Whether you are a seasoned gardener looking to stretch the shelf-stability of your harvest into the winter or a beginner taking your first steps toward self-sufficiency, food preservation can feel both empowering and a bit intimidating, but my guest this week, fifth-generation homesteader and “Pioneering Today” host Melissa K. Norris, makes modern home canning and other preservation methods approachable.
Drawing on decades of hands-on experience and family tradition, Melissa reveals why you don’t need expensive equipment or a massive homestead to get started. She is a bestselling author, and one of the most trusted voices in modern homesteading. She homesteads on a 15-acre property in the foothills of the North Cascade mountain range in Washington State. Since 2010, Melissa has taught hundreds of thousands of home gardeners, home canners, scratch bakers, and aspiring homesteaders how to grow, preserve, and cook real food from scratch, even on small land, limited time, and a tight budget.
Melissa K. Norris is the host of “Pioneering Today” and a fifth-generation homesteader.
Photo Credit: Suzy Holling Photography
“ I just have a heart to steward my home, my family, the land that we’ve been given, this earth that we’re living on, to really just try to approach everything from being a good steward with what we have in that moment at that specific place in time,” Melissa says.
On Monday, September 14, Melissa will present “You Grew It. Now Keep It: 9 Ways to Preserve Your Harvest at Home” for the Online Gardening Academy™ community. Admission is $29, and the recording will be yours to keep. The program will begin at noon Eastern.
Then on Wednesday, September 30, I will host “Death in the Garden: Why Your Fall Cleanup Might Be Killing What You’re Trying to Protect” with landscape ecologist, researcher and author Shaun McCoshum, Ph.D. Shaun will show you how to read your garden’s dead and dying vegetation like a habitat map — and how to manage or redesign your space so it looks intentional, not neglected, while doing dramatically more for local wildlife. Registration is $25 plus taxes and fees, and the program will begin at noon Eastern.
Meet Melissa K. Norris
“ I grew up what most people would consider really poor. We lived in a 1974 single-wide trailer, and it had an Expando, meaning there was like this extra square footage on the living room. So we felt like that was like high class,” she recalls.
Her father worked full time as owner of his own business, log truck driving and road building.
“ We always used to tease my dad that he had his own business because he didn’t want anybody else telling him what to do, and there may be a little tiny core of that in my personality,” Melissa admits.
Her family also had a beef herd and a really big garden.
“We really just lived what a lot of people would just consider ‘country living,’ and we didn’t call it homesteading,” she says.
She still lives on the same road she grew up on, just a few doors down. Many of the people she grew up around had vegetable gardens, and it was common for them to cook from scratch.
“I’m 45,” she says. “You know, back then there was no such thing as Uber Eats or DoorDash, and they still don’t deliver up here.”
Growing and cooking one’s own food was just a way of life, and it was second nature to Melissa. It wasn’t until she was in high school and spending nights at friends’ houses that she realized other families did not have gardens in their backyards.
“They would go to get stuff for dinner – their mom wasn’t pulling jars of home canned food off the shelf, and they weren’t pulling their meat from the freezer that you could tell wasn’t store-bought.”
She also didn’t realize how tight money was until she became an adult.
“My mom and I started talking, and she started sharing more about the actual budget, what it was when I was growing up. And I was like, ‘Wow,’” she remembers.
But growing up, she always felt like they had really good food – and her mom was a great cook.
Melissa started blogging in 2011, and then a podcast in 2014. She had been a radio guest and was invited to host her own radio show, which she distributed as a podcast.
Then in 2018, she quit her day job as a pharmacy tech so she could be a full-time homesteading instructor, blogger, podcaster and video creator. She shares tutorials, recipes and home food preservation instruction as well as herbal medicine and natural wellness advice. She also runs the online Pioneering Today Academy and is a co-founder of the in-person Modern Homesteading Conference, which will next be held from June 25–26, 2027, at the Kootenai County Fairgrounds in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. And a brand-new conference tailored to women is planned for March 2027.
On top of all that, Melissa is co-founder of Homestead Living, a publishing house that produced magazines and books, and she and her husband raise grass-fed, grass-finished beef that they sell locally.
Fresh basil preserved in salt. Photo Credit: Jayson Korthuis
What’s Changed in Canning Tech – and What Hasn’t
Melissa is coming up on 27 years of canning in her home, in addition to the years she canned with her mother. In that time, not much has changed in terms of home canning, but there has been one development of note: the steam canner.
The steam canner has earned National Center for Home Food Preservation’s approval for preserving high-acid foods. The technology has been in use since 2019, and essentially, it’s approved for the same recipes as water bath canning is approved for.
She notes that people like steam canning because it uses less water than water bath canning and it doesn’t take as long to get the heat up to the right temperature.
Water bath canning is the method most canners are familiar with.
“Many folks know that’s where you got a big pot of boiling water and you’re putting your high-acid foods, your jams, jellies, pickles, et cetera. Fruit is going into that boiling water all sealed up in its jar and is processing, and then you pull it out and it’s shelf stable,” Melissa says. ”That’s been around really since the mason jar was invented, which was about in the 1850s.”
Canning is one of humanity’s newer forms of preservation methods, she points out. And canning was mostly done at home prior to industrialization, though home recipes for canning weren’t widely published until the 1920s.
Pressure cooking came before water bath canning.
“We’ve had pressure cooking for hundreds of years, actually,” Melissa notes. “That’s not new technology. We’ve got some new safety features on pressure canners today — hallelujah, amen — even in comparison to, like, the ’50s and ’60s. But the basic tech really hasn’t evolved past then.”
Most of the canning industry standards are still based on testing that was performed during World War II. Food scientists studied which canning recipes could be deemed safe, as in, the necessary temperatures, cooking times and acid content to keep food free of bacteria that leads to botulism.
“There’s been a few things throughout the years where there’s been a few updates, but the majority of it is actually based upon that testing that was done upon that time,” Melissa says.
Pressure canning can be intimidating to people who are new to canning, so water bath canning is where most people start.
A ferment securing lid.
Photo Credit: Cheryl Thorne
Safety Standards vs Rebel Canning
Melissa is a canning safety hardliner. She notes that there is no canning police, so people can can however they want.
The practice of canning with little regard for widely adopted safety standards is known as “rebel canning.”
“It’s really important if someone wants to practice rebel canning that they’re upfront about it in saying, ‘Hey, this isn’t an approved method,’ or, ‘This isn’t safe.’ Because new people coming in, they don’t have that foreknowledge – is this safe or not? And a lot of them do want to use the safe methods. They just don’t know what they don’t know.”
She wants people to be upfront about it when they are sharing canning practices that are not within the lines of what has been tested for safety.
“In my groups, I have a lot of folks who have come there because they specifically want to learn tested, safe ways to do home food preservation. So if somebody shares something that’s not, I first gently let them know.”
Some people don’t know it’s not considered safe because that’s just the way they learned.
“ You can have somebody who has been canning for 50 years, but if they didn’t learn the science-tested way to begin with, then it doesn’t necessarily make them an expert,” he said.
She has enlightened many people in her canning safety courses who are happy to learn. But there are some people she encounters in her groups who are determined to do things the way they have always done it, and she lets them know that is their prerogative, but in her community, she only allows people to share what’s tested and safe.
“I personally would not want to just let some of those things fly and then have a report where somebody did get sick. I don’t want that on me, on my conscience.”
Canning safety is paramount. Photo Credit: Suzy Holling Photography
Heirloom Beans
Two varieties of bean have been passed down in Melissa’s family for five generations: Tar Heel pole bean (a green bean) and October beans (a white shelled bean).
Her grandparents moved their family from North Carolina to Washington State in 1940, when her father was just a little boy.
“They didn’t get to bring very many possessions at all,” Melissa notes.
But they did bring those bean seeds — a piece of home.
She considers it a bridge to her past as well as her future.
“My great-grandmother wrote letters to me when I was a little girl, but I never talked to her on the phone. I never got to meet her in person,” she says.
But they had those beans in common. And Melissa plans on passing the beans down through the generations to her own great-grandchildren someday.
One of her fondest memories in recent years is sitting with her father outside his home and shelling October beans.
“ I hope that someday that will be some memories that my kids will hold, those moments of nothing special as far as money or this big, huge event or this big, huge gift, but that they’ll hold that.”
Learning from Bean Traditions
Growing up in a family that grew much of their own food and then preserved it, Melissa learned a pattern: How many beans to plant in order to have enough to “put up” (that means “preserve,” in homesteading lingo), enough to eat fresh and enough to plant the following year’s crop.
“ So when I started my own garden, I just knew that this is the row space that we need in order to have this outcome. So that kind of had already been done for me,” she says. ”However, as we started expanding the amount of what we were growing, and I had some health things where we really were like, ‘We need to produce more of our own food,’ I started realizing I have to figure out the same thing for all the other crops.”
As her family grew, she also needed to recalculate how much they would need.
“Each year, my goal was to have one more crop that we had grown and preserved a year’s worth ourselves,” she says. “So we started with the green beans and the October beans, and then each year we just kept adding to that.”
Garlic was easy to do because it stores well. Then she worked on tomatoes. And today, she has a wide variety of crops she puts up.
“ It was kind of out of necessity because even though I grew up as a fifth-generation homesteader and had some of those things that I could model and I’m really grateful for, I was one of the first women that actually worked full time outside the home. And so I had to figure out systems if I wanted to be able to keep doing a lot of these skill sets that would work when I wasn’t home for a vast period of the day.”
Melissa grew up in a household where the pantry was also stocked with preserved homegrown food.
Photo Credit: Suzy Holling Photography
Anyone Can Have a ‘Root Cellar’
Melissa teaches nine ways of preserving food:
- Cold storage
- Water bath
- Pressure
- Dehydrating
- Fermenting
- Freeze-drying
- Root cellar
- Infusion
- Salt curing
The most underutilized method? Melissa says it’s the root cellar.
”A lot of people think that you have to have a root cellar or a basement or something like that in order to do root cellaring, and I mean, those things can be beneficial and helpful, but you don’t actually have to have a root cellar in order to use root cellar techniques on specific vegetables,” she says.
Garlic can be stored at room temperature and last almost a full year. Storage-variety onions can likewise be kept at room temperature, and don’t require a ton of humidity as some other crops do.
“So those are really two great crops that you don’t have to do hardly anything to,” Melissa says.
Botulism Alertness
“ One of the biggest mistakes that I see is people not understanding botulism,” Melissa says.
Botulism is a deadly illness caused by botulinum neurotoxins.
There are two camps: Those who fear it because they don’t know enough about it, so they are too fearful to venture into canning. And people who don’t realize the true risks involved.
She encourages people to not be in either of those camps.
”I wish more people had a healthy respect of it,” Melissa says. “Even better, an understanding of how we get it, so therefore you know how to avoid it. And then use practices to make sure that it was avoided, but that you are still preserving food for yourself and your family.”
She encourages everyone to come learn. “The table is open,” she says. “Come in and learn either side so that you can move forward confidently. Because you can absolutely produce really amazing food for your family that you don’t have to worry about its safety concerns.”
Canning dehydrated fruit. Photo Credit: Cheryl Thorne
“Home food preservation is something that anybody can do, and you can start really small. It doesn’t have to be where you are trying to produce a year’s worth of something – which I shared is my goal. I tend to have really large goals, Lord help me sometimes. But you can start small and build, and you don’t have to have a huge investment. You don’t have to go out and buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment or anything like that.
“And it’s also something that if we look back at society and humanity, like people have been preserving their own food and growing it for a really long time. It’s really only the past 60 to 100 years that we’ve kind of gotten away from that. And so it’s kind of like almost like coming back home in a way.”
You don’t need to have a root cellar to use the same practices in preservation. Photo Credit: Cheryl Thorne
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Melissa K. Norris on modern home canning and homesteading. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by clicking the Play button on the green bar near the top of this post.
Do you practice canning and other food preservation methods? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Episode 168: Preserving Your Harvest with No Special Equipment, with Theresa Loe
Episode 326: An Introduction to Modern Homesteading, with Jill Winger
Episode 456: Food Preservation for Gardeners
September 14th webinar: “You Grew It. Now Keep It: 9 Ways to Preserve Your Harvest at Home” with Melissa K. Norris, author of “Everything Worth Preserving”
September 30th webinar: “Death in the Garden: Why Your Fall Cleanup Might Be Killing What You’re Trying to Protect”
Fall Gardening Masterclass – Get access to the webinar replay for $20.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
“Pioneering Today” on Apple Podcasts
Pioneering Today – Melissa K. Norris on Facebook
Melissa K. Norris – Pioneering Today on Pinterest
Melissa K. Norris – Modern Homesteading YouTube Channel
Melissa K Norris – Modern Homesteading on Instagram | @melissaknorris
“Everything Worth Preserving: The Complete Guide for Food Preservation at Home” by Melissa K. Norris
“The Made-from-Scratch Life: From-Scratch Living Guide for Growing Food, Preserving Harvests, and Building Self-Sufficiency” by Melissa K. Norris
“Home and Hand Made: Homesteading Guide for Saving Money with From-Scratch Cooking and Homemade Essentials” by Melissa K. Norris
“The Family Garden Plan: Family Garden Planning Guide for Growing More Food and Harvesting Year-Round” by Melissa K. Norris
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com – Use code JoeGardener26 for $5 off
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