I had occasion the other evening to witness a lovely and delightful couple whom I call friends demonstrate bottling grape juice and peaches.  These good neighbors have given me some of their grape juice, and boy is it tasty!  This is a perfect activity for couples to do together.  These folks in the video have been married over 40 years, and they rock out to ABBA while preparing food and juices for their food storage!  Dee and Mary Ann Hardman have a modest home and property in Orem, Utah, but they take advantage of every square inch of their yard, having planted apples, apricots, peaches, pears, grapes, and a garden with everything else.  Dee spends most of his time in his partial retirement serving other people.  Mary Ann also serves others by working in the field of health care.

Dee and I get pretty jazzed about razzing each other.  I tell him he is too slow when he is driving us to our favorite fishing holes up at Strawberry Reservoir, so he pretends he has Alzheimer’s Disease and drives around the block 3 times before he gets on the road heading in the direction to take us fishing.  When he wants to take the scenic route home, I call him on being lost, but he just squawks, “I’m just turned around!”  He gets pretty particular about his verbiage sometimes.

Back to food storage.  At one point in the video (which I edited to keep it under 10 minutes for YouTube standards, Mary Ann talks about when they first started bottling tomatoes, pears, peaches, and all else how beautiful it was in their storage room, and how they would invite the neighbors over to show off their artwork.  Well, it really is an art to know how to do this kind of thing, and too bad it is a dying art unless we keep it alive.  So here’s to keeping it alive by posting it on YouTube and here on my food storage site so all the youngsters can learn how to do it if their parents won’t or can’t show them how.

Oh, one more thing.  I edited this out too because sometimes Dee can be long-winded (still love ya, man):  Dee and Maryann were moving cross country and Dee was going a bit too fast around a corner in a U-haul (yeah, that was a long time ago in his younger days).  He rolled the thing down a hill.  Much of their furniture and other belongings were destroyed, but not their food storage; none of it, not even the bottles!

P.S. You can actually watch Dee in one of my other YouTube videos teaching you a thing or two about outdoor survival.  Fathom this– one of the skills Dee teaches herein is how not to “get turned around.”  Only he comes right out in the video and uses the word “lost.”  But you would never hear him use ”I” or “I’m” and “lost” in the same sentence!

Related Posts:

Food Storage: Wild Game Meat
Food Storage: Mystery Shopping Your Way to a Full Year’s Food Storage Supply
The Water Storage Part of an Effective Food Storage and Emergency Preparedness Program
Self Reliance and Food Storage: Gardening