Today's rubbish reducing tip is....Forget buying tinned produce...Bottle it Yourself!
OK. I'm being a bit cheeky with this one! But seriously, isn't bottling our own tomato puree a great way to reduce rubbish. We (actually it's all Ben's hard work, I just take the photos) are aiming to fill our pantry with a years supply. There won't be any tomato tins in our bin this year!
And so, after what feels like forever, we said helloooooo Vacola! It's been a while since we plugged you in, but once we dusted off the cobwebs you were all systems go.
We
brought our Vacola preserving kit and what feels like hundreds of kilos worth of
preserving jars with us to Norfolk. To get our jars here safely, we had wrapped each one individually in
several layers of newspaper. Unwrapping them was quite nerve wracking as we weren't
certain they'd survived the journey. As it turns out, a couple did get
smashed. The kit was well used in our previous
home but has been sitting in the shed here for the last two years. The biggest reason being that our attempts to get a successful veggie patch flourishing have failed due to a lack of water. We only have one rainwater tank and so have to be quite precious with water-use. It does rain regularly, but still not often enough to keep a veggie garden happy, really happy. It's a shame, but not all is lost. We have a fabulous growers market here every Saturday and everything sold is local, organic and reasonably priced. There's no cold storage here folks, so we can only buy/eat fresh what is in season. Lucky us I say.
And so we kick start our preserving program with tomatoes - boxes of them (seconds in fact - not beautiful to look at, but PERFECT for cooking). Something tells me, now we have our preserving groove back, there will be preserves a plenty in our cupboards once again! And I suspect spaghetti bolognese may be on the menu soon.
And so we kick start our preserving program with tomatoes - boxes of them (seconds in fact - not beautiful to look at, but PERFECT for cooking). Something tells me, now we have our preserving groove back, there will be preserves a plenty in our cupboards once again! And I suspect spaghetti bolognese may be on the menu soon.
PS We think we may have a solution for our lack-of-water problem. Sometime in the future, we plan to re-locate our veggie patch down hill, so our shower and washing machine water can be put to good use.
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