The pantry shelves are starting to look gorgeous with all the colourful jars of organic home grown food.

Seeing this bolsters my enthusiasm for another long day of work in the kitchen.

We haven't been able to eat at our dinner table for weeks. It is continually loaded up with food from the garden that needs to be attended to in one way or another. This is a good problem but right now it does seem like this is a bottomless pile of produce. I'll be glad when we are done.

It takes a lot of food to feed two people for a year, a lot, of food indeed. sometimes I wonder if we'll ever have enough to do it without needing a store.

Then there was sweet corn!

Yesterday I ventured into town for a few essential supplies and came home with a 70lb sack of lovely fresh corn. The smell of fresh sweet corn wafted in through my open truck window and I had to pull over. 70lbs of food for $30 Canadian dollars is a bargain right?

I feel like this purchase makes up for my own failure at growing corn. Here's my itty bitty corn beside proper corn.

I also brought home a huge sack of cucumbers because they were cheap - all non gmo and naturally grown. It is rare for us to find produce grown to our standards so I really could not resist.

These two sacks of food look like a huge amount of food but when all is said and done, what does this provide us with?

My husband @xwalkran helped shuck the corn, I washed it and cleaned up using a shop vacuum because corn is so messy!Then he got to work with the knife and I got to work with the canning side of the operation. Everything goes much faster with an extra set of hands.

It was fun. We rocked out to old music because you might as well let the good times roll. All that good energy ends up in the food I am sure of it.

We don't have the luxury of being able to run multiple freezers so the simple act of freezing the corn was not an option. This means that to keep this corn for eating through the winter it needed to be pressure canned. Corn takes a while to process, from warming up the canner, the processing time and cool down you are looking at an hour and a half per load.

We decided to keep it simple and can corn packed in water. No additives or preservatives, just pure organic corn. We also made one batch of corn salsa using all of our own garlic, onions and cilantro. I was able to make the salsa while the canned corn was processing - it's a lot faster to make!

When you start growing and storing your own food, you are given a reality check on just how much food is required to feed yourself for a year.

A jar of tomatoes requires a whole lot of tomatoes and this sack of corn took about 9 hours from beginning to end to get into jars, safely processed and set on the counter to cool. You'd think that 66 cobs of corn would yield a lot but by the time you've shucked, cleaned, and cut the corn from the cob we ended up with 26 jars plus 5 cobs for grilling!

The amount of material the head to the compost was quite notable as well. We would have normally done this messy work outside but it was sweltering hot outside so we did our best to keep things tidy .

The recipes I used were as follows:

Canned corn - requires a pressure canner
spicy corn salsa - requires water batch canner.

Food is such a precious thing. It all starts with that tiny seed in the spring. All of this work is worth it to us for food security, food quality and even the growth of our skills.

You can also find me at: walkerland.ca |
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Corn Shucking & Self Reliance With Food @Walkerland