A picture Of part of my allotment were this all started for me, this is about half the plot. I have 350 Square Yard which is divided into three plots 200 square yard which you are looking at, a 100 yard and a fifty yard plot. All told this little lot costs me £39.61p Per year.When this is all filled with crops its quite a site especially the outdoor tomatoes which are my passion I just Love Growing them even though we have had blight for the last two years they have kept producing fresh tomatoes right up till the first heavy frost about the second week in October and I still had green toms ripening upto New Years Day and just beyond.
After the credit crunch and so many people being on short time which a lot of company's have done rather than loose the people that they have as well as the unemployment for other people. I think that people should consider the things that they can do to help them self and it seems to me that personal food security is the most fundamental of all security options. Year on year I produced more in the summer than I could eat or store and even with two freezers it wasn't working. Besides freezers have to be powered from the grid and not counting the cost there are chances of power outages, breakdowns, strikes, fuel shortages,terrorist attacks, the list probably goes on.
So first I looked at bottling or canning, pretty good and I will always do some bottling, pickling, jam making as part of my strategy for preserving food. But it is very labour intensive and time consuming. Then I learnt about dehydrating this made the system work better than I ever expected it could. I can also take things from the freezer and dehydrate them so if the gluts over whelm my capability to dehydrate I can temporarily freeze the excess and use the freezer as a buffer. I have my freezers outside in an outhouse which has is dry but doesn't need to be frost proof.
Now if I store my canned goods outside it would need frost proofing and an emergency heat source for really cold spells.But dried goods don't freeze and so can be kept outside with perhaps just a little insulation.
As a country Great Britain doesn't do a lot of preserving apart from some jam making and pickling famously seen at local shows on the woman's institute stand. So most of the information I have gleaned has been from American and Canadian sites and blogs, so thanks you guy's for making my research a lot easier than it would have been.
So now the system is frozen goods and dried goods storage outdoors canned goods stored indoors and the dried goods opened and in use in doors.
A good site for information is
http://www.dehydrate2store.com/Labels: Allotment