The Great Wall of Preserves – Where do you store preserves?
We live in an apartment with a single closet. I have the tiniest freezer in the world (made even more absurd that I have 15 pounds of deer bones filling it currently) and little place to store much of our preserves. We frequently get asked questions about where we store our food – our affectionate term is the Great Wall…
Yet we live with 100s of jars of preserves. We recently were on a house-cleaning binge and I had a chance to take a photo of this years treasure – we’ve added another 90+ jars since this photo but you’ll get the idea of this years harvest below:
You’ll notice that while they are not hidden in a dark room, there is zero access to natural light (there are considerable windows on the other side of the lamp in the background but the wall and shelf shelter the product from the street).
We do keep another 150+ jars of tomato sauce that we share with my folks in the suburbs.
Where do you store yours?
Comments
I am so lucky to have bought a house with a real pantry–it’s in the middle of the house–it’s also a pass-through to the utility room and one bedroom (mine). It’s dark and cool—-no windows–perfect for storing the bounty.
Good on you Tammy! That is fantastic – and dreamy!
I have a laundry room that I want to turn into a walk in pantry next year!! I can’t wait! I want to learn how to do canning. My father canned all his veggies straight from the garden in the back yard!! Oh, I wish I had of watched him and learned how to do this!! He had 28 cases of just tomatoes with 12 jars in each case!! And he grew okra, squash, cucumbers, corn, pretty much everything!! I don’t ever remember going for veggies at the store. He grew them all at the back fence and even over the other side in a vacanted railroad bed.
Your place is great! I especially love your pepper shaker!!
Way cool!! And your chairs!
Thanks Rene!
Join the canning ranks and you’ll soon be in your Father’s footsteps.
The pepper shaker was a bit of a joke Christmas gift that ended up being the best grinder we’ve ever had and it’s been a welcome resident of our abode since it’s arrival several years back.
That is really a cute shelf! Did you buy it or build it? We store ours in a bedroom we have dubbed “the farm room.”
This is actually two Ikea Shevles on top of each other – the top two rows are one unit and the bottom 5 are another. They have a variety of sizes. Our apartment has 3 units set up like this – one is a bookshelf that has remained stable for 5 years even with a giant load of books…
We moved into our first home this spring so we’re lucky and have a basement which currently isn’t used. It’s done up in stunning 1960′s rec room styles with wood paneling and a mirrored bar but when the house was rewired and plumbed there was great chunks of all cut out to do the wiring/plumbing. We’re not going to finish the basement until next year so for now all the preserves are stacked on the mirrored bar and shelves! It’s cool and dark down there so it’s a good place for now but once we finish the basement we’re doing a built in pantry cupboard running down the length of the room.
Do you keep preserves longer than one year? Most of the recipes I’ve been reading say to use them within the year but growing up I remember there being years of pickles and preserves in our basement – we’d just rotate the old ones to the front when we made new ones. Has this now fallen out of favour? Of course we were also fast and loose with other canning practices then – reusing commercial jam and pickle jars and their lids and sealing jams with wax. Should we just know better and eat everything within 12 months?
Shana,
We ran an article on the topic of storing times and ran a poll – it’s not very scientific but most stored longer than 12 months – have also included some academic studies on safety over a year. More info here:
http://wellpreserved.ca/2010/11/15/how-long-do-preserves-keep/
Safety is essential; I also find it interesting to compare current safety standards around the world. For example, the US Government endorses the use of pressure canning to preserve meat (a practice that has been around as lon as canning) and yet the Canadian Government says it`s not safe. Yet 100s (if not 1000s) of communities in Northern Canada rely on canning meat to get through the t.ter – to this day.
All good food for thought.
It’s so nice and organized. I love the shelving you have. I am lucky to have a basement that I keep all my preserves in.
It generally stays that way for about 6 months and then good intentions fall the way of convenience and then it`s time to reorg
Great set up and clever use of limited space. I have an old home with a cold storage, so that’s where all my preserves go. Plus, we have a medium sized deep freeze that I keep all my soups, fruits, vegetables, etc.
boy oh boy what I`d do for a deep freeze of any size
I love this picture. I think you showed these pantry shelves sometime earlier in the year and the picture stayed in my head but I couldn’t remember who’s canjam post it was on. The thought of trawling through every post to find it was just slightly beyond me.
Lots of people in the UK don’t get ‘canning’ but the sight of shelves filled with comestibles is when it starts to make perfect sense.
laughing, they were indeed – though much barer back then
I`m still making the significant transition from understanding that these jars can be ingredients in other things – and not end results by themselves. as we find more and more uses for them, we find the logic behind having them only makes more sense. 
We moved into a rental duplex two years ago that not only has a yard (with pre-fenced in garden), but also has a large utility room in the basement full of shelving! I was very excited since I had been wanting to garden and we previously lived in apartments. Then I had so much extra produce I had to get into canning. It is like our place was made for it!
[...] a lot of preserving in the last 2 months. Life has been unusually busy and the 700 or so jars in The Great Wall of Preserves needs to be dented before we add too many jars (although I suspect there will be some pressure [...]
[...] Domestic Goddess is sooo last century, now chatelaine in the buzz word!) and Dana and Joel’s great wall of preserves, in their city apartment. So you see it isn’t necessarily about having a special room in your [...]
[...] I know that the appeal of scarcity is part of what drove us to this (details of the shelf here): [...]
[...] unit and how much it has changed our kitchen. Drying is consuming more and more shelf space on The Great Wall of Preserves (so much that we are thinking or relegating cookbooks to another room). The food is fantastic, [...]
[...] allows me a bit more of a chance to experiment but allows us to create a lot of variety on the Great Wall of Preserves. There are over 100 different flavors in our collection now and the bi-annual batches of [...]
A separate cold storage room was a key attraction of the new house we’re doing up right now. I sometimes think it was the key reason we bought the house, along with all the other good stuff like location, size and looks.
That’s one lovely picture!
I also have 2 freezers; one for meats and one for fruits/veggies/etc! I need another freezer though!
We have a half-finished/half-unfinished basement, so half of the finished basement is my “Harvest Room”, I have 3 huge shelves (1 1/2 of them have dried bulk goods, 1/2 shelf for empty jars, and 1 whole shelf for my filled jars) plus a table for cooling jars and my dehydrator!
Even though I just got to Korea, I am already anticipating the days when I will have an apartment larger than 10ft x 10 ft. Also, the days when I will once again be able to find canning equipment. I canned all throughout college and now there is nothing to be found in Korea. A blogger who has been in Tokyo for 5 years tells the same story. I can’t even find glass that can stand up to heat.
Somehow I imagined you two and the hungry chairs lived in a loft like the one in the movie Diva, where you had groovy lava lamps and enough room to roller skate in circles.
I’m lucky to have a basement! while there is a window (the house is a split-level), its a north-east facing window, so gets minimal light. Our preserves are stored on Ikea shelves against the wall furthest from the window. I also store extra dry goods there, so there’s always rearranging to do to fit things in!
Like so on shelves build specially for that purpose, in our back hallway which has no direct light: http://milkingweeds.blogspot.com/2011/01/homegrown-foods-in-wintertime.html
I love this! What a wonderful way to display your preserves! I keep mine on top of my kitchen cabinets but am fast running out of space. Rene’s laundry room idea sounds like the perfect solution
Love your jar decor! I open visible space above my kitchen cupboards, so I line them with all my jars. I love it in the winter, make me feel surrounded by summer.
They’re currently stacked in a corner of the basement. Once the furnace really goes on though, I feel they’re too close to it, so I’m having the husband build a shelf in an opposite corner of the basement.
[...] only downside of diversity is storage. Our ‘Great Wall of Preserves‘ was set up to store quantity. The deep shelves allow me to ‘front’ 2-3 [...]
[...] a very, very, very long time – just store in a sealed jar out of direct sunlight (our ‘Great Wall of Preserves‘ is hidden from the sun at all times despite it being in our [...]
[...] our pantry (though none of the 700 canned goods that are stored on the other side of the room on the great wall of preserves), the upper-right includes 3 shelves for plates, cups and an entire shelf of wine glasses. The [...]
[...] our pantry (though none of the 700 canned goods that are stored on the other side of the room on the great wall of preserves), the upper-right includes 3 shelves for plates, cups and an entire shelf of wine glasses. The [...]