We very strongly prefer to perform our canning and blanch & freeze efforts outdoors. We’re couped up indoors for so much of the year that if it’s at all tolerable outside, we want to be outside as much as possible.
Yet, sometimes our time, our garden’s progress and the weather aren’t always in agreement. We’d usually just push through and do what needs to be done, regardless of conditions. But, we’ve been slowly advancing things for years now. We finally have a semi-dedicated covered space that we can use to comfortably preserve our food!
We don’t have a nice garage or a shop that we can use to help us with our preservation efforts. You’ll find these northern grade “garage in a box” temporary shelters all over Alaska, building is incredibly expensive and covered space that keeps things out of the snow and rain is like gold to the northerner. We have three of these things!
Years ago, we installed this temporary garage and it was always just a place to put stuff that we didn’t want to get wet or snowed on. You fellow northerners will appreciate this, but we just never had enough time in the year to get it well organized and laid out to where it could be multi-functional working space. Well, we were tired of it and this last weekend, we put in an immense amount of work and fixed that!
We put in the gravel pad flooring, got our shelving set up, palletized everything we could and generally made the space one that could be easily converted into a sheltered workspace. Our “big” freezer is right there, so it’s the perfect spot for us to preserve, regardless of what the weather’s doing! We can use this for both canning and blanch & freeze processes, in pretty much any conditions!
This is our inaugural run, woohoo! We can’t even begin to tell you what a quality of life upgrade this is! For years now, we’ve been preserving in the rain, the dark, the cold, the heat and whatever else Alaska could throw at us. If we were lucky, we’d get a nice, perfect day. But, coming from that, we can truly appreciate what a step up this is.
The overarching lesson here is that you shouldn’t wait for things to be “perfect” to do something. If you can make it work, it’s going to add value to your life. Then, when you get the “better setup,” it’s like you receive such a sigh of relief and there is hardly a more satisfying thing for the soul.
Maybe someday we’ll have the nice shop and a super multi-functional heated space that we can work in. We’re working hard to get there. But, even just a small step up like this is a good step. That’s how things happen in life, one foot in front of the other!
