456-Food Preservation for Gardeners

Hi everybody, this is Joe Lample, the Joe Behind Joe Gardener and welcome to the Joe Gardener show. Today's episode is one I think every Gardener, especially anyone who's ever stood in the kitchen staring at an avalanche of peak season produce, is going to appreciate. Because growing the food, well that's only half the story. What happens after harvest, how you capture it, preserve it, and make it last? That's where the real magic and sometimes the real overwhelm begins. And that's exactly what we're diving into today. I'm joined by Stacey and Jeremy Hill, the husband and wife team behind the new book, The Preserver's Garden, Had a Grill Garden for fermenting, canning, pickling, dehydrating, freeze drying, and more. Whew. What I love about their approach though is that they flipped the script on how most of us think about food preservation. Instead of asking, what do I do with all this food now that it's ripe? They start at the very beginning, designing the garden itself with preserving in mind. We're talking about choosing the right varieties, planning for volume, timing, harvest for batch processing, and matching specific crops for the preservation methods that showcase them best. So whether you're brand new to preserving or you've been canning and fermenting for years, but want to get more strategic about how your garden supports it, this conversation is packed with practical insights you can put to work right away. So let's get into it. And as we do, thanks to our sponsors for today's episode, soil-cubed and territorial seed. You probably know by now, having access to high quality compost is my not-so-secret weapon for the success of everything I grow in my garden. And that's why I'm so proud to be partnering with soil-cubed. 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Stacey and Jeremy, give us your backstory picking up from where your food preserving part of your lives began because you didn't have any mentors for that. Your entirely self-taught and here you are today with an incredible book about that topic and a lot of authority to back it up. So not having anyone to fall back on, I find that that's really interesting because it seems like every food preserveer I know kind of had somebody that they took some lessons from or they were taught from. So not having anyone to fall back on in your case to keep that tradition going. What were your drivers to going all in on this? Let's start right there. Well, that's a big question. I know. When it comes to not having anybody to fall back on, I mean, I should say that, you know, I grew up in the country. My grandparents can their food, grew a lot of their food. Stacy did not have that. She grew up in my suburbs, like no, no gardening, no, anything. Besides a couple tomato plants here and there. But I would say, I mean, by the time we decided to start doing this, there were, it was too late to learn that from anyone that he wanted to drive. Yeah. And it's not like most teen boys are paying attention to that growing up. And we was more of like a, a mythical grandparent that I was focusing on. Like, when we got to where we were growing our family and we were, we had been gardening for six or 10 years or something. And I just was like, I want to, we want to learn the things. We want to be able to pass on this knowledge. So we had to find it first. And go back and get it. So you, when you said we've been gardening, you've been growing food for that many years, right? We've been growing food the entire time we've been married. 21 years. 21 years now, but not like, not at a scale. I'd say three drivers that you asked about that, that really got us doing this were, number one, saving money is huge. The more food you can grow, if you do it right and you get good at it, you'll save money. Number two is clean food. We want, we grow everything organically, kind of ties into saving money. You can buy all organic fruits and vegetables, but the quality of growing your own is better or plus you know what's going in it. Yeah. You know, just because it has an organic sticker on it, you still, there are things you don't know about it. And that only takes you so far. And then the third one, I would say is just good old passion challenge. I grew a hundred pounds of tomatoes. I want to grow 200, I grew 200, I'm going to grow 500 now. So a lot of this just, you know, good old fashioned stick to it of this. Now in your intro, I know that you were living in suburbia there for a while and then you had an opportunity to buy 11.1 or how many acres is it? 11.6. 11.6. And you loved it. There was no looking back, no turning back, no regrets. And was, but in your suburban setting, you were growing food at that point, right? Because you said you'd been doing it all since your married life, right? Yeah. So we started out now way back with just like one raised bed, like one little eight foot stretch of, to wash or whatever. And then we, for, when we, when we went a little bit further along there and we got a little more into it and started with a community garden plot at a local park. So it has our, our house to Newman. We had like a sledding hill for a backyard, not a, not a situation for many. Right. And we got a little bit more than I think it was like a 16 by 16 thing garden that we had there. And then that was getting frustrating because we had to drive there. Nobody wants to drive to their garden. Yeah. And it was in a public park. And it was in a public park. Or they were deer eating it. They were, they had it split organic and not organic sides of the community garden and that they were still spraying in the past. I was going to say not the drift has anything to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, and they were spraying right outside the, oh my gosh. Yeah. Spraying for weaners around the pressure tree, the chemical treated landscape. Yeah. Nice. So we were like, all right. Let's give it a that. And then we started raised beds on the side of the hill, which was interesting. And that you could only take that so far as far as the amount of food we could grow. So at that point, we were still buying a lot from the farmers market and we would buy like those bulk boxes of canning tomatoes. So we were learning those skills, even though we couldn't, we could only grow four tomato plants. Yeah. So you were taking your purchase, you were taking the purchase produce because you can and say, you know, try, try ways to preserve that. That's what you're saying, right? Right. Yes. And we still do that. We're going to go out with tomatoes because we figured that one out. Well, still buy fruit, peaches and apples bananas. Yeah, we can't grow bananas. Missouri turns out. I learned, I learned a lot of stuff in your book, but one thing I never even heard about before until I was reading it was the produce auction. It probably depends where you're at. Yeah. We have a large omesh and midnight community. Right. And they grow, they grow food and have an omesh auction where you just go. They put all this food by the, by the crate and by the pallet and bid on it as a lot. So you have to, you have to be committed to it, but you know, a lot of restaurants go by there. A lot of people that have roadside stands by their fruit there and just resell it. Interesting. Interesting. And you can get locally grown. We realize in the process of writing that book though that a lot of people probably don't have that as a resource, but more. Are they still at farmer's markets? Yes. Farmers at the markets, you can work out a deal for both produce. And the local organic grocery store, you know, I go in there and check every now and again. And if they've got an overstock of bananas, yeah, I'll buy a case of bananas on quick sale. Get them at a good price. They're all organic, bring them home and we'll chop them up, put them in the freeze dryer and the kids have a healthy snack that people pay a ton of money for free, freeze dried to me. Banana. And then we've got them on the shelf as a snack all the time. So you don't have to grow everything you preserve. We're already getting some really great tips here. And we kind of already went down a side trail to get to that. But back to my question, what I'm curious to know and then we'll get into all the particulars of the questions I have for you regarding the preserving and canning and all of that. When you decided, okay, I'm going 100 pounds of tomatoes or 200 pounds of tomatoes. At some point you're saying, we can't eat all of this and you give away to who you can, but you don't want any of it to go to waste. And so is this, I guess I'm getting to the point of what was that light bulb that went off that said we've got to really learn how to put this in the full scale preserving. I would say we kind of started there. We didn't really, I mean, everybody around here kind of grows tomatoes. Yeah. Anybody who would want them, who would appreciate them, they're growing their own. So nobody wanted anything we were trying to give away at that point. And so you start googling and like, hey, internet, what can I do with this? Yeah. Oh, you can can this. This isn't actually hard. Yeah, water bath canning tomato sauce is easy. And then you're just one little hupskip in a jump away from salsa and tomato soup. Yeah. And that's what that is. And getting into freeze drying and some of the other things. That's just traditional water and canning that you can freeze the tomatoes. And then can them later that that led us to be we were canning with our for tomato plants in our backyard in town because we could stash them all in the freezer and then do it all once. I admire you because you on your own figured all that out and look at you today. And now you've got this book. And in your book, you say it helps gardeners grow with preservation in mind. I'm looking forward to hearing about the part where you are flipping the script as I said in the introduction. And as you're planning out your garden, you're already thinking ahead about incorporating the preserving part of that. So did you say water bath canning was your first entree in the into the start of the process kind of in the canning. Yes, I think we probably started with freezing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Throwing something right. I have I can raise my hand. Yes. And you can even you can make tomato sauce and freeze it. It's just make it in your crock pot. So you like it and throw it in the freezer and it's a good, you know, I'm going to say that. You know, baby step if you're afraid of canning, we did green beans in the freezer first also before because green beans have to be pressure canned or they can also freeze dried. So we went from freezing all our green beans, which is blanching and then freezing them in vacuum bags. Back you bags. There you go. Whoops. To a canning them with the pressure canner. And that was our first real like thing we pressure canned, which is a super fun exciting adventure pressure canning. I mean, pressure cannings what gives canning the bad. That's what scares people. Yep. The better reputation they see the the pictures, the old pictures with the canners exploded, which doesn't happen anymore. They all have safety just don't use the old ones. Yeah. Use a modern one because they have safety valves and we've experienced the safety valve. It works. Our grandparents did this as a default. Most of our grandparents, if not our grandparents, great grandparents around the turn of the 20th century, most people grew their own food and they planned what they were going to grow, whether that was meat, chicken, cow, dairy, eggs, produce, produce everything. You planned what you were going to need for the year and you planned ahead. In the 20th century, a lot of amazing things happen, technology and, you know, communications and travel skyrocketed. What went by the wayside in that are some of those traditional skills. Yeah. The ability to go to the grocery store and just get your food. While being a marvel, it removed people from that knowledge set. It removed people from thinking beyond. If I want, yeah, if I want tomato sauce, if I want spaghetti next week, I need to go by a jar of spaghetti sauce at the grocery store to, I've had friends that have said even taking tomato sauce from the grocery store and turning that into a spaghetti sauce, which is basically adding a little basil, oregano, salt, because it's shocking. So all that to say, people are so far removed from that life cycle that comes with producing your own food. That's what we just hope to be able to introduce people back to. Just back into, if I want to eat spaghetti three times a week, let's say two times a week, for my family of ex people, I need this many tomatoes. So I would need to grow this many plants and then have a plan on how to can them. It's not a hard process. It's not complicated. It's just something we've gotten away from as a society. Yeah. This is exactly what I wanted to talk about, but to your point about in the 21st century, food preserving typically follows what you grow in your garden. But you take it beyond that back to what you said and that's in your case, you actually build preserving into your planting plan. You started to talk about that. You kind of gave us a description with a tomato example, but talk more about how that works and why this is something that we should give more consideration to because you are exactly right, Jeremy. It seems like nearly everybody I talk to or interact with when we're talking about food gardening, it's, I want to try to grow this and grow this, but the conversation never includes canning and preserving. Not that that is excluded from what they were, they're thinking, they just don't bring that into the conversation. So I never hear that part of it because they're so excited about what they're growing, but I wonder how many of those people are actually thinking about a plan for what happens after the harvest. So a little bit more about the methodology or the recommendations or the kind of the practices that you find work really well that maybe new to some of us who haven't really thought along those lines. For one thing, being able to grow the plants and be a gardener to start with is important if you're going to grow the food. It's going to be really hard for the average person who wants to preserve tomatoes or zucchini or green beans, whatever, to know how many to grow if they haven't grown them before and known what is capable or what is possible. So being able to back into those numbers, you got to have a starting point. So... It's different for everybody. Absolutely. Where, based on your local pest pressure and we share a lot in the book about what we do, but it might not work in all climates and you need to know how your tomato plants usually do and then you can be like, okay, I get this much, this is my much I want, how many plants do I need and what kind of plants and do I want them to all ripen at once, like romas and whatnot and sauce tomatoes or where can I just grow all of the fun tomatoes and get enough to make whatever... Mix it all together. Going back to creating an individual dish, like tomato sauce. If you want tomato sauce, you need to consider growing tomatoes, oregano, basil, thyme, maybe if you're feeling spicy. If you want to make your own salsa and different kinds of peppers, cilantro, if you're into that, just there are different things that you can combine. Not all of those are seasonal items. They don't necessarily grow together, at least where we are, tomatoes don't bloom at the same time as cilantro. And if you like cilantro and your salsa, you have to plan and freeze a little. So it's all a matter of deciding what you want, what you like and then just build a plan for it. A lot of people just inherently write this off and say, this is too much work. I'm not going to do this. It's just so much easier to go to the grocery store. We've all seen the memes on social media about the person buying the beds and buying the plant, buying the dirt and spending 73 hours throughout the year and then at the end they've got a $400 tomato. That's such a disservice to the whole thing because while that may happen your first year and it's real, you can reuse those beds, you can reuse the soil, you're going to gain all the knowledge and then next year you're going to grow 10 tomatoes. And then next year you're going to grow 50 pounds of tomatoes. Yeah. So it's cumulative. Not everything just happens. What do you think the main hurdle is for those who haven't preserved but maybe they've wanted to or maybe even they've tried? Is there one single roadblock or hurdle that jumps out to you that seems to be the common denominator of preventing people from getting past that point? I think they're just afraid. It's just basic fear of the unknown. Yeah, that they don't know what they're doing. Like it's not that hard. Yeah. You do know what you're doing. You read a description where you can follow a recipe. If you can make your spaghetti, you can also can your sauce. It's not that complicated. Yeah. A lot of it's fear. A lot of misinformation is out there about safety. I think a lot of people fall back on that as a reason not to do it. You brought up, you know, botulism and pressure canters exploding. Those are real things. They can't happen. But anything can happen. If you buy, but there are safety mechanisms just like with the canter, they're built into the recipes. Like when you're canning tomato sauce, if you're using a recipe, you're adding lemon juice or bottled lemon juice, not fresh. Yeah. Or because the pH is controlled that way or citric acid. A certain amount to the tomato. That way if your tomatoes just happen to not have enough acid, which they almost always do, you're still covering your bases. And botulism can't grow. Yeah, botulism can't grow in acidic environment. So you've covered that one. You're good. And you can buy a pH meter and check your food yourself. So you know, they're less than 20 bucks. They're way under the pH that you need to be. Because there's a line. And like over this, not good. Safe under that. It's fine. And then you can check, check it yourself. Then hopefully you'll stop worrying. The example I used with people a lot of times when they talk about, you know, preserving your own food isn't safe. Is just like growing your food. If you've ever grown lettuce at any gardeners grown lettuce. Yeah. How many times have you heard about a farmer or a group of people getting sick eating their own lettuce and wins the last time you heard about somebody getting sick by from buying lettuce at a grocery store, which happens more. Mm hmm. Just saying. Yeah. Very true. That seems to be the story on the news a few times a year from the home. A few times a week. Yeah, really. Yeah, it really does. Because, you know, so many people touch it. So many different legs, such and that's what the need to produce. It's just, it's become industrialized. And food production becoming industrialized adds, adds many more. Points of failure. Yeah. Yes. You talked about some growing tips to maximize yields. Even if you're just a gardener, you know, who doesn't want to try to maximize their yield that for no other reason than ego or pride. Absolutely. And that much more to give to your friends. True. What are some of those tips to maximize yields? I'm curious. A lot of it has to do with the varieties you're growing. And knowing your garden and your abilities and whatnot, like just what's practical. But varieties are a ton of it, especially like I like to use green beans as examples over and over again. But you can buy like some really pretty heirloom varieties and they're going to produce a reasonable amount. But then if you go to the ones that are made for market production, I'm going to get a whole lot more real. Really? Yeah. And the same thing with tomatoes and pretty much everything else. And to go along with that, succession planting, companion planting, putting plants together that work well together, like, you know, tomatoes and cucumbers, at least in our world. They have done well together. They do really well together. And then we have onions planted between them and basil. Right. It's all together. Right. So there's no space wasted. Right. And the onions were off a lot of the. And so does the basil. The onions and basil. And then they keep the bugs away from the tomatoes and cucumbers. And then our cucumbers always die because there's cucumber beetles here and more. But I hide the cucumbers between the tomatoes and they last longer. Interesting. The bugs aren't finding them there. Yes. Kind of eventually, but then they die in time for the tomatoes to grow up and get plenty of sun and all of that because the cucumbers are done. Yeah. But then we can plant more. Mm-hmm. And then you know, multiple sessions depending on your climate, you know, like we can keep using tomatoes and we say in the book that we use tomatoes as our example because we love tomatoes. Yeah. And they're an easy plant to use as a example. But with tomatoes, you'll pick off those suckers. You can instead of just throwing them away, you can root those. Yeah. And that can be your second succession of plants to true. Yeah. With everybody told us like, oh, you can't grow two succession of tomatoes. And Missouri, you can't plant them past, you know, the middle of May. And I planted them as late as the fourth of July and gotten another crop in the fall. Good for you. And I'm envious that you all, you actually follow through on that. I always had the best intentions because I grow a lot of tomatoes also. And every year I take those suckers and I pot them up. And then by the time they're ready to get planted, I'm too tired and I don't have it in me to. And there's also like, sometimes you need them and sometimes you don't. Yeah. So if you pot them up and you have them, then a hail storm comes and destroys your garden. Yeah. You're ready to go. It's worth it just for the insurance, even if those are the sacrificial plants. And we don't want to talk about what habits them. One of my favorite things, it better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. And that applies to so many things, but certainly to tomatoes and you need rain, go out and wash your car. You're probably going to make a change. There's so many positive things about food preserving and all of that. And again, we're going to get to those seven ways that we can do it and talk about specifics there. But I still know, and I'm in this group, there's a bunch of people listening to this that want to get there, but they've stalled for whatever reason. But what are some of the top misconceptions that act as roadblocks to people taking up food preserving? Now I already kind of asked that question, but the misconception part may be a different angle to that question. My favorite one to talk about is, I don't have time. The paradigm shift that I would challenge people to make is that right now all of your food probably is a general rule comes from a grocery store or a farmer's market or someplace you're buying it, you're trading money for food. If you consider that to get that money, you're most likely trading your time for the money, then your money for the food. What if you think of it as cutting out the middleman and you just trade some of your time for your food? The yields are going to be higher and you're going to get a lot more out of it, not only from a production standpoint, but from a self-worth and feeling good about what you've done standpoint. I like that a lot. That is a good misconception. That's the first one. And then it's not safe as a big one. Or that there's too much, just too much to learn. You can learn one thing, like learn to can or preserve or even freeze one thing. Like just if you're too overwhelmed by, I can't preserve everything in my garden. Don't. Do one. It's not that bad. It's just it's really hard for some people to wrap their head around the fact that you can make your own food and survive off of watching your home for more than three to five days, maybe a week, maybe two weeks, maybe a year. The big misconception there would be that people don't understand how much food they actually consume because they are generally eating literally hand to mouth. And they don't see how much food actually goes in to supporting a, nearly, you know, 150 to 200 pound human mammal. You burn a lot of calories and you eat a lot of food. And most people don't understand how much food that really is because you just go to the store and buy more. And it just, it's actually gets sat up in front of you to see, wow, I eat a lot of food. Even if they do their weekly grocery shopping, they're also eating out, which we don't do. So we, so you see that pantry get depleted through the season from feeding eight mouths. And if I'm not mistaken, five of them are males, right? Are there five boys? Five men? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that adds to the consumption level, I would say. It does. Yeah. And you're not seeing all of our food in that pantry too. No. It's only like what five deep praises full of. Oh my gosh. We have a lot of food, but we eat it all. Yeah. Yeah. And I did do a video about that last year. It's about like May, late May, early June, when it's like the empty, as it gets. And the pantry is not completely empty at that point, but there are like empty jars and empty spots on the shelf that are pretty dramatic. But it's, we still have some food because like the tomatoes aren't going to be ready until August. So in May, I try to make sure that we still have enough to get through that. And then let's say we have a bad tomato year, or we're always using tomatoes here. We want to have enough made-o-sauce left on the shelf in August and we start putting more so that we don't completely run out if we don't fill it out for our food. Our goal on the things that we're really passionate about eating that we really like is to have two years with the food on the shelf. That's not just two years, it's two growing seasons where I think case there's a failure of a season. It's catch up and you don't have to go without. Nothing wrong with an insurance policy and you never know. The fact that you're consuming that food over whatever time period that is, it's not going to waste. Wow. Okay. All right. So let's talk about those seven different ways that we can preserve food. I'm like all the people that have at least dipped their toe in the shallow end and that is to do freezing the tomatoes or the beans whoop the do. But let's start there, I guess, because there are seven and you feel free to start where you want, but maybe you just work through the ones that you have there. Free things is the easiest one out there. Most people have a freezer in their house and- Or they can easily acquire a freezer. Yeah. Have a new freezer. So just like you freeze, it's commonplace to freeze meats. Many of your vegetables can be frozen. Some have to be blanched first in order to maintain quality. That's pretty much a quick Google. Yeah. You can always- Yeah, and just real quick on that though, give us another minute on that and why what which ones, why do you do that? How long do you do it? Blanching, it just involves boiling water or steam and you have your process cut up vegetables and you blanch them like by exposing them to that water or steam for a set amount of time. And that time depends on how much you put in the pot, but also what vegetable it is. Like potatoes go a lot longer than beans. And you're just like basically cooking it just a tiny bit to deactivate enzymes in the food that would break it down over time. Okay. So you're stopping that process and it allows it to keep more of its nutritional value and flavor in the freezer, because things will still break down in the freezer. If you don't do that, it can also affect the color. Yeah. If you don't blanch them, they will turn brown when they are either frozen or dehydrated. When they're exposed to oxygen. Right. But they turn extra brown. Right. And I guess so you know what needs blanching and what doesn't is again, just a Google search if you don't know. Yes. That's how we keep all of that in the world. Right. Just look at that. That's why we have the magical internet. Thank God. Yeah. Just the other day we, I mean, first off, we Google things all the time. We're not, we're not, we're not omnipotent. And just the other day, I forget what it was, but we were looking something up and we wouldn't got our own book in law. Yeah. I forget what it was, but it was hilarious. And that's funny when that happens. Yeah. Yeah. I've had to refer to my own book too and it's comforting to find the answer that you're looking for in your own. Yeah. I mean, you can't just keep everything in your head all the time. Yeah. I knew this at one point. If you're doing it every day, that's one thing. But these things we're preserving, we're doing it like once or twice a year sometimes. You can't. Listen, it's like the hard drive, eventually that hard drive gets full and you need to back it up or offload it or start deleting and. Yeah. You don't have a good like search bar in there. Yeah. And we got, we got recipe boxes, we're all right things down. This is the case. Google goes away, but it's easier just to pull out your phone and Google, help, how long do I have Blanc screen beans before I freeze them? And it'll pop up and tell you. The pros of cons. No shame there. No shame there. Yeah. And the other thing with freezing that's good to consider is vacuum sealing. You brought it up. Let's talk about it now and when do you use it and do you recommend it? No, we use vacuum sealing in the freezer. Okay. That's the biggest one because it keeps, you can see some freezer burning because everybody knows about. Yeah. Yeah. Throw things in a regular Zeplock bag. But if you get all that air out of there, they will last significantly longer. Like we're adding years to the life of something in the deep freeze. Wow. You can also use the vacuum sealer for like grains or the dried, like as long as things are completely dry, but not freeze dried. That's another situation. Okay. Dry of moisture. Dry of moisture, but like rice and grains and oats and stuff like that. You can vacuum seal those and get them to last longer that way as well, which you could also store them in mylar. So if you're looking at dried or freeze dried foods, not stuff that goes in the freezer typically, mylar bags with oxygen absorbers takes the oxygen out of the situation and will allow those things to last much longer. Reastryer companies will save 30 plus years for freeze dried foods. Wow. And that's all about the mylar and oxygen. And you can also do like rice and pasta and oatmeal, whatever in mylar and keep it, you know, so you can have, you can buy things at bulk that way. Like we were, we talked about that earlier. So like when we buy oats, I don't want to use, I want organic and we need gluten free because our whole family is gluten free. It's a whole nother. Wow. But we, so we buy 50 pounds of gluten free oats at a time because it's the only way to get them to be affordable by pound. And then I separate all those into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and seal them up. And then it doesn't go bad or get bugs in it or any of that while you're waiting to, we go through all of that. Yeah. And is it is the same kind of stuff that excuse my ignorance here, but I think at the mylar balloons that you get at the grocery store. It's similar, but they're a lot thicker. Yeah. But it's silver like that. It's a, they're much thicker. Yeah. And they're bags. They're just bags. And they have, they have ones that have zippers. Like you get like a ziplock or you can get ones that you can heat seal with like your straightening iron. Yeah. Yeah. You're curling iron. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, anything that we don't grow, we try to buy in bulk because family of eight, yeah, chocolate chips. We buy chocolate chips in bulk. And well, we used to, but you know, chocolate's gotten so expensive, but you put them in small quantities, vacuum seal them. And they'll last a lot longer because they have fat in them and they will go bad over time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that slows that process down dramatically. Chocolate doesn't go bad. That's, you know, we used to buy it. You buy a 30, 40 pounds of the time. Yeah. I could help you with that. Can you vacuum seal mylar? Yes, I know. Okay. The walls, the walls of the bags are too thick. Okay. Really sucked in. Really, again. But when you put the oxygen absorber in there, it, it pulls it out a little bit. And then there's no oxygen. So it's kind of like even though there's space in there, it doesn't need to be vacuum seal the same. I got it. Air isn't necessarily the enemy oxygen is the enemy. Sure. Do you throw those in the freezer or how you store those after you put them in the back? No, you don't. Unless it's fresh food, if it's dried food, you don't have to. Okay. It's in it, but it does the same thing. Like if you, you know, put your flower in the freezer, lots of people put their red flower whenever in the freezer to keep, make it last longer. Yeah. You put it in mylar with oxygen absorbers. You cancel out the freezer. You don't need that. Oh, wow. And it does the same thing. Mm-hmm. Okay. It's preserving it longer without... We keep our mylar bags in the big totes that you get at your home improvement store. Seal those up so that mice won't get to them. Yeah, mice are whole-nother situation. Mice like mylar, but... Yeah. That's the one downside of mylar is that a mouse will take a tiny little bite just to see what's in there. Then they were on elephant because they put puncture it. It's like the birds with tomatoes. You know, they just... Yeah. One peck at it. But in a totes and in the meerkat. And mylar bags are easy to find. Yeah. There's lots of companies that make them. I would be careful getting them on Amazon just because the quality can vary. There are a few good companies out there that we buy from. The three that we've gotten from are Wallaby, a pack fresh USA and four jars that started selling also. Oh, four jars, isn't it? They have some of mylar now. Pack fresh and four jars also have vacuum sealer bags that are really good. The quality, like no, you know, concerns there. Yeah, and they sell them in a roll so you can make them to whatever size you want. Yeah, the vacuum sealer bags. You just seal the back end to make it however big you want. Cut it off. Yeah. And the mylar comes in different sizes. And they also sell the oxygen absorbers. And four jars also has canning lids and jars that are fabulous quality. Yeah. Good. Spoken from a professional. That's good information right there. All right. One down six to go. The second one is dehydration and no particular order, but that's what I have is number two. And dehydration, similar to what we've been talking about, the whole idea of dehydration is to remove moisture because moisture is what will, I mean, it's what's going to cause bacteria to us. And we talk about some of the history in the book of, you know, why people started dehydrating food thousands of years ago. And that context really helps you to understand the process of why we do it today. And a lot of the ways that people do it now are reasons that people do it may seem outmoded, but they're still really valid. You know, jerky is a treat and it's a snack now, but that was how people preserved meat a long time ago just by necessity because salting and dehydrating were the only way you could keep your kill, fresh for months or even years, even the rest of the week or the rest of the week without refrigeration. And so dehydration, really just the process of removing moisture. One of the examples we give is making fruit leathers. You know, a lot of kids love their fruit roll ups. Yeah. You can make your healthy ones that don't have any added anything just by taking some fruit and mix it up. You know, you can have bananas, strawberries, blueberries, whatever you've got. Apples are really good. Apples. Yeah. Throw them in your blender, make up your ray, lay them out on a sheet and you can put them in the oven with just the lid on and let it dry and you'll roll that out. You know, all the saster if you turn it on low, but it's been on how low your oven goes. Yeah. If you don't want to cook it, you just want to cover it. You don't want to go over it. One tin, one twenty. Yeah. Okay, that's what I wanted to know. The heat men is fine. Yeah, I guess you're going to keep an eye on it. The other thing we've done, which is in the book, too, is put them in the car and hunt sunny day and put your trays out on the dash and it gets hot enough occasionally that you could dry things outside, like just sitting out there, but ants are usually a problem. Yeah. I've done that with tomatoes before cherry tomatoes trying to dry them outside and I'll be like, oh, they're almost done and then the ants. Oh, no. On the fruit roll ups things, you lay it out on a parchment paper and then once it's dried, not crispy, but dry, you just roll it up and then cut that roll with scissors and then the kids can peel them open and you've got just like the ones at the store, but better. When you do that with fruit, it makes it last a year instead of, if you can get through a year without eating it, which is never a thing. You talked about the oven, you talked about the car. Is the dehydrator equipment the main thing? The dehydrator is like the fancy version of all that. It's nice that you can do it without a dehydrator. We have like two dehydrators. We have two dehydrators. One big. One has 16 trays. It's a big commercial dehydrator and it's really nice to have that. You can set the temperature exactly at what you want it to timer. It'll turn off when it needs to turn off and you just go check it. We just like to throw out these other methods because we don't want, you know, oh, I have to buy some big, fancy piece of equipment to be a limiting factor for people. You can do a lot of this stuff without the equipment with what you already have in your house. Yeah. And it's a good gateway, or entry to the whole thing. I hate to jump around, but I'll go back to one of the other misconceptions about food preservation. Yeah. Another good one would be that food preservation means you're putting something on the pantry for a rainy day. Food preservation can just mean putting something into a different form so it can be enjoyed in a different way, like the fruit leather. We don't preserve fruit leather for the purpose of having it for years. We do it so the kids will have easy to access healthy snacks for the next couple of weeks. That's still food preservation. It's not just filling a pantry. Would you hydration? I think of fruits, you know, dried apples and all that stuff. But is it much broader than I'm thinking in my narrow view? Dehydration you can use for herbs, which everybody uses dry herbs in their little bottles. You can use it for onions and garlic, which are kind of like herbs, but kind of not. But people grow a lot of you can make onion powder, garlic powder, or just like diced and dehydrated. And then it's like that's something people buy. Yeah. To dehydrate it on you. You can make your own like French onion dip mix, which I do that. And then so that that's the hydrate. And then all the fruits everybody loves their dehydrated fruits. And the reason it usually stops there is because if you dehydrate things like green beans or carrots, they take longer to rehydrate. So you have to be cooking them into like a soup or something that's going to sit there with lots of liquid to get it back to like a not chewy gross. Lathery. Yeah, lathery. Yeah, you don't want to be lathery. But people used to dehydrate green beans all the time. Like they'd string them up and hang them and they'd dry them that way. And then they would cook them all day on the stove. And that's how they would get them back to to edible. And that's why really mushy green beans are a thing that a lot of people like that came from when they used to dehydrate green beans and had to cook them all day on the stove to make them edible again. Yeah. Throw it in with a with a ham hawk on the stove and they cook for two days and it just turns to mush. It turns to mush. That's where you get your right. Your dehydrate green beans back to edible. Yeah, okay. They call them leather bridges because when they're dried, they are inedible. They are just a piece of leather. But they last all winter. So you can put them up and it doesn't cost any extra. People would just leave them hanging in their house. You can just hang them on the side of the wall or in a doorway and they'll just stay there forever. Not the dust off. I forget anything. All right. Those are the big ones. I mean, you can take really. Yeah. The other thing I was going to say was tomatoes. I was starting to say, oh, we wouldn't want to dry the tomatoes because we wouldn't use them. But actually, when you're canning tomatoes and you peel them and you cut out cores and peels and you're just going to throw that stuff away, you can stick that in the blender and then dehydrate that into a powder. Dehydrate it and blend it again. So it becomes a tomato powder and you can use that to make tomato paste for recipes. You just put a little bit of water in it and it becomes like the consistency of canned tomato paste. Wow. We're just a little more water, vinegar and sugar and you've got ketchup. Yeah. Nothing goes to waste at your house does it? No. Gosh. We also have pigs. So we really don't think that's really nothing goes away. It's true. True, true. All right. So salty and you mentioned that along with dehydration is one of the only two ways that things used to be able to be preserved is salt. Salting is still a thing. Is that common? So salting, I mean, salting is kind of how you get bacon. So it's like not necessarily very much used in the garden in that sense, but salting is related to fermenting and when it comes to vegetables. Like the amount of salt you put in the water and then you put or on the vegetables and to pull the penny on the moisture content. It's all connected. Yeah. We could take salting right into fermentation, but before we make that jump, I would throw out one of our favorite things in our house that we use daily that would fall into salting would be herb salts. We take tons of fresh basil, put it in the blender, make a paste out of it, mix that with kosher salt, like really coarse kosher salt and dry it slowly. And the salt sucks the moisture out of the herbs the same way we suck it out of me. It's our one of reals you're preserving. And makes the salt taste like the herbs. And the salt turns green. It's the best thing ever. We don't even use plain salt in our house. And don't stop with basil or regano time. We mix those up. We make we make a salt with basil or regano time, garlic and onion and call it pizza salt. And it tastes just like pizza. You put that on anything and it makes it taste like pizza. Okay. So I read your book, but I didn't read all the recipes. Is that in the book too? Yes. It is. Okay. It is the basil salt. The basil salt. Basil salt where you start. Yeah. We made jalapeno salt before. Though jalapeno peppers and the blender make a paste out of it. Yeah. And the... And the candy, apple, onion and salt that we've... Oh, God, you're killing me. And so you mix it together. You put the paste in, you put the salt in and where do you dry it? You can actually, if you get the, you could dry it in the oven. You could dry it in the dehydrator. We put it in the freeze dryer and we've also just left the tray on the counter and stirred it. You know. Perseveral barriers. Perseveral barriers for a few days. Because the salt is doing the work of it. And you're just feeding it out by putting it in a warm dry... And you would just put a fan on it. What you don't want to do is get it hot. When I mentioned earlier, the 110, 120 degrees, that was more for this. If you get it to warm, your herbs will turn brown. Yeah. They don't taste as good. They don't taste as good. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. And these are the apples. starting room right now. So be ready to go. I'll be adding some good self. Yeah, seriously, I love it. We probably should do another episode of this at your place in person in all. We can do taste testing. Once you start making these salts, you'll never stop. We came across some quicksale at the grocery store, Limes, and we made Limes Salt. Oh, man. We've been meeting from the Limes, the zest, and the juice. Mix that all together and put it with the salt in. You must have a lot of different salt flavors in your cupboard or something. Oh, yeah. So you just decide what do you want that ex now? What salt flavor are you in the mood for that night? That that happens. Basically, yeah. And we, so the other part of our, of what we do is our farm is a agritourism destination. Yeah. We have a farm. We teach classes. We let people, we have a e-pick flower farm. So we have a lot of other things besides just this. And we sell their herb salts in our little farm store. And they're one of our more popular items. I would think so. Really easy to make more than even our family can eat. Oh, yeah. It's something you make a lot of. And I'm working on how to market this Limes Salt to bars for a market. Seriously, that's the first thing I thought of when you said that. We don't go to fermentation. Yeah. So fermentation is just a natural progression from salting, really. You're just replacing the bad bacteria with good bacteria like in yogurt. You're replacing the. It's not necessarily bad bacteria. Wow. You just want to grow a certain kind for a certain flavor. Uncontrolled. It's as a bacteria that you control. It works better if you were in pastures and milk. And the, in the garden, the two biggest things that people ferment these days are going to be cabbage. You ferment to sourcrow out. Yep. Or kimchi. And the other one would be pickles. Yeah. I fermenting dill pickles as opposed to canning them, keeps them crunchy. They have a lot of good health benefits. It's really good for your gut. What do you want to add to that? So the main thing with modern fermentation is that all of those things, it is recommended that they are refrigerated. So and they will. The official line is the last six months in the refrigerator. I think it's been more than six months since we had cucumbers. And they still have perfectly good pickles in our refrigerator. But we do keep them in the fridge because otherwise they kind of keep fermenting unless they're kept cool. So if you had a good, you know, well-temperature controlled root cellar or something, you could keep your fermented stuff in there, which is probably what people used to do. And that was, that predates canning also because you would ferment in like a crock those big brown things in the oxygen. Or there's like a moat of water at the top and the little bubbles come out or. Well, in your fermenting cucumbers for pickles, is he even involved or you? No, no, it's so you're basically washing your cucumbers. You cut off the ends. There's some enzyme that's in the blossom end of the fruit that you don't want. It makes them bitter. So you cut those off. So you can do the whole pickle as long as you cut off the ends or you can slice them up or do whatever you want. How do you shape you want them? And you put them in a saltwater brine and leave them out for like three to five days usually. It depends on how warm your house is. You just taste them when you want to know if they're ready. Okay. It's like a pickle. Cool. Yeah, and you can add dill too. The saltwater brine is what you need for safety. Mm-hmm. There's the right ratio. The flavoring is up to you. I think that's even ever a book. I think we have a recipe for that. And like with sour crout and pit coal, sour, sour. Kimchi. Kimchi. Sour crouted kimchi. You chop up the cabbage and just put the salt on the cabbage and the water comes out of the cabbage. So you don't even have to add liquid into that. Oh. Both of the time. It depends if you're eating out that water. Yeah, if your cabbage is really dry, there's like alternate instructions or it'd be like, oh, if it does this, add this. Okay. Okay, cool. It's so good. Yeah. It's a piece like magic. It's another one of those that, you know, people think of it as what you get at your local Asian restaurant, but you can make it in so many different ways. And it doesn't even just have to be cabbage. Last year, I made a lot of cucumber kimchi, which was so good. It's really just fermenting it. Yeah, it's just fermented and with different seasonings. Yeah. You can be red hot. That's where I was going. It doesn't necessarily have to be hot pepper, but it doesn't necessarily have to be spicy. Okay. We're going to move through these other ones. So we get through the seven. Freezing was one we talked about earlier. Is there anything you wanted to add to that? You just have to look into what has to be blanched before you freeze it because, yeah, if you don't blanch certain foods, your result is going to be not good. Right. Water bath canning would touched on. Yep. So water bath canning is for high acid foods. Okay. If you are ever confused about that, go back to Google. What are high acid foods that will just tell you? But it's mostly most fruits, apples, peaches, pears, tomatoes. They say that peppers are low acid. There's a number. It's a number, yeah. As long as your food reads less or higher than that, that's the number. But apples are one that surprises a lot of people that they can water bath can applesauce. And then you can also water bath can peaches and peach sauce. And peaches and water, like the canned peaches you buy at the store, like fruit cups and stuff that kids like that can all be done with a water bath can. Okay. Pie fillings also. Mm-hmm. The list goes on. We do a lot of pie fillings when we have a lot of apples. We'll just a quart jar of apple pie filling fills an 9 inch pie perfectly. Pressure canning. That's the one that has the bump, bump, bump. But not anymore because they fixed that. Hotter and pressure canners are very safe. What's the purpose of the pressure canner? What is its unique quality? You're basically getting the water hotter than water bath canning. The temperature in the canner. Yeah. You're bringing the temperature up high enough to kill the bottleism. It's the same concept as a steam engine. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. When you water bath can, you're getting your fruit up to about that temperature. When you pressure can, you're bringing that water through the use of pressure up to about 240 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. It's like that. It varies based on the engine. It's just killing a whole different level of bacteria that the acid doesn't take care of. A lot of the bacteria that can thrive in the absence of acid, in those high acid foods. Low acid, low oxygen environments. Yeah. They will be killed off above that 212. They can survive at 212 degrees. So is this another Google search when we know whether we need to go above water bath? You're just looking low acid, what needs to be pressure can, or what would happen. There are all sorts of people on the internet that don't follow the rules. That's personal. Really? Rebel canning. Rebel canning. Yeah. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, Rebel canning is a certain amount of sugar. And a lot of the Rebel canners are using the science because the people who test the recipes and put them out there aren't going to test everything you would ever want to do. Right. They test the most common things and they put out recipes and then they say things like you can you can can this salsa recipe in a pint, but you can't do it in a court. It's not safe, but it's only not safe because they didn't test it. Oh, okay. I get it. If you use other things like, well, if this was a tomato sauce and not a salsa, and these are the rules for courts of tomato sauce, and I just like adjust a little bit like you can't add a whole bunch of extra peppers, but you can replace some of the onions with peppers because the onions and peppers follow the same rule in that jar. That's like a random example, but and you can adjust the herbs to make it taste more like salsa instead of like tomato sauce. And that's how we make our tomato soup. We're actually using a salsa recipe, but taking out the spicy peppers and adding more basil. And not like obscene amounts of basil, but enough that it's still within the parameters. So it's safe to do. Yeah. Ooh. I guess some experience really comes in handy over time, right? I thought where you start. That's not where you start, but it shouldn't scare people. Yeah. If we can learn it from Google, so can you. And with pressure canning, like that's how people are able to pressure can their own soups and stews because you can safely can all of those ingredients. So you take the ingredient with the longest processing time, and that's what you can't it for. So like meat usually has longest time, it's usually like 90 minutes or something ridiculous like that. So if you're making like a mixed veggie soup or a chili or something, you put all your ingredients in there and then you set the timer for whatever is the longest ingredient. Yeah. Not the beans, but the meat in the jelly. The other thing to look for in a canner is it's called a weighted gauge canner. So you have a weight and you also have a gauge. So then you have a the gauge will show you the pressure inside, which you can you can can without being able to know what the pressure is because the weight will jiggle when it gets to a certain pressure. Oh. So, but if you have both, then redundancy. Like because you know you're it's right because two things are telling you right. Yeah. And you can have your gauge tested at the extension offices if you are concerned about it or it's older. Yeah. Come by anyone. But they yeah, we have we have an all American canner is the brand that we have. It's a newer one and we just bought new seals gauge and everything just replacement. Yeah. Because it's a couple of years old. We use it a lot. I bet. And it doesn't have a gasket like a lot of them. It has the has the safety seal valve and the gauge. Yeah, but it doesn't have a a gasket around where it seals. It's a metal on metal seal. Yeah. And you just kind of oil it and it's like one less thing to fail. That's just like a rubber gasket and it's so the if pressure gets out of hand, it'll blow that gasket and it'll shoot steam across the room and it'll scare you. But the point is it's safe. The last one is freeze drying. You know, when I'm hiking on the Appalachian Trail in my backpack, I've got my freeze dried ready to eat meals and they're good. What although when you're starving and even hiking for 25 miles, anyway, so tell us about that process and what do we know there? So when you buy them, they're also expensive. As long as you have that freeze dryer, which is an initial investment, I won't lie, they're not inexpensive to get started. Like what is it price range? You can get a small one right now these days that would be good for two or three people. For I think I saw an email the other day there on sale for like 15 or 16 or $1. Yeah, more than I was expecting you to say. Oh, no, and that's cheaper. Our first one was they have small, medium, large and extra large. We had of a large that we got back in 2021 and it was a little over 3,000. And then an extra large we got and that was over 4. But the extra large is overkill for almost everything. Yeah, we even a lot for us. Wow. So by during peak harvest time, we're running both of them constantly. And we fill it up, but it's a lot more work to fill up the extra large because it holds so much more food and you have to chop all that food and get it ready to go in and just that alone, like the large is a lot more manageable. I would implore you because you can not only freeze dry components, you can freeze dry meals just like your foods that you buy to go hiking. If you take the cost of those foods and divide that out over a couple thousand dollars, you would probably just find it wouldn't take you too long to pay for one seriously. Plus all the other things you can use it for. And you can go in with a friend or neighbor and split the cost and both use it. Yeah. So tell me the process, the word freezes in there and I'm totally ignorant on the process. Is it? Yes. So it's an appliance. Okay. It sits on a table. It's kind of loud. You don't want to have it in your kitchen. It needs to be in a side room. But what it is, it's a sealed chamber that is, it's pressure sealed. So once you close the door on it with the food inside, it freezes the food very quickly. Wow. Bring it down to about negative, what, 30 degrees, 40 degrees very quickly. So the food flash freezes. Okay. Then it has a vacuum pump hooked up to it and it sucks all the air out of that chamber. So it's under vacuum. Then it brings the temperature up very slowly. And as the temperature comes up, the water that's in the food sublimates and it actually sticks to the outside of that chamber. So when you open up after the cycle is over, you're going to have the food that's freeze dried like you're used to seeing. And there's going to be a layer of pure ice around the outside of the chamber. And you let that melt. It melts into a bucket. You throw it out. You take your food out first. And then you repeat the cycle. You've got to keep the food dry. Yeah. Take it out while everything in there is still. It's the word freeze dried. It's not an oily food. Whether you're freeze drying onions or you're freeze drying cucumbers or tomatoes. Or anything else, the water is just water. It's not removing anything from the food, but the water almost just a tiniest bit. But sometimes you can't even tell. So the food that's left is devoid of moisture. But it's all of the flavor is left to there. Yeah. If you think about it, if you throw a tomato in the freezer and you take it out and let it thaw, it turns mushy. Yes, it does. And the water comes out. Yeah. But that's tomato juice that comes out. And there's water, but you can tell that came out of a tomato. It's not just water. Right. Whereas if it's freeze dried, it's only taking out the water. So it's a lot more potent. That's why freeze dried fruits are so popular. And freeze dried candy. You've probably seen freeze dried skittles and things like that. The reason they're so popular, people freeze dry candy because when you take a bite of it, it's like the most flavorful skittle you've ever had because it's just super concentrated. So if you're freeze drying a tomato, it's going to take the water out, believe the juice is a juice heavier? What's how does it know? How does it know? It leaves all the solids. All the solids. All the parts out the juice. Yeah. So if you think about tomato juice, if you put tomato juice in a freeze dry, you're going to be left with the powder. Yes. Okay. It'll come out as like a, like we freeze dry bone broth. And that like looks like a complete liquid. But then it, it comes out like a styrofoam sheet. Mm-hmm. But the same thing would be with a fruit or vegetable juice. So freeze drying, like I said, not only can you freeze dry any of the components or any of the individual foods that you grow or you, or by you can freeze dry meals. You can freeze dried chili or stew or casseroles as long as it's not high in fat or oils. Too high in fat. Yeah, or sugar. There's some sugar issues like the candies puff up. We tried to freeze dry a sweet and spicy hot sauce. And that was about 50% sugar and it exploded all over the entire freeze dry. Yeah. Not worth looking at the comments. We can't freeze dry. Like usually they say straight butter, chocolate or honey. Yeah. Those are the things that tell you not to freeze dry. You can freeze dry milk and cheese and all of the vegetables and fruits. So other than the. You're added sugar. Kind of the things you mentioned that you can't do. It sounds like the sky is the limit on anything else. It is. But we freeze dry like all of our vegetables. The zucchini, peas, beans, broccoli, green beans, carrots, potatoes. And you can rehydrate all of those and mix them back together as stir fry. You don't have to just use them in soups and casseroles and things like you cook them. Like you. It's best to both stir fry every day. I mean, it's a part of our daily meal. And those are all made with freeze dried in the winter. In the winter. There are obviously a reason for us in the summer. But yeah. And what is it stored in? We store most of them in my large. I knew you were going to say that. But my large is the backup. Okay. The main reason we're storing them in my large is because we have them. Because we've done so much canning and because it's easy to grab them and pour the water directly into the jar. So if you do it with mylar, which is a little bit more accessible because it's cheaper. And you can reuse mylar bags also. Then you just dump it in a bowl and put your water in there. Cool. And I do most of the cooking. So when I go to make our stir fry, I'll go in the pantry. I'll get two jars of green beans, a jar of broccoli, probably two jars of sliced squashes of zucchini and usually one other jar of something. Some okra or some corn. Or okra corn or snap peas or usually one other one. I'll rehydrate them, just pour them full of water. You're just letting sit for about, I don't know, 15 minutes on the counter. Run it through a strainer, shake off the excess water and you're ready to throw them in the wok or hot skillet. Wow. Magic. That's where the freeze drying like really leveled up what we were able to eat and enjoy out of our pantry. That's why we say now if we didn't have a freeze dryer, we would have a freeze dryer. We'll just buy another one. It's like if you refrigerate or breaks, you're not going to just go without a refrigerator. We're not going to go without a freeze dryer. What an interesting conversation and I just imagine your hardest thing about meal time is just choosing from what you have what to make. I mean, because it's not like there's any shortage there, it sounds like and you just get to experiment every time. The things we didn't talk about, but Stacey has a lot of food allergies beyond just we mentioned gluten briefly and some of the kids. Yeah. But going out to eat is, I mean, when's the last time you ate an arrest warrant? Been years. And it didn't go well. So you get into so many things that can be added in or have trace elements in a restaurant. If you have food allergies, this is a great way to control what you put in your body. And not have stress about it. And not have to stress about it. Yeah. A lot of people, you get into clean eating. We talked about that as a reason, but a lot of people have allergies to foods, but those allergies aren't necessarily to the food. It's to the pesticides or it's to the added them, some things like that. So it just removes that from the equation. We've had a really nice conversation and we've had quite the length of a conversation in a good way. But we're going to wrap it there because I think you've given us a ton of information. I'm inspired and motivated and I think I'm going to move this up on that to do list and see if I can start expanding my practicing of some of these preservation skills. They're really good. And I love your book. I think it's really well done and really accessible. You did a great job with that book. So congratulations and thank you for writing it. We appreciate that. It was a lot of work, but it was, I know. It was a labor of love. It's not just hyperbole. I mean, it was, it's something where, obviously, you can tell by talking to us. It's something we're really passionate about. So the idea of sharing this with other people and the thought that if we can get people that we've never encountered to think about things differently and maybe change a little bit of that behavior is really exciting to us. All right. That was a lot of information there and a great book that really covers it all. Again, the title of Stacey and Jeremy's new book is The Preservers Garden. And I think you will be very pleased with all that it covers. The show notes for this episode can be found exclusively on our website, joegardener.com. Look for the podcast tab and this is episode number 456. And the show notes, you will see pictures that Stacey and Jeremy provided and other related links to our conversation. And the notes themselves are written specifically from the conversation that we had in this podcast. Much better than just a transcript. But if you'd like to watch my conversation with Stacey and Jeremy, you can do that on our YouTube channel, joegardener TV. We also have our YouTube channel for my television series, Growing a Greener World. Just look for our channel, G-G-W-TV. And there you can binge watch over 200 episodes of our Emmy award winning series about organic gardening and living a more environmentally conscious life. On social media, you can find me on Instagram, at joegardener. And I have just one announcement this week, master seed starting, our premier course in the online gardening academy is still open. So if you think you missed the sign up window, you haven't, but we are getting ready to wrap that up. But if you really want to feel like you are totally equipped with the information and the mentorship that you need to start or improve your skills, this is the only course on seed starting like it anywhere. But the best next step is to learn more about the course. And if you like it, enroll at joegardener.com slash mss. That's joegardener.com slash mss. All right, that's going to do it for today. Thanks to Amy Princess, Christine LaFont and Brendan O'Reilly, as always, for their help with the production of the podcast. And thank you for joining me today. My goal for every episode is to help you take the guesswork out of gardening. And in this case, canning and preserving too by teaching you the why do behind the how to so that you can become a better, smarter, more confident gardener. I'll be back here again next Thursday for another episode of the joegardener show. And I look forward to having you right back here to join me for that. Until then, have a great week. Take care. And I will see you back here really soon. Thanks for listening to the joegardener show. The podcast where it's all about gardening and learning to grow like a pro, no experience required. For more information, podcasts, and how to videos, visit us online at joegardener.com.