Grow It! Preserving Food for Winter

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You can construct a simple outdoor fruit drying rack from scrap lumber and layers of wire screen.
You can construct a simple outdoor fruit drying rack from scrap lumber and layers of wire screen.
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Make the root crop storage mound half as high as it is wide. When the temperature falls below 25 degrees, close off ends of trenches with packed soil and put a bigger can on top so that half an inch of screening is left uncovered.
Make the root crop storage mound half as high as it is wide. When the temperature falls below 25 degrees, close off ends of trenches with packed soil and put a bigger can on top so that half an inch of screening is left uncovered.
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Use this fruit storage barrel to preserve only fruit that is not bruised and has no worm holes or other flaws. When temperature falls below 25 degrees, replace inner screen cover with a solid wood one.
Use this fruit storage barrel to preserve only fruit that is not bruised and has no worm holes or other flaws. When temperature falls below 25 degrees, replace inner screen cover with a solid wood one.

At last! For the first time since the Have-More Plan was published way back in the 1940’s, a fellow named Richard W. Langer has come up with a 365-page book that really introduces a beginner to small-scale farming. Want to raise your own fruit, nuts, berries, vegetables, grain, chickens, pigs, ducks, geese and honeybees? GROW IT! tells you how to get started. We like it, so check out this chapter about techniques for drying fruits, the process of fermenting sauerkraut, tips for storing your harvest for winter and how to make homemade butter from goat’s milk. 

SPECIAL NOTE: All material here printed from GROW IT! Copyright ©1972 by Richard W. Langer. 

Chapter Excerpt: The Larder

Let them make sausage of me and serve me up to the students.–ARISTOPHANES

One of my fondest memories of childhood was sneaking into the ice shed and chipping off a sawdust-flavored “popsicle” in the heat of midsummer. The ice shed wasn’t a house where an ice machine was kept, our ice machine was a pond in winter. The ice was cut into large blocks from the center of the lake by timber saw and then hauled by sled to the ice shed, where it was covered with layers of insulating sawdust. Come summer, the frozen pond still fed the icebox. A real icebox.

  • Published on Jan 1, 1974
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