Canning pea soup and cleaning chicken eggs

I have 2 questions:
#1. I just canned some green pea soup. I followed the directions on-line for canning dried beans. My beans ended up in the bottom of the quarts in a solid glob. Are they safe to eat? I know you talk about noodles/rice and dense food. They all sealed and I have been able to shake some of the solid mass.

#2. I read online that if your fresh eggs have chicken feces on them you should discard them. That it has already contaminated the egg and no amount of washing will clean it. Jackie just about all my eggs are like that. Is it safe to keep eating them?

Ramona Berry
Newberry, South Carolina

I wouldn’t be afraid to eat your pea soup. The peas remain in solution with the liquid during processing, but when they cool, they settle into a glob; they have sufficiently heated during processing first.

You can read about anything online! Wash your eggs and don’t worry. The only way the poop could possibly contaminate the egg would be if it were cracked. What do you think commercial egg factories do with eggs with chicken poop on them? To keep your own eggs cleaner, use shavings in the nest boxes and also on your coop floor so the hens feet don’t pick up poop when they hop into the boxes to lay. Clean feet make for cleaner eggs! — Jackie

Hamburger rocks

Have you ever made hamburger rocks? (Dehydrated hamburger) If so, how safe is it to store and use? I’ve never dehydrated meat before but am thinking of trying it.

Glo Diliberto
Insinger, SK Canada

I haven’t made hamburger rocks. But I have dehydrated a lot of other meat. Choose hamburger that is very low fat so the fat doesn’t get rancid and you’ll be fine. Give it a try and see how you like the results. — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

Brooding chicks off-grid

Years ago I raised lots of day-old chicks using a heat lamp to brood them. I want to get back to poultry now that I am retired but my homestead is off grid. Any Ideas other than running the generator many hours and charging batteries to provide heat during the night. Solar is in the future but not in time for a May start on chicks. Would a low btu propane heater work.

Howard Brewi
Valdez, Alaska

We used a propane heater to brood our chicks in the house (in our sunroom/greenhouse). At first, we needed it on all day and night, but as the temperatures warmed up, we found that the chicks were comfortable with the heater off, as long as the house was reasonably warm (wood heat and sunshine through our big windows). We did keep a small CFL burning over the stock tank we used to prevent picking and also to prevent piling up after the heater was not used at night. I’m posting a photo of our setup to help give you more ideas. It CAN be done! — Jackie

Pickled okra

Asking for my sister…She has pickled okra that the seals are turning loose on. They have been stored in her pantry with no extreme temp changes and nothing stacked on top. They were canned this past summer, however, in the last two weeks the lids have started pinging and turning loose. Any ideas as to the possible cause and would the vinegar keep it safe to eat or should the contents be thrown out?

Becky in Alabama

I don’t know why your sister’s pickled okra jars are having seals that are failing, as I don’t know how she processed it, etc. But if the jars are having pinging lids that are releasing, something is wrong! No, I wouldn’t eat the okra. It’s the old saying “when in doubt, throw it out.” It hurts when it’s your home canned food, but take it as a learning experience and try to figure out what went wrong and follow tried recipes to can it next time. Don’t let one failure throw you! It happens to all beginners at one point or another. — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Aberdeen, South Dakota, for the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture conference so today I’m madly packing (www.npsas.org/news-events/winter-conference.html. Click on the conference schedule button on the right of the page to see when I’m speaking). Will brought his wheeled travel bag downstairs for me to use to carry the books I’m bringing to (hopefully) sell. Mittens, our teen-kitten, thought it made a terrific playhouse. He spent more than an hour in and out of that bag, popping the flap open to ambush Spencer, then hiding back in the bag. What fun! I let him play until he was bored, then started loading it up, keeping the 50-pound checked baggage limit firmly in mind. I don’t mind flying a bit, but all the security and the fees for baggage DO make me cringe!

Hope to meet some of you at the conference! Please come over and say hi!

Oh, just an update: Several readers questioned our building a pig pen from used pallets, thinking the pigs would dig under, lift them up, or jump over them. Here’s a photo I took yesterday in the snow storm of our pigs IN the pallet pen.

We have yet to have an escapee. Pallets make great fences! And they’re free. — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

Although Will’s wood-fired stock tank heater worked pretty well, he knew it could do better. Roughly patterned after the “rocket stove,” the new one does burn hotter and keeps going even longer. The modifications included adding a 6-inch smoke pipe chimney, removing the square tube air intake (and welding a patch over the hole!), and removing the 6-inch diameter filling pipe and replacing it with a longer 6-inch pipe, inserted down into the tank about 18 inches. This gets air to the fire, making it burn much hotter. Before, the air came in the square tube, but it was not large enough. The new tube lets more air in and the larger chimney lets the smoke out faster. So, all in all, the whole thing works even better!

Lucky it does, too, because a cold front moved in from Canada, giving us a high today of -3 degrees! Last night and tonight it is going to be down to -26. This morning, the cow’s tank was frozen solid. After stoking up the cold tank heater and letting it cook for several hours, there was a foot of melted, steaming water in the tank (not steaming hot, you understand — after all it WAS only -6 degrees all morning!).

Will’s going to hunt around the dump and try to find another small water heater to build another heater for the horse tank; right now, we melt one tank, then haul the heater to the other. It works but requires a lot of monkeying around. We sure love our new heater! And so do our animals! — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

Wood-fired stock tank heater

I love the wood fired stock tank heater, and I hope you write up a more detailed article about it for the magazine. How long do you leave the heater in the tank? How do you get the fire going? I am so tired of hauling water down to the critters while the big tank is just a huge ice cube.

Jane Jasper
Sapello, New Mexico

Yes, we are thinking of writing an article on building a wood-fired stock tank heater. Even if you don’t have welding skills, it would cost little to have a local welder put it together. All of the components are easily found at local dumps, old farms, yard sales, or a neighbor’s, house for little or no cost. Ours is built from an old, small water heater tank, a piece of pipe for the chimney, a square tube for the air intake (could use pipe), and a larger diameter piece of pipe for the inlet for the wood. We leave it in the tank all day for a frozen solid tank. By evening, it’s melted at least half of the ice! We pull it when the fire is nearly out, in the evening. In the morning, we put it back in and it melts nearly all the ice from a 200-gallon tank. To start the fire, we just crumple a little newspaper, light it, and toss it in, quickly followed by several pieces of birch bark or other fine kindling. Then we start adding dry, small wood until it gets fired up. After that, we add chunks of wood, as needed. It works very well but Will is already thinking of ways to make it better! We’ll keep you posted. (He’s planning on adding a longer intake pipe, running down into the firebox and a couple of feet out of the stove, to allow more air (hotter burn) and let him use 4-foot poles, which will self-feed. This will eliminate running down to the pasture several times a day to chuck wood in the heater.) — Jackie

Pickled quail eggs

We raise quail and our family loves pickled quail eggs, but they only last a few weeks in the fridge according to the recipe I use. Can you pressure can them? Do you have a recipe? Another question I have is I pressure canned some pumpkin this year, I put it in the food processor first so it was smooth. After canning the jars lost a lot of liquid, it was down a couple of inches. The water in the bottom of the canner was orange. Is it still safe to eat? What did I do wrong?

Crystal Misiak
Millboro, Virginia

You can find a recipe for canning pickled eggs on page 124 of my book, Growing and Canning Your Own Food, available with a click, right here! But here it is so you can have it right now:

18 whole hardboiled, peeled eggs (or the quail equivalent!)
1½ quarts white vinegar
2 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp whole allspice
1 Tbsp. pickling spices

Mix vinegar and spices in a large pot and bring to a boil. Pack whole, peeled, hardboiled eggs into hot sterilized wide mouth jar, leaving ½ inch of headspace. Ladle boiling pickling solution over eggs, leaving ½ inch of headspace. Remove air bubbles. Process for 25 minutes in a boiling water bath canner. If you live at an altitude above 1,000 feet, consult your canning book for directions on increasing your processing time to suit your altitude, if necessary.

Sorry Crystal, but you’re not supposed to can pureed pumpkin or squash as it is so dense. It is possible that the internal temperature of the food does not reach a high enough temperature for sufficient time for safe canning. Now we can pumpkin and squash in large dices, instead. On use, you just heat the contents to boiling for 10 minutes, then puree the chunks without liquid and use. — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

For our pigs, that is! We have two gilts that need to be bred and we have no boar. Friends of ours, Tiffany and her husband, Nate, had a boar they could spare but needed their three goats bred. So we traded breeding services and we brought all the animals home. Two of their goats are in with our Boer buck, Thor, and the other, which is part Boer, is in with our Nubian/Boer buck. The kids should provide plenty of milk and also extra buck kids (lots of tasty meat). It’s a totally win-win situation, as neither of us will be out any money and we’ll both get our animals bred.

Will’s been working on log siding for our house. Rather than pay $50 or more for a piece of log siding to finish our addition, he’s cutting slabs with our portable Hud-Son bandsaw mill and then using sanding discs on our angle grinder to clean off the pieces after he drawknifes them. So far, he’s got several done and they are looking good! My son, Bill, did this with the interior gable ends of his log home and his turned out great. Better than store-bought siding! Cheaper and better is our motto!

Our winter continues to be GREAT. Today it’s sunny and 42 degrees above zero! This is unheard of here in northern Minnesota in January. The usual temperature is 35 below, so you can see why we’re kind of nuts, here. True, it may not continue, but every mild week is a week closer to spring and a week that it’s NOT cold. — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

Where to get chickens

I was wondering where you got your white laced cornish chickens from. I have looked on-line and all I can find are the dark cornish. Also, do you know anything about feeding fodder to livestock? I have found several systems on-line that make growing your own feed seem easy. Is it too good to be true? John and I cannot wait to meet you guys in May!

Mia Sodaro
Frazier Park, California

We bought white laced RED cornish from Welp Hatchery. We wanted the white laced reds as they are a prettier bird with a whiter skin than the dark cornish. Yes, we have grown up feeding fodder to livestock, primarily corn stalks with ears matured and on the dried stalks. This works well for horses and cattle. Let me know if you have specific questions, and I’ll be happy to answer them! We’re excited about meeting you at the seminar, too! — Jackie

Canning ham

I have a lot of left over ham. I was wanting to can it instead of freezing it. Is it safe to can at home? Is it done the same as other meats or would the prolonged canning time make it turn to mush as it is already precooked? I can’t seem to find information on canning ham anywhere!

Jennifer Gall
Roseburg, Oregon

That’s one reason you should have my book, Growing and Canning Your Own Food! (This is the most complete canning book out there, with lots of recipes to can, including ham. – BHM Staff) Yes, basically, you can ham like other meats. Only, because it’s pre-cooked, you only have to slice or dice it up, fill the jars, and pour boiling broth or water over the meat, leaving 1 inch of headspace. It must be processed for 75 minutes (pints and half-pints) and 90 minutes for quarts, at 10 pounds pressure. If you live at an altitude above 1,000 feet, consult your canning book for directions on increasing your pressure to suit your altitude, if necessary. Ham is wonderful, canned like this. I do it every year! — Jackie

Share or Bookmark

Obviously, we can’t use an electric stock tank heater. Propane heaters are expensive to buy — and to run! Will remembered his dad telling him about his chore, as a kid, of having to fill his grandpa’s wood-fired stock tank heater every day and that got Will to thinking. We have two big tanks for the horses that we fill with hoses, chopping ice out in-between. But, sooner or later, the ice gets thicker and thicker until there’s only a five-gallon basin left unfrozen in the top. Will looked online at some wood-fired heaters and thought he could manufacture one. A trip to the dump brought back a couple of small hot water heaters, which he dismantled for the tank inside. Then he welded an air vent pipe on (square one in photo), cutting a hole in the lower side and putting a chimney on top to vent the smoke. Then he added a piece of 8-inch pipe, welded on top to load the wood, with a flat swinging cap to close after the fire is going.

He tried it yesterday, first in the cow’s tank, which was also frozen pretty badly. By evening, the tank was half unthawed! So this morning, he took it down to the horse pasture and set it in a chopped basin on top of the ice, and fired it up. Now, two hours later, there is a wide basin of water around the heater and all the afternoon to go. (And because it’s forty degrees today, that should help a lot!)

It’s amazing what can be done with very little money to make homesteading on a shoestring much more enjoyable! Thank you, Will! — Jackie

Share or Bookmark