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Tue, Aug 7, 12 at 23:58
| Hello Harvest Forum frequenters!! I'm so glad to have found this forum. Finding real life people who do canning and abide by current safety practices is pretty hard to come by where I live. I'm grateful to see the information here by those insistent on encouraging food safety. I've been reading this forum all day, and wanted to introduce myself. My name is Ellen, I live in Southeast Missouri. I have 4 children, including a set of twins. I own and operate a greenhouse business and a flower gardening service in my small town, population about 5,000 in the city. I've been in business for 6 years but have been a Horticulturist by student and profession for 10 years. Being insanely busy with flowering plants, greenhouse production, and public gardening as my focus, vegetable gardening and preserving is actually quite new for me. It's been many many years since such a passion has consumed me such as this has!!
As a business owner in this economy, penny pinching every way possible is a MUST. Making every dollar count....Heck, making every dime count, has become a daily norm with every single decision. This same practice has transformed my home management. I'm just flat out tired of spending $30 a day to feed my family food that is over processed, sugar and corn syrup laced, artificial everything, and questionably innacurate nutrition labels that the government allows descreptencies. We're paying money for all that??! Really?! And so the canning and preserving passion took off. I look forward to getting to know each of you! |
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| Well, I just retired from running a commercial greenhouse and nursery. Twenty one years, and several years before that as a grower at another concern. Also used to live in Missouri.........you made me homesick. LOL. However, gardening, and especially food production I was doing before I ever started growing professionally. It was my first love. The canning came as a result. I am also not a fan of processed food, and cook almost entirely from scratch, preferrably with home grown produce. I also raise chickens, have an orchard and bramble patches and grapevines, and nut trees. Dollars count here too. We live as plain as possible and it's a good life. |
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| Hi Ellen and welcome to the forum. Wife and I are just across the border from you in Arkansas and gardening and home food preservation has been our passion for almost 50 years now. Retirement only increased the amount of time we have to do both. Our sons bought into the gardening but took a pass on learning to preserve the food. Fortunately they both married good farm-raised women devoted to gardening and canning too. So now we and our daughters by marriage all work together to raise the next generation of penny-pinchers to understand the importance of hard work and self-sufficiency. Dave |
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- Posted by ellen_inmo 6 (My Page) on Wed, Aug 8, 12 at 22:42
| Very nice to meet you both! Two very well respected profiles on Gardenweb. Calliope, I remember you from many years ago on the Professional forum. You have the greatest candor about you, professional, right to the point, and you rise above any dispute. Ironically, just after reading your kind response, I get my Park Seed Wholesale catalog and right on the front page is a photo of a new Geranium called 'Calliope'. I remember you saying that you raised children of your own, then took in foster children, all the while operating your business! Wow! You and Dave both have a lifestyle I aspire to. SIMPLE. Making something out of nothing. No wasting, recycling, reusing everything, and making every hard earned dollar stretch. A life where a frill truly is a frill. I've learned that you can have daily frills, at home, just by preserving Mother Natures bounty. People can argue the costs and hard work involved in gardening and canning. Those people just don't understand the difference between home grown corn and store bought stuff. Or a vine ripened tomato versus a hot house one. You CANNOT replicate home grown flavor! And my children's interest and excitement in this is the icing on the cake for me. :-) |
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