You Don't Need to Can to Fill a Pantry

It’s live now: five days, five methods, no canning pot

For the last ten or fifteen years, I haven’t had enough surplus to can anything even if I’d wanted to. Before I bought this farm, I was a landless farmer—no ground of my own to grow in. Keeping bees on other people’s properties allowed me to continue farming, but gardening wasn’t always something I was able to do.

Once I bought the property in New Portland and moved my operation there, most of what I grew went to my customers. What I kept for my own kitchen was small and specific—squash, potatoes, onions, carrots, some blanched green beans. I put it up the ways I already knew: freezing, drying herbs, and cold storage—but I didn’t always get it right.

Cold storage is the one that’s given me the most trouble. I’ve lost produce to it more than once—not because the method failed, but because my house wasn’t holding the conditions those vegetables needed, and for a while I didn’t understand what those conditions actually were. This year I’m trying the buried-crate method, or holding the pantry at true cold-storage temperature through the winter if the budget allows for it.

You’ll notice that none of that involves a canning pot—and that’s because I simply do not like canning. I shared that dirty little secret in my recent post: “My Anti-Canning Preservation Method”.

I’m hardpressed to be in the kitchen at all this time of year. So—no. I don’t like canning—standing over boiling water in a hot kitchen in the middle of summer—and I don’t like the texture of canned food once it’s done.

I’ll admit I’ve carried some guilt about that over the years and still wrestle with it some days. But guilt isn’t a preservation method, and neither is doing something you hate just because it’s expected of you.

So I built the thing I actually do into a system you can follow.

This isn't a generic checklist. It's what I've actually tried, including the parts I got wrong—like the cold storage failures I mentioned above. You're not getting five vague tips; you're getting the specific method, with the trial and error already done for you.

The Anti-Canning Preservation Sprint is a five-day email course. One task lands in your inbox each day:

• Day 1 — Freeze something. Berries, herbs, blanched beans and peas.

• Day 2 — Herb salt and herb vinegar. Two ways to hold onto fresh herbs that aren’t the freezer.

• Day 3 — Dry something. Window screen or hanging method, no oven or dehydrator required.

• Day 4 — A quick refrigerator pickle. Cucumbers, brine, done—plus a printable recipe card to keep on hand.

• Day 5 — Cold storage. How to hold winter crops without losing them.

No equipment list to buy your way through, and you can start the same day you sign up, wherever your pantry actually is right now.

Your friendly neighborhood farmer,

—Sam