Ball, Kerr and other mason jars that are found easily and cheap in US are hard to come by under 10-15x the price here and if one wants reuseable jars I only found weck to be the ’best’ option
It would be nice to find lids or ring/lids for regular glass jars out of supermarkets that are easily avaliable but I have not found any, the closest chepest is to buy new honey jars. For some reason those are pretty cheap.
Tom, finding people who grow pure numerous vegetables, fruits, berries, wheat, sunflowers, herbs and more – will mean a nightmarish task! And where is the guarantee that for money a lot of these people will not want to produce more products called “clean”? Even a billionaire will have to spend too much time doing this. Who can I trust to feed my family? And how do you know that the food is clean?
Cancer has already been recognized as an environmental disease. It’s what we eat, what we drink, what we breathe, (even what we mostly think about). Oncology is already mowing down newborns, although some 40-50 years ago it was a disease mainly of the elderly.
In fact, there is only one option – to learn how to grow all the food yourself! We need our own land. But besides the fact that we need the cultivation technologies themselves without numerous poisons, we need own technique (try to remove and thresh your wheat crop for bread and pasta, or sunflower for oil). And after we will need knowledge and equipment on how to save it all until the next harvest.
Growing a wide range of food on your land is one of the most interesting tasks you can imagine. And it must be solved if you seriously expect to continue your kind on Earth.
Ivan Ovsinsky grew food without chemicals. 1890. After him was Edward Faulkner. 1943. We have someone to learn from!
As a universal car, you can take a frame four-wheel drive SUV. And equip it with hydraulics and numerous attachments. Up to the mounted combine harvester.
Oh, the laurels of writing do not give me rest – someday I will take it up and write at least a small book on this exciting topic. 
the only way i could justify growing myself is if i could find a way to do it with minimal input from myself. with all the things i need to do, and want to do, growing my own food seems like it would consume a lot of time. maybe im wrong, maybe theres a method that im not considering that doesnt require me to constantly de-weed, fertilize, water and maintain every time i turn around. my father made me work on a little tomato garden and it was NON STOP hassle trying to keep bugs out, animals out, weeds out, pruning, and maintaining the growth.
it just always seemed like an obscene amount of effort compared to someone who had an optimized large scale growing operation who could make hundreds of thousands times more produce than i ever could with a fraction of the effort.
No way I could do more than a small salad garden when I was working Thomas and there were no week end markets with growers possibly providing non-polluted food. We were stuck with what was in the supermarkets. It was the economic collapse of 09 that folded my building business that forced me to reconsider my priorities and they came down to water, food, heat and power.
I have transitioned to JADAM methods for growing now Marat.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=jadam+organic+farming
I am no longer purchasing fertilizer or other amendments besides bone meal which I could produce myself. I don’t till so don’t need equipment. Normally I would do some hydroponics over the winter but this year I am well stocked from outdoor planting and I have other things I want to get accomplished, so I’m done until seed starting in Feb.
I’m just going to say this here. Don’t home-can food solely to save money. You won’t save money, once you factor in the energy costs, jar and lid costs, and even minimally value your own time. Grocery store cans are always going to come out ahead on price. If you want to save even more, look at buying bulk foods. Cans are actually the most expensive way to store preserved foods, look for dried and frozen alternatives (dry beans vs canned are 1/3 the price).
If you are doing it for health reasons, or for learning self-reliance skills, or a half-dozen other perfectly good reasons, that’s great. I agree with all that has been stated above on the better quality foods available both from farmers markets and home grown in the garden. That is why we can what food that we do. But it does come at a price, and it’s not one everybody can afford. Be realistic about how you spend your time. Home canning does NOT save money over store-bought.
Where you can save money and improve your health is by cutting out prepared foods. Buy potatoes not potato chips. Buy eggs and flour and butter, not canned biscuits and pancake mix. Learn to cook from good ingredients, and you will be much better off, save a ton of money, and still have time for a 40-hour job. Shift your diet from cheap tasty carbs into basic proteins like beef, eggs, beans. You will be shocked how much better you feel, just by simplifying what you eat.
Kent,
A long-time friend of Driveonwood, May he rest in peace!
Remembering Dr. Larry Winiarski | Aprovecho
Edit: This is the video I was looking for…
Well said Marat and ChrisKY.
Same-same of why we keep annual harvesting and heating with wood as grow some of our own produce. Still nurture chickens for our own eggs. Other choosing to have meat and milk animals too.
Thinking just in terms of cost savings is a trap. A trap they/them will use against you. To keep you dependent; weakened; and enslaved to them.
The benefits of doing these are multi-dimensional.
The European city-girl had parked her ass up in her bedroom all two days of the week end. “Studying”. Gaming online. She’d asked about local walking trails. Yes. A car trip 5 and 7 miles away. Wife had wanted to take her. “NO. Later. I am busy now.”
My Wife instead build by hand stacked rocks and cast off bricks some flowers planter beds in a dead unusable driveway corner:
And she is 69 with one hip been replaced.
And I helped the handyman replace out one utility room window.
Fall regrowth mowed the lawn. First had to disassemble the two yards hammocks and stands. Moved the pieces into winter storage up stairs into the shop loft. Six trips up and down on this old body. Gnawed away some more at the old deck tear-off wood pile. Power tools. Bending. Stretching. Stooping. Rough ground walking. Wheel barrels pushing.
So as much as anything to do your own wood . . . to grow your own garden . . . to have animal in your life is how you extend your life in years and the pleasure of learned; and retained; capabilities.
How I’ve lived my life. Like Marcuses now mantra; “Go Outside”, “Get Outside!”
The real world has you outside mornings, too cold. Afternoons; sunbaked, sweating. Evenings out doing and getting bug bit. Harvest-time; dawn to dusk processing.
Asked at the dinner table if her folks have grass yards. Yes. Have you ever mowed them? No. They use commercial robots. Ha! The Wife choked on her food hearing this. She hates robot vacuums. Makes you fat; dumb; and unhealthy not able to move and do needful or enjoyable things.
Use-it Or lose-it Steve Unruh
Me and her both. Mom has one for the livingroom/kitchen part of the house and I hate that thing. Always getting stuck, sucking up cords left on the ground or being jammed by a receipt paper that fell out of the garbage can. Terrifies the dogs and they’ll make a racket. Stoop down to empty it’s little dust bin. Just a headache.
I had the first generation, and that thing always got stuck on cords, under furniture. Then my sister got my mom a later version and i noticed that actually worked better… not flawless.
not all robotic lawnmowers use the random pattern like floor sweepers. Some of them you map out the area you want to cut, and it does it’s thing in that area with nice straight paths. They usually have some obstacle avoidance but hoses are hard to see from 6" not 6’ above the area. .
Yes, I’ve admired his work for a couple of decades. Never got a chance to meet him, but you can tell what’s important to people by where they invest their time.
Regarding the canning and preserving discussion, and maybe Dr. Larry also, saving time, effort, and money isn’t necessarily wrong, but also isn’t the most important consideration. Our 8 years of farmers market and market gardening wasn’t particularly quick, easy, or profitable, but it was something we had wanted to do for decades. We didn’t make a lot of money, but we got the opportunity to make a huge number of mistakes in a relatively short time. We didn’t do it because we had to, to survive. But if the time ever comes that we do have to, to survive, it will be great to have a lot of mistakes out of the way. The more we learn to do, the less we’re likely to worry, and my Boss has told me not to worry.
edit, addendum:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and pleading with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. Philippians 4:6 NASB
Easy to understand, hard to do.
Anything premade, or convenience usually has a markup on it. junk food is the worst. Then probably fast food. Cutting out buying lunch is a huge money saver. I buy bisquits on sale, but I make pie crusts and freeze them.
Once you get some kitchen tools, it is a bit of time, and if you don’t mind eating leftovers… You make a decent dinner on sunday, watching football, and eat leftovers the rest of the week. Like grill chicken or a roast on sunday, then it again monday, then a small chicken salad with it on tuesday/wednesday. Then sandwiches on thursday and friday. maybe a quiche or enchiladas on saturday, etc. Then pork is on sale the next week so you get pork and do about the same thing.
What will probably keep you the healthiest, is you are only going to eat until you aren’t hungry because half the time you made something that doesn’t taste that good, but it is still edible. It keeps obesity away.
There are a couple of options, one is container gardening, the other is probably kratky hydroponics. Neither keep the bugs or animals out really but they eliminate a lot of weeding.
It is a pressure cooker like the insta pot for around 2 hours, to soften it, then you can grind it up in like a meat grinder. That is the alternative over boiling for like 12 hours to soften it. And I think bone meal was like 10 dollars a pound so you can save quite a bit of money if you already have bones. but I am sure you knew that already.
And if you hustle around, you might be able to find a deer processor willing to give you all the bones you want.
We have a Roomba, somewhere. Our son got two dogs, Newfoundlands. They’re big. They shed. The Roomba could do about 4 square feet (~0.5 square meter) per emptying. We now have a rug rake and an upright vacuum 
.
friends on DOW, do you know conserving in beer bottles? all stuff that remains more or less liquid can be used…we mostly for tomato sauce,…the lids are extremely cheap, ant there is a little machine, working with a hand lever, to fix them on the bottles…
this system was very common here, we do it since 35 years…
for someone this system is also e good excuse to drink more beer for collecting empty bottles…
actually the twist off lids for jars are not more good, not all keep thight, after one use they have just rust inside…asia stuff.
the old european ones we used a lot of years , always reusing the same lids, never were problems…this quality is not to find more
