Alder Burns

Back in my commune days I canned many a load of stuff in my pressure canner over a campfire!  If you're sitting around with friends and some wine, poking at a campfire all evening anyway, might as well make it productive!  It isn't really that hard....you need to set it on an elevated grill and then dither with small wood and moving embers around to regulate the heat just so!  As others have posted, a simple propane burner or a camp stove works even easier, and you can set it up temporarily indoors if need be.
    But as a long-time (40 plus years now!) canner, canning is best for certain things and not for others.  It's a great way to put up large amounts of meat, certain fruits, broth and soups, long cooked things like tomato sauce, stuff like that.  For most green veggies it depletes the vitamins and turns them mushy...corn and green beans are the only exceptions.

I've got a bunch of birdhouse gourds hanging as we speak...vine mostly dead now but gourds still green and slowly drying.  The vine did double duty on a rough trellice of sticks against the south wall of the house for shade, now late in the season largely replaced by moonflowers.  I'll soon be reading up on how to work with them and make them suitable for martins and treating them to last.  Bottle gourds of all sorts are a very ancient and very cool plant....I believe the latest research places their origin in Africa, but they found their way all over the world to whatever climate they could grow in, well before Columbus and his ilk and their "voyages of discovery".

A good way to do these is to try to find somewhere that they self-collect so you don't have to pick them up one at a time....sweeping them up off a pavement, perhaps.  I got a bunch last spring that ended up where the downspout of a gutter dumped out.  

Among all the other good ideas here the only one I would add right off is discovering cardboard as insulation.  Maybe not the best, but it's free, easily replaced, and easy to cut and work with.  In particular, cutting pieces to fit over unnecessary, west and north facing windows in the winter.  I made panels of 3-5 thicknesses, duct taped together on the edges, just the right size to press into the window wells from the outside, with a couple of pieces of wood jammed into place to help hold them.  The windows are enough under the overhang to keep the cardboard from getting wet except in the worst storms, and wow the difference it made in those rooms.  I wish they were easier to place and remove and I'd be tempted to see if they help in summer heatwaves as well. In comparison this seems to help even more than taping plastic up on the inside, although this does continue to let light in.

After reading about it in multiple places, the other day I decided to try catnip when working in a particularly mosquito infested spot.  Yes catnip.  Just pick sprigs of fresh catnip and rub it all over exposed skin.  Take a few more with you....you will need to do it again after 20-30 minutes.  It works!!

I grew them for two or three years when I lived in California where the summer was hot and dry. Comparing them to ordinary bush beans, which I also sometimes grew, I found that they needed about half the irrigation.  I also grew Hopi blue corn and blue squash and found this was the case for them also, compared to other varieties of corn and winter squash.  These breeds are simply adapted to need less water.  The teparies are mostly a dry bean....I don't think it would work to try to eat them as a green bean pod and all.

I recall one time years ago I moved into a room where the previous tenant had been keeping a dog.  Atrocious fleas!!  Ugh!  So early one morning I got out and cut down every single tall marigold in the yard, and all of a big clump of tansy as well.  I was after "stinky" plants.  It ended up being a wheel barrow full of stuff, for a room the size of an average bedroom.  I threw it around everywhere...under the bed and under the mattress, all over the furniture, up on the shelf of the closet, etc.; and went off to work.  Came home that evening, no fleas.  Not one, and they never came back, not even after I took all the stuff out after a day or two more.

Since I pee in a jug anyway, for use in the gardens, etc. I keep the jug by the bed at night.  That way I can sort of half wake up, roll out and use the jug and go right back to sleep.  It doesn't reduce the frequency, but it's way less of a full wake-up than it would take to get up and walk to the bathroom.

Yes this looks like callery or "bradford" pear.  Some are thorny and some aren't.  Birds eat the tiny pears and spread seed far and wide....many consider it an invasive.  But always useful to a homesteader, for forage and firewood if nothing else.

Out of all imaginable fruits and all kinds of grapes, and 20 years plus doing it, hands down, blueberry is my all time favorite!  Made from dead ripe berries and without any added sugar or water.  
    One of my more surprising successes was a batch made from a bunch of green candied pineapple that was old and being tossed at the place I worked, briefly boiled in some water.  The wine was a weird green color but oh my! and plenty strong!