Ben told me early on that canning was just “hot water and patience.” He said this while eating a pickle from a jar his grandmother made, which is about as useful as taking swimming lessons from someone who learned in 1962. The best canning recipes for pickles and relish are not complicated, but they do…
Everyone told us salt preservation was an exact science. Precise ratios, kitchen scales accurate to the gram, careful temperature control. Ben read three different homesteading forums before we tried our first batch of salted herbs, and every single one gave him a different percentage. Two percent. Three percent. Five percent for long-term storage. He came…
Most people go looking for the best canning recipes for pickles and relish and come back with a list of ingredients. That’s not where batches fail. They fail in the margins — the 30 seconds you didn’t wait, the headspace that was a quarter inch off, the jar that went into the water bath still…
If you want a small space vegetable garden that has some kind of design aesthetic beyond “pile of tomato cages,” vertical is where you start. Not because it looks good on its own—it doesn’t, not automatically—but because it solves two problems at once: you get more growing surface without expanding your footprint, and the visual…
Three to one. That’s the acid-to-water ratio that matters more than any recipe you’ll find when it comes to pickling. I spent a lot of time in my second summer out here hunting down the best canning recipes for pickles and relish, downloading PDFs, bookmarking forums, filling pages in my garden journal with notes I…
Most small space vegetable garden design advice assumes you have a blank slate and unlimited patience. You don’t. If you’re working with a tight footprint and you want it to look like something other than a container graveyard by July, there are a few structural decisions that matter before you put anything in the ground….
“Just follow the recipe and you’ll be fine.” That’s what everyone said. I spent two summers collecting what I thought were the best canning recipes for pickles and relish, printed them out, tucked them into a binder, and still managed to ruin three batches in a single August. Two didn’t seal. One sealed but smelled…
The raised beds needed watering and I was already an hour behind because June had gotten into the herb spiral again and eaten half the lemon balm. Standing there with a hose, looking at three raised beds, an herb spiral, and a half-acre kitchen garden, I remembered why I used to think small space vegetable…
I used to think the best canning recipes for pickles and relish were about finding the right grandmother’s notebook. Some handwritten card with measurements in pinches and glugs, proven by decades of church potlucks. What I know now, after three summers of mixed results in this farmhouse kitchen, is that the recipes aren’t the hard…
Ben looked at my half-acre kitchen garden last spring and said, “You know this is actually a small space, right? You’re just in denial.” I told him the garden was fine and that he should go back to whatever he was building in the barn. He wasn’t wrong, though. I’d been treating a fifth of…
