Kate Muller

We are renovation our kitchen and there are a few things I am doing to make it easier for homesteading food preservation projects and aging in place.
-Building our pantry cabinet 14" deep so we can easily store quart canning jars 3 deep, hold most of our small appliances, and seasonally used kitchen equipment without stuff getting lost in the back.  

- Installing a butcher block counter top on an adjustable height desk with locking wheels.    This will be used so I can sit while doing large amount of food prep.  Having it be adjustable and moveable means it can also be used in the dinning room when hosting large family gatherings.  

- Zoning my soon to be larger kitchen to have the sink, dishwasher and dish cabinet closer to the eat in dining area.  
The fridge, electric kettle, coffee supplies, food storage containers, and air fryer on the opposite wall from the sink and range.  This way if other family members can prepare snacks, get beverages, and pack up leftovers out of the way of the main cooking space and food preparation counter. Laying the kitchen out this way will allow more than one person to easily work in it without getting in each other's way.
 
-Measuring all my cookware, food preservation supplies, dishes, and figuring out where I am going to store them in the new kitchen.  This way I can order the cabinets to fit the items I need and  where I want them.

-Making my cabinet under the sink be open to the tile floor and have 180 degree doors so I can sit on a stool when I am having a bad day and still be able to use the sink.  It is also where my compost bucket will live when not in use.

-Ordering my propane range with a side hinge on the oven door for aging in place and easier access to clean the oven. We get power outages due to weather events so I want a cooktop I can use without electricity.

-Adding an additional farm sink to the garage with a clay sediment catchment under it.  This way I will be able to keep all the sand from clogging my drain when washing root crops.  

-Adding an insulated root cellar/chill room to the back of the garage instead of getting a giant fancy refrigerator.

- Choosing durable easy to clean and maintain materials like soapstone counters, hickory cabinets,  tile backsplash, butcher block, stainless steel, and vintage solid brass.  

-Layered task lighting and lots of outlets.

-Adding 6" deep window sill that is waterproof so I can keep plants, and dish cleaning supplies on it.
-Lower cabinets will be all drawers.  

-Adding a much needed broom closet

-Keeping my existing large single basin sink, smallish refrigerator, and dishwasher.
 
-Tile flooring with some texture so it isn't slippery when wet.

We may box in one corner of the kitchen so we don't have to deal with a corner cabinet. We would use that space to create a small linen closet in the small bathroom on the other side of the wall.

Dehydrated cherries are one of my favorites.  Since you have to pit them they have a giant hole in them so don't take forever to dry and they have a chewy texture. I do use an electric dehydrator for them.

I enjoy dehydrated pear slices as much as dehydrated apple slices.  

Led lights under the upper cabinets.  We did this over counter of our main prep space. It solves the problem of your body and the upper cabinets casting a shadow on the work surface from the center of the ceiling light.  

A stainless steel swivel  towel rack that can swing over the sink. I use this to hang dry canning rings, reusable food storage bags, buckets, and of course hand towels.  It is bolted to the window frame above my sink and is very useful.

A magnetic locker pencil holder is great for keeping marking tools near the counter where you package food for storage.  I have one on the side of my fridge that is next too my main prep space in my kitchen.  I has sharpies and dry erase markers in it.  

I also have a magnetic dry erase panel on the front of my fridge that we use for various cooking messages and lists.

I use a pretty bathroom sized trash can for my utensil storage on counter top.  It is taller, less tippy, and holds more than the standard sized utensil holder.  I keep all the utensils I use on the cook top in that container.  It makes them easy to grab while cooking and frees up limited drawer space.

Wire basket on the counter for clean rags.  Having them in plain site and easy to grab prevents paper towel use.

Food is as simple as anything that you regularly eat that requires minimal inputs to cook and stores on a shelf. Most people in the US don't really cook anymore so they may have this stuff in the cupboards already.  Just get more and rotate  every few months.

Here are some things to go along with the food.  These are  things I have used have during 3 to 10 day outages power or municipal tap water.  If you go camping you may have much of this list already.

-Water.  I fill all my giant stock pots with lids along with any clean jugs, bottles, and large jars.  I also fill the bathtub as the storm started. This wound up being our supply washing water and finished out as flushing water.  This was on top of whatever bottled beverages we had on hand.  
-Camp shower. The kind that is a bag style and has a nozzle out of the bottom.  These are great to fill with water and hang near a sink or in your shower/tub so you have a way to easily wash your hands and rinse your dishes.
-Camping cook stove and fuel for it for cooking.  I used it near an open window with no issues.
-Coffee beans,  French press and manual coffee grinder will make dealing with everything else easier if you live with someone who needs there morning cup of coffee.
-Some thin walled pots, frying pan and a stainless steel tea kettle can reduce you fuel needs to heat stuff up or quickly cook some eggs.
-large chunks of ice in the freezer.  They get moved to the fridge or cooler when the power goes out to keep everything cooler longer.
-Disposable cups, dishes, and flatware are great when water and fuel to heat the water are at a premium.  
-Invertor that hooks up to the car battery.  We have used this to keep a fridge and chest freezer cold, charge small things, and run a nebulizer.  This only works is you can park near your door and safely let the car idol while you run the invertor.
-Coolers are great if you lose power in a cold winter.  You can move everything out of the fridge or freezer and store it out side assuming you have a secure spot for it.  You can move some ice and foods that need to get eaten into the cooler so people are not constantly opening the fridge.  It is a great way to slowly defrost frozen leftovers so you have easy meals a few days later into the outage.
-The microwave is an insulted box. I would use it like a hay box to cook stuff like pasta, or rice.  Heat up whatever you are cooking to a boil while using a pot lid. Instead of letting it simmer on the camp stove I would pull it off the heat and tuck the covered pot into the microwave to finish cooking.  It takes a little more patients but it conserves fuel.  

 

We are renovating our kitchen and here are a few things we are doing to with the kitchen remodel we working on.

We are changing the tile floor to a style with some texture to it so it isn't as slippery when wet.

6" Wide cabinet hardware that is easy to grab onto.  For knobs I am using larger smooth styles that are easy to grab.  I am using second hand vintage solid brass hardware that all coordinates together even though it doesn't all match.

Lower cabinets will be all drawers except for the one cabinet that holds the pressure canner and stock pots.  This is not a low cost option since we will be going with heavier duty hardware that soft closes.  It will make aging in place easier since I will not want to give up all the cooking I do.  

The pantry cabinet will have 13" to 14" deep shelves.  This way it stuff won't get lost in the back and it can easily store  quart canning jars 3 deep comfortably.  It is also a good interior depth to hold the few small appliances, serving dishes, mixing bowls, and other items that don't quite fit in a standard upper cabinet kitchen cabinet in the US.  

The kitchen sink will be made into a custom cabinet with no floor in it.  The doors under the sink will be on 180 degree hinges.  This way I will be able to sit on a stool and still be able to use the sink if I am having a bad day.   The tile flooring will extend under the sink and dishwasher to reduce the chances of water damage.  The tile floor under the sink will also make for a good home for the compost bucket.  

I am also splurging  on a propane range with a side hinge on the oven door.  It has nice big knobs for controls and no touch screen buttons.  

Instead of a island we will be putting a butcher block counter top on an adjustable height desk frame.  We may put locking wheels on it too.  

Lighting for the ceiling lights is LED on dimmer switches.  Wall sconces will be used as task lighting. I am thinking some sort of swing arm lamps over the kitchen counters.  We will also put some LED lights under the upper cabinets.  

In placing the cabinets we will set them a foot in from one of the doorways. This will make it much easier to enter or leave the kitchen while using various mobility devices.  

There will be a 60" pathways through the kitchen.  This allows me plenty of room to move around.  It also allows for the fridge, electric tea kettle, and air fryer to set up across from the main cooking area on the other side of the kitchen.  This way when I am doing a large food preservation projects other household members can get snacks, hot beverages, or heat up a meal and not be in the way of the main cooking.  

It is 11 years later since I posted on this thread and I have learned few things.  To sum things up 3 or 4 crops won't cut it.  Not everything has a good year every year.  Just when I think I have gotten everything figured out the garden does something new to frustrate and challenge me. .  We have bumper crops and crop failures and my garden is designed to account for that.  My cooking and food preservation skills have developed to also handle the variation.  I am at the point that my garden produces 75% to 100% of the vegetables we eat in a year.  It also produces about half the fruit we eat in a year and a tiny amount of nuts we eat in a year.  We also keep laying hens for compost production as much as the eggs.  


What the best crops you can grow is not only what will thrive in your garden but what you can preserve in format that you will be happy to eat weeks or months from now. Water bath and pressure canning, dehydrating, freezing, fermenting, and basement/root cellar storage, are all methods I use to eat what we have produced this year.  The need to preserve so much food in a two and a half month marathon every year has skewed my gardening choices over the years.   We fresh eat out of the garden May through October but leaves 6 months of figuring out how to avoid supermarket produce.  

Fruit Trees
We have lost so many to cold winters, storm damage, and disease that I now only buy them on dwarf root stock and treat them as shrubs that need periodic replacement.  With the variability of our last spring frost date we have to plan for no fruit on large percentage of our trees. I compensate by planting early, middle, and late producing plants of any type.  Pest pressure is a big issue with fruit trees here.  Woodchucks, voles, porcupines, racoons, deer, and all the endless bug damage make fruit trees hard work.  These are all real problems in my fenced in garden.  The deer are tend to jump the fence in drought years so they are not too much of a problem.  We have apples, pears, peaches that have produced fruit. We have a few other things that have not been successful yet so time will tell.

Vines.  
We have 3 grape vines and only one of the 3 does well in any given year.  We get grapes every year but it is not the same variety each year.  Also they ripen at different times so the not so good producers still give us enough for snacking.  
Our hardy kiwi just started producing last year and we picked a couple of gallons of fruit off of it this fall.  It is our lates fall fruit.  

Shrubs and Canes.
These are the big winners in my garden for fruit production.  Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, high bush cranberries, elderberries, aronia berries, currants, and gooseberries, are all easy for me to grow and hard to kill.  I can go out in the yard and snack on some kind of berry from early July to the end of September with periodic larger harvests for preserving.  The ROI is great as long as you are around the beat the birds to the harvest.  

Strawberries are fantastic as long as you propagate them and plant them in a place that you cat likes to hang out.  The patch that has the least pest pressure is right near my front door where my cat can hang out under the rhubarb leaves and chase the chipmunks and birds. It is also ground cover in my blueberry patch. Both the blueberries and strawberries enjoy wood chip mulch.   If I plant strawberries in my lower garden beds the critters get most of the berries.   I have one rhubarb plant that I neglect and it largely is a shady hang out spot for my cat in the strawberry/blueberry patch.  Rhubarb is easy to grow but I rarely use it.

Asparagus I am still trying to figure out how to keep it happy and thriving.  It is something I am finding I need to plant more of every 5 years or so.  I love it and I am hoping to get to a point where we grow enough to excess to preserve.

Bunching and walking onions. I love having these in the garden.  If you just harvest the green leaves they are some of the first and last greens to be harvested in my garden every year.

Hazelnuts.  These have just started producing and I need to figure out how to beat the chipmunks and squirrels. to the harvest.  They are burying the nuts so this year we started finding seedlings so I am not too worried about the lack of hazelnuts.   We also planted Chincapins last year and they survived but are still years away from producing anything.  

Herbs.
Creeping thyme, sage, chives, garlic chives, oregano, mints, dill, winter savory, lovage,  lemon balm, catnip and horseradish are all thriving to the point where they are becoming invasive and a weed problem in parts of my garden.  I am thrilled to have this problem.

Annual plantings beyond what we eat fresh through the season. Anything that is easy to save seeds is an easy win.  Anything that is hard to find or expensive in my local supermarkets is a priority in my garden plan.  

Easy to grow and easy to store in a New England basement include music garlic, storage onions, short season sweet potatoes, and butternut squash. We also grow Delicata squash but that is not always successful and doesn't store as long as butternut squash.  Potatoes are harder to grow due to pests and disease here so I prefer to buy them locally in the fall and store them.  

Canning vegetables.
Upstate Oxheart Tomatoes, Jalapenos, Beaver Dam Peppers, Serrano, Peppers, Cayenne peppers,  bell peppers, pickling cucumbers, onions, garlic.  This covers the tomato based sauces, salsa, relish, BBQ sauces, and chili that I put up every year.

Fermenting vegetables garlic, cucumbers, and cabbage.  

Frozen vegetables that I grew include  green beans, bell peppers, broccoli, tomatillos, Red Russian Kale, spinach, snap peas, and Perpetual Spinach Chard. Basil and garlic scapes gets made into pesto and frozen in 8 oz jelly jars.  I will also caramelize a large batch of onions that I know won't store well and freeze them in 4 oz jelly jars to use for quick meals.      If I have slightly damaged root crops that won't store I will blanch and freeze them. So I wind up with some carrots, celeriac, and parsnips in the freezer every fall.  

Root veggies like carrots, celeriac, and parsnips are currently stored in the refrigerator, frozen, or dehydrated for soup if I have had an better than expected yield.  

Excess herbs, green onions, zucchini, summer squash, garlic scapes, carrots, celeriac, fruits, berries, and peppers,  get dehydrated to use over the winter too.  

I love dual purpose veggies.  Celeriac stems and leaves get dehydrated for soups and stock.  Rattlesnake pole beans are eaten as green beans till I have enough in the freezer and the rest ripen and are harvested as pinto beans.  

So it has been over a year since I have posted here on Permies.  It has been a hard year and my garden has suffered for it.  I managed to break the spacer in my replaced knee 9 months before we figured out why my knee joint was so loose and painful.  As a result much of my late summer and fall garden work never happened.  My knee revision surgery happened in May.  
We scaled back the  garden to just fresh eating for the season with a few small exceptions.
I managed to get the greenhouse planted before my surgery.  My husband and a friend planted out the 4 small raised beds in the main garden for me 2 weeks after the surgery.
We installed drip irrigation in the greenhouse and everything had to survive just with the automatic drip irrigation for at least 2 months.  My wonderful husband is a really good engineer and a good landscaper but he isn't a gardener. With having to take care of me while working full time the garden had to thrive on it's own.  

Things were going well and I started getting back into the garden after 2 months. Mostly to harvest.  We realized that we will need wider foot paths between beds so I have an easier time walking with a crutch or a cane in the future. Not only will this make for safer walking but the pathways can be mowed now that most local sources of free wood chips have dried up in our area.

At the 3 month mark of my recover I managed to trip in my garden and fall. I sprained the newly replaced knee, broke 2 bones in my ankle, and tore a ligament.  This happened less than 3 weeks after I was cleared to drive from the knee replacement.  So I am on crutches and can't put any weight on my ankle.  Being out of commission during the 6 busiest harvest weeks has not been fun.  

The upside is my husband is becoming a much better cook.  Beyond that running the entire homestead, taking care of me, doing all the house hold chores, driving me to appointments on top of  his day job has been very stressful for my sweet and wonderful husband.  He now has a much deeper understand of all I regularly do on a day to day basis. He is building me a beautiful raised bed with a cold frame to fit it.  It will go in front of my front porch near my herb bed. I will be able to garden while sitting on the porch or on the paver covered pathway on the other side.  

We have hired a young friend of ours  that has recently started his own landscaping business to clear out a bunch of the invasive weeds.  We have also been having him clean up and tarp our annual beds for next year.  This way in the spring when I have 2 good legs in the spring I can focus on getting the first plantings in and getting the rest of the garden back into shape.  

We are reevaluating  how we will design things in the future since my ability to dramatically damage my joints is not going to get better as I age.  Every repair, upgrade, improvement and farm expansion will all be designed to reduce the work load and improve access.  

While this has been a hard year I will recover and I will appreciate the garden even more next year.

The 1816 Year Without a Summer hit New England hard.  Living here now I am grateful that greenhouses, hoop houses, cold frames, and row covers are far easier to obtain and use than they  were in 1816.  

Living in a cold wet climate on the side of a hill we have been developing our homestead to handle wet rainy weather.  We have raised beds  and keep adding organic matter to the glacial sand that we have instead of topsoil. The greenhouse has been amazing for keeping us in fresh veggies for a most of the year. This allows us to focus the main garden for food mostly food preservation crops, perennial fruits, nuts, herbs, and veggies.  

Future plans include more fencing, food forest, a better honey bee housing, and meat production.  Of course this may not help if we have a major climate disrupting event but it will help with our goals of retiring early.

Denise Cares wrote:I agree with what Kate Muller has said about reasons for having supply on hand.  My problem is how to prevent those pesky grain larvae from getting into everything. Even buckets with tight lids do not keep them out. They get into glass jars too. I'm missing the secret. Maybe need to remove the oxygen as many describe. Putting the whole bag of grain thru the freezer before sealing in a bucket would be difficult as freezer space is very limited. So even dividing up the 25 lb sacks would pose a major logistics issue. Multiply that by several large sacks - not feasible. Once a single moth finds "where you keep the goods" (pantry, shed, garage, closet), it's nearly impossible to keep them out thereafter.

We solved the lack of freezer space problem by stocking up on the few grains we use in January.  That way we can freeze the grains in the coldest part of the winter.  We put them in buckets, seal them for storage, and then set them on the bulkhead steps of our basement for a week.  It is cold enough to freeze everything and also critter resistant.  A shed, out building, or porch could be used to freeze the gains if you have enough of a cold snap to freeze it all the way through.

junaid ahmed wrote:It seems like the grain storage problem has already been handled by the local grain elevator, and doesn't really benefit by home storage methods. Flour also seems like a problem that is best solved by the mill. Is there a reason why you want to store more than a month worth of dry grain or flour? Am I missing part of the goal? Or is experimenting with different preservation techniques the goal?

Here are some reasons a household may want to store large quantities grains, legumes, and other shelf stable ingredients.  

Food allergies and dietary restrictions.  If you have to be very careful about which grains you can eat buying in bulk saves money and insures you have the ones you can eat if the supply is seasonal or inconsistent.

If you are growing your own grains, legumes, and other seed based crops you generally harvest the crop all at once and need to store it.  Ideally so you can use it till the next year's crop is ready.

Some households are large and it is a time saver to buy in bulk when you are cooking for larger number of people.  It saves you time to go and get the supplies if you do once every few months or twice a year.  

If you live in a rural area and the local supermarket is a 45 minute drive buying in bulk reduces fuel consumption. If you also produce some of your own food it make sense to buy in bulk for the things you do not produce to reduce long car rides to get supplies.