What is up epic gardeners? It is Kevin from the epic gardening podcast. We're back with our final

episode with Melissa Norris. She is a fifth generation homesteader and like myself she loves to help people use

organic methods to grow their own food. She is the host of the pioneering

today podcast and she has an awesome website with a bunch of awesome and epic

gardening information over at Melissa K Norris.com which you can find

in the podcast description.

So a couple of episodes back, Melissa, we talked about the whole gamut of preserving techniques and I think today maybe we can focus in on one that

you've actually built a course around, Home Canning with confidence, but one that I think is a very

classic tried and true method that a lot of people can get their feet wet with and that would be of course canning.

So could you maybe first explain the basic science or the basic principles of canning and why it's so effective and then we can get into exactly

how to do it?

Yeah, so canning is one of my favorite ways to preserve food and for a couple of reasons.

One is simply because we, as I shared shared we live very rurally and we experience a lot of power outages and when the power goes out we do have a generator but we've been without power for 14 days straight and it's used yet so if you're

relying on and it was actually from a mudside and so we couldn't even get

through unless we went this really back way for a couple of ways to get to a gas station and we were having to travel, you know, 12, 15 miles to get to a gas station to just keep the generators going.

So if all of my food is reliant upon electricity, which if it's in a deep freezer,

then that's what it's reliant on.

The other issue for us is when our power goes out, we're on our own private well.

It's actually the only way you can have water where we live.

There isn't any city water system to plug into,

which I'm actually very grateful for,

but our well doesn't operate.

...