Rain Country Homestead

Though I have demonstrated this method in many videos, I thought it would be a good idea to do a step-by-step in photos on how to easily vacuum seal your dried goods into mason jars without the need of electricity.  I have found it to work FAR better than using the FoodSaver where it would take me several tries and several lids to finally get it to seal, and then they would still often lose their seals within a month or even a week. The only failures I have had with this method was a result of a bad lid or fine powders in too full jars.   Lids that have been used once for pressure or water bath canning typically will work better than brand new lids and can be used over and over again, however, they can still get misshapen over time and simply need to be tossed. That is another thing that makes vacuum sealing dried goods into jars is the fact that one does not need to toss those metal lids so soon but can get many repeated uses from them. To ...

I had someone ask awhile ago if we were actually off grid or if we just explore with it. Well the answer is sort of both. We are still connected to public water and power, however, we live mostly off grid throughout the year.   Making beef jerky on the wood stove in the fall with the dehydrating rack Mr. Rain built Since we have an extensive solar power set up, summer is easiest for us to be pretty independent of the grid. We are not grid tied with our solar and we plan to keep it that way. We want what is ours to be ours. Period.  For a rather detailed explanation of our solar set up, here is a video Mr. Rain did on it: From spring through fall, I do all my canning in my All American Canner on a propane burner outside and much of my cooking in our Solavore Solar Oven and on our Stovetec Rocket Stove .  When cooking outside is not an option, or I am baking breads and pies, that is when I utilize the solar power to run my toaster oven and hot ...

As our garden is nearing its end for the year, I am reflecting back on lessons learned over the past six years since I really started getting serious into growing our own food.   It really began many years earlier when I started growing tomatoes in the greenhouse for the sake of simply having my own for salsa and my Italian sauces.  At the time I knew nothing of starting my plants from seed, I simply went down to the nursery and picked up some tomato plants and transplanted them in the greenhouse and they always did quite well for me.  By 2012, a lot of changes occurred that had me thinking it was time to get serious and start learning how to grow more food of all kinds and to do so from seed.  Some of what led me to this was unexpected and difficult trials we had gone through, some of it was waking up to the realities of our food supply and seeing the direction things were going. This is when I began to expand outside the greenhouse by working up a sm...