O what a waste! If you have been following my blog for a good while you know that i can a lot! and that i love to try new recipes. You know that one good garden years i can and will can up to two or even three years worth of staples.

That when i am about to get a new full beef or pork in, that i clear my freezers by canning the older meats up and putting the fresh in the freezers and that on average we move though and that i can around 1000 to 1500 jars a year.

Covid did a number on my deep canning pantry, and in more then one way, we had health issues start up five years ago that meant that many things regularly used where to sugar heavy, other things were tried as why nots that did not turn out and i never make anything in a batch that is less then four to six jars so if we had one jar and did not like it, the other four or five jars have been sitting there.

Add in good garden years and amazing sales at the local food co-op and we have a working pantry of around 400 to 600 jars that are actively being used and refilled and so on.. and we have by a rough count, around a thousand jars that need to be sorted, shifted, and thrown out.. Some of it is fodder worthy, example the quart jars of carrots, turnips and beets are all still good with solid seals and if i had a pig that was feeding, it would be easy enough to go though it but i have a small flock of laying hens that had a set amount of “scraps” in their diet vs layer

I have had it! With me on the knowledge, planning and paying out some cold hard cash in work hours (trust me, she is earning it) Miss R has starting the work of a full cellar sort, clear out and fresh start.

What to do with all the things coming out of the jars, its getting trenched, long lines of semi-shallow trenches are being dug with lines of four to six inches of the empty jars and then covered by a foot or more of soil are being dug into the pasture and yes it will settle lower and will need to be touched up with infill in the spring to level it but it will give this one last purpose in the terms of feeding the soil and the plants that grow in the pasture.

Today we start the work, i am guessing that it will be four to five hundred of the oldest jars done, I started off with a mass purge of the 10 years plus and then we will work our thought the next lot of 500 plus and see where that gets us.

This trenching and sorting needs to be done before the ground freezes and then as a family unit we will figure out what will go back into the jars that will be much more closely followed and rotated.

While i am well aware that this is on the extreme end in terms of the number of jars, I will point out that its all sizes of jars, from little wee 4oz to lots of 8oz and hundreds and hundreds of pints along with a reasonable amount of quart jars.

How do you deal with jars of food that you worked hard to grow, buy and then process that didn’t turn out! Do you figure out on the first jar, nope, not for us and then toss all the other jars and clean them up, i think if i didn’t have around 2000 jars, i would have been a bit more.. hey i need to empty that jar so i can use it again. However i brought in pallet of pints in the early days just before the lockdowns, some friends and i brought in a number of pallets of jars and so it was so easy to reach for a new case as needed and then it happened.

Hubby said, hey, there is no more room in the cellar, but we have a ton of room in the shelves in the basement and i went sure.. and so for the past three plus years the newly canned has gone to the basement and asked for in the basement.. which means that rarely on some thing i still asked for the cellar but less and less and less..

And here we are.. in purge and clean mode..

and before anyone asks, yes i was still canning like we would have lots of company and no we did not have company, yes i was still canning like hubby would need to use three pints of things per work day off the farm, pint of soup or stew or chili, pint of fruit and then me using a pint or quart of x or y..

Did you build to deep a pantry? Did something change that meant you didn’t have access to ways to use things, example pigs. Have you ever needed to do a canning purge? Keeping the jars of course.

30 day challenge for blogging and writing daily – Day 11