply with that they have driven smaller processors out of business. Of course, the large corporate processors don’t mind having their competition eliminated, but it skews the food supply system in a dangerous way. Remember the meat shortages of a few months ago? Some people will claim that these laws are there to ensure safety, but I’d much rather get meat from a local producer than from some huge conglomerate. And if you are butchering your own animals on your own property for your own use, why on earth is the state even involved?