A lot depends on what natural resources you have around you Kevin. Trees dropping leaves, Wooded areas with mature hardwoods that you can takes some microbe rich top soil from around. If you live somewhere that people bag their grass clippings and leaves for curb side pick up then you have everything you need. Local farms cutting hay that you can talk with the owner about what if anything he uses in those fields. Building soil is a process. I started out about 4 inches of soil and pure sand below that so itās entirely do-able. People think that they have to get enough compost and amended soil to cover their whole growing area. You only need enough to fill the hole you are planting a specific plant in. Let say you are planting a tomato in sand. You could do well with an 8 inch diameter hole 16 inches deep. Leaf mulch in the bottom six inches to absorb the water that otherwise would just keep migrating down and then fill the rest of the hole with even bagged soil. Menardās sells .75 cu ft bags of manure mix for around $2.25 and bags of top soil for about a buck more. I use it and havenāt had any issues with it. A bag of each with a equal amount of your native soil mixed in would plant 5 or 6 tomato plants and as Don M pointed out, unless you are canning them that would provide way more fruit than you could eat through the season. The same applies to all other plants that are some what spaced. Peppers, any leaf plant. Potatoes will grow in almost any kind of mulch or in containers and I always plant things like carrots, radishes, beets, ect in those cheap 27 gallon totes you can get almost everywhere. Head of lettuce will easily grow in a gallon paint can or any small container like that. I have grown half a dozen carrots in one can that size. Anybody can grow at least some of their own food anywhere. If you started now gathering leaves, wood chips, saw dust, grass clippings, and dumped them in a couple of three foot diameter welded wire fence cylinders, and if you kept it moist and didnāt dump all you urine down the toilet and added some of that top soil from around the big trees occasionally you would have plenty of excellent compost to grow a ton for next years garden.
Hey! Another great embroidered statement hat idea . . .
IN SPITE OF . . .
meaning Kevin, you still must keep living; and trundling forwards in-spite of conditions imposed onto you.
Manmade chemicals, aerial contrails. Or sandy soils. Or clay soils. Or out here PNW wet-side; former conifer forest soils - are strongly acidic soils. So for me it is all of the wood ash I can create, along with some Mount Saint Helens wash-down ash-sand harvested from along the south fork of the Toutle river just 1/2 mile away.
I must restrain myself from wood stove burning up all possible consumer wastes and packaging āTo Free The Carbonsā to not contaminate my stove made wood-ash with dye metallics and plastics coatings chemicals. Pay to Land Fill those instead.
Regards
Steve Unruh
I found a paper, which I donāt expect anyone to really understand, that is saying humic acid can reduce the effects of pichloram. It was by roughly 10% reduction. humic acid comes from microbes working on dead plant matter, charcoal, etc. you can buy it, it is otherwise known as brown coal. They hinted that furmic acid may also work, but no one has tested it.
This kind of makes me wonder if you wash the manure in water, pichloram is very soluable in water so you get like 80% of it out, then filter the water with charcoal, whether the charcoal will trap it, then you can expose the charcoal to sunlight to degrade it. Which by volume is a significantly less, and less total surface area to expose.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-9936-y
WHAT you are describing growing in pots, building some compost cylinders, and buying some manure mix from Menards, sounds like my best bet,THANKS for the respond.
AND thanks for the other response about the nature of grazon or its ingreadiance in the soil, and ways to use it ,or make it usable again, I think I will go with pots or just putting bagged store bought soil like Tom has been using , in the hole big enough for the plant too sustain, with good results.And making a mulch bin to get known good organic matter built ahead for next year.
I planted about 34 giant sunflowers late this spring and have about 3 left, I think the rabbits cleaned them up before they got tall., they are a bit slow growing in sand and I needed more bagged pellet firtilizer, but did not know how much I could use with out over fertilizing per giant sunflower hole. nest year I will try the manure mix from Menards, and some home grown mulch stacks/piles. I guess the stalks make good food like celery. better LATE than never hopefully.
Hey Steve, this quote is from a while ago but what was the title of this book?
Thanks, David
My freezer is full so my next best way to save green beans is dehydrating. here is 2 1/2 lb of cut green beans that fits in a pint jar after dehydrating.
I seal the lids with this cordless lid sealer from Amazon.
should last a couple years in a cool dark place.
I donāt know how I missed that gizmo Don. Iāll be getting one. Do you have a model number on the one you have. There are a lot of different ones on Amazon with a lot of different prices.
Iād just get the one with the highest reviews that your Long Haired Banker would approve of
I always try to scroll down the page after the gizmo information and often they have the same one for less money. I think I paid $13 and change for mine.
I seen those lid sealers, I never tried one, how long it takes to get enough vacuum to seal the lid on regular size mason jar, THANKS
Kevin, after it is turned on there is a little window on top with countdown numbers that also shows battery percent. It takes about 20 seconds until the sound pitch doesent change anymore and then it is sealed. One nice thing about it is after I open it and take a meal out, it can be resealed quickly as long as the lid was not damaged when removed.
I was wondering about the reusing the lids. I vacuum seal everything but the bags are not that cheap and once you open one itās pretty much toast and you have to re-do the seal. I like the idea of resealing in jars. Plus I have a couple hundred Chinezy lids I bought during the plandemic when ball lids were not available. I think they would work alright for this but I never tried them or trusted them for canning. By the way I made up that word. Itās a combination of Chinese and Sleezy. Amazing how many products it can be used to describe.
I have been using these to store my freeze dried food in qt. jars. I also add an oxygen absorber to each jar.
What can you can with it? I have only used the āboilingā method, in part that also has to do with sterilization. Is it just dried stuff?
You can reuse old lids provided they arenāt damaged. Usually they get bent or the rubber seal gets damaged. Tattler makes reusable lids, and honestly with the price gouging for the single use ones, they arenāt that much more expensive. Their disposable lids are 37 cents and the reusable ones are a dollar. AND they do have black friday specials so it might be best to waitā¦
The people that make the Ball Jars and lids must be raking it in. Before 2020 it was common for them to have quart jars on sale for $8.99 a dozen. $1.79 for regular mouth lids. At least at Menardās where I always bought them. Now the jars are on sale for $13.99 and the lids for $3.19 and they were closer to 5 bucks in 2022 and 2023. I donāt like the tattler lids for some reason. Old dog new tricks I guess.
I have done tomato juice and tomato soup with this method with good success but I agree with you that anything that needs sterilization I would not risk it. You can lengthen the shelf life of anything you keep in the refrigerator though and keep it fresher longer.
Dried stuff is where the method shines. Things with a fat or oil content can go rancid. Things like nuts, flour, powdered milk. I think this is an oxidation process. No oxygen, no rancidity, at least not as fast. Best accidental example: when we were moving in 2016, I came across two gallon jugs I had filled with powdered milk 16+ years before. No comments about hoarding please 
. I had vacuum sealed both of them, but only one was still under vacuum when I opened them. That one still smelled like dried milk, the other smelled pretty bad. Two notes: 1) this is not a scientific study; 2) this was done with high-vacuum mechanical pump, so it started out with a really good vacuum, compared to a Food-Saver, or the like.
That is what I was wondering. 
it is an oxidation process so it will slow it down quite a bit. If it worked for mayonnaise, since I couldnāt find a preservative, but it would probably give the marshmellow effect since it is whipped.
I have a vacuum sealer, but like Tom I think the bags are too expensive.
I was just trying to figure out what I could use it for. Things like rice and flour, and a few other things I buy in bulk because it is cheaper then I vacuum seal the rest to keep it fresh and potential bugs out.
And I will add a potential 3rd, if the jugs were plastic, plastic leaks air slowly.