I knew that this house was our home when I opened a very unassuming door off the back porch and laid eyes on the pantry. While I had been on the fence about the house up to that point, that tipped me over the other side. When I was a girl reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, my favorite passages were always descriptions of the food storage rooms in the fall. I loved the Ingall’s family’s attic filled with pumpkins, onions, herbs, wheels of cheese and sides of salted meat in the big woods of Wisconsin. I loved the Wilder family’s cellar on their upstate New York farm with bins of potatoes and carrots, and their pantry full of jams, preserves, cakes and pies. I wanted to be Ma Ingalls or Mother Wilder, creating artful nourishment for my family with the abundant store of amazing things in my attic, cellar, or pantry. The homesteaders didn’t have high-paying, high-stress jobs with all the money, things and lifestyle that go along with it. They worked hard and they reaped and stored the simple bounty they created for themselves. I loved the self-reliance of it. I got the notion in my head that I wanted to do that, but it appeared to be an antiquated thing that people didn’t do anymore.
When my children were babies, I was fortunate to meet some mammas in a baby play group who taught me how to can fruit. I had never canned, my mother didn’t can, and I was so excited to learn how! I became a serious canner. I canned peaches, jams, preserves, pickled veggies, sauces and syrups. I learned how to make my own soap and crochet rag rugs. I learned how to wild harvest food. Homesteading skills, it turned out, were alive and well in these modern times. I found homesteading books like Five Acres and Independence by M.G. Kains , Living on the Earth by Alicia Bay Laurel, The Homesteaders Handbook by Rich Israel and Reny Slay, Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, and the Foxfire books and found a wealth of knowledge there. We subscribed to Countryside Magazine and Backwoods Home and read the articles voraciously. I just kept picking up more skills along the way and meeting more folks willing to share skills and learn together.
Even though we had just moved into our house in August, I felt compelled to fill that wonderful pantry with the autumn’s harvest. I gleaned pears, apples, plums and quince from old, forgotten fruit trees around town. I canned, dried and froze something almost every day. I picked hazelnuts and acorns and stored them in baskets to deal with later in the fall. I got storage potatoes, onions, garlic, and winter squash from a local farm and filled my wooden baskets and shelves. Baskets of fresh apples and pears for eating through early winter sat under the shelves. I lined up all my jars of herbs on one shelf and all my jams and jellies on another. I had one chest freezer full of strawberries, blueberries, peaches, pears, elderberries, cherries, and huckleberries for smoothies, baked goods and pies through the winter. The upright freezer was full of pork from our Sweetbriar Farms pig and elk meat from my dad, along with jars of pesto I had frozen and the lard I had rendered from the pig earlier in the summer. When we picked wild mushrooms in October, I dried them and filled tall jars on one shelf for winter soups. Later in the fall I shelled the hazelnuts and processed the acorns into flour. Then, in the spirit of modern homesteading and self-sufficiency, our family enjoyed the bounty of harvest that we had stored in that pantry.
I love this blog post.
We have so much in common.
i drifted over here from the patchwork underground blog………..
i just wanted to say how awesome you are. will you be my best friend? haha, seriously, mad props for the inspiration and courage you have given me with this post.
*chorus of applause*
My goodness me,how wonderful you are in providing for your family, it is a great skill that you have. I have always enjoyed these little books, especially the "Brambly Hedge" AUTUMN story by Jill Barklem, have a look at The Store Stump. cheers and well done Marie
I have positively fallen in love with your pantry … the loving way you've attended to and decorated your home is pure Americana at its best!
It's so great to be connected to other people who share a passion for simple living. People who don't have these skills think they are difficult and time consuming but what they don't realize is by living this life we have time for the things thzt are truly important, like family, community and being in nature. Thank you for sharing your beautiful pantry with us.
I came across your blog from Taryn's. I have serious pantry envy