#enjoy and let me know if this is nifty content to you! I mean Ill make it either way but

[consumer-o-content]

ClanGen Moon 0

Welcome to WillowClan!

Quietstar - 114 moons, 9 lives remaining, an insecure dream shaper and a great kit sitter

Pumaback (deputy) - 73 moons, a righteous and unusually strong fighter

Daisybubble (medicine) - 154 moons, a charismatic and naturally intuitive elder

Breezecloud - 29 moons, a phenomenal hunter and great teacher but completely oblivious

Wingkit - 5 moons, an ambitious moss-ball hunter

Riverdusk - 103 moons, a cunning storyteller

Downypad - 151 moons, an adventurous hunter with swimming skills

Sloefall - 141 moons, a strong fighter but childish (perhaps it's just childlike whimsy)

Moon 0:

Moonlight shone on the long moore grass as puffy, bunny-tail-like clouds quickly traced the sky. The breeze was refreshing but fell on numb fur as the cats trudged on the freshly dampened earth. New-leaf had been generous with rain so far. Quietflit looked behind her as she walked. She had known the elders who followed her would need a slower pace after walking for such a long time but seeing them now, tailing even farther behind with every step, she realized how desperate the group was for a camp. Wingkit, who had started the trek outpacing every other cat, now had to be carried by Riverdusk after complaining of sore paws. Were these the cats StarClan had prophesied would found a new great clan? 

It's not that Quietflit didn't trust the group; she didn't trust herself to lead them to that destiny. Clearlilac, the medicine cat of RiverClanClan, had been very clear what must be done before his untimely death but had he been correct to pick Quietflit to fulfill this prophecy? Quietflit wrestled with these thoughts as the group walked on. Desperate to bite the throat of this insecurity and bring it to the ground. The group behind her, who had been willing to follow her for a moon, trusted her. Clearlilac trusted her; in life and in death. The dreams of him had only grown stronger since they said their final goodbyes to RiverClan. The sound of his voice in her ear, giving her comfort and guidance on which paths to take through the many forests, hills and swamp lands they walked through. The only thing she had to worry about was taking each step.

A gasp came from Pumaback who had been walking at her side. Quietflit looked up. Her eyes shone with disbelief. Of course StarClan could be trusted. Of course Clearlilac had been right. Of course leaving RiverClan had been the right path for this group of cats. In front of her, as if placed there by the paw of StarClan, lay a large shallow cliff enclosed clearing. Tunnels framed by smooth stones encircled the camp as soft fresh sprouts of grass, no larger than a mouse tail, grew at the center. The willow tree that marked the end of their journey grew at the far end of the clearing, its long dainty branches hung over the slope. At that moment, Quietflit could feel the dragging weight of her group's StarClan given duties lift. 

She turned to face the brave cats who had followed her. Their many-colored eyes shone brighter in the moonlight. Now full of life as they took in the sight they had longed for. "When we set out a moon ago, I did not know tonight would be the night that our many days of wandering would conclude." She smiled as Wingkit was gently placed on the ground. Sleep weighed down the kit's eyelids. Quietflit knew Wingkit wouldn't remember this in the morning but somehow that added to the cuteness of the scene. "You are brave warriors, braver than me that's for sure. I believe this is the place Clearlilac prophesied that we would settle in. I see questioning in your eyes Downypad." Quietflit chuckled. "No, I also did not anticipate living like a WindClan cat but if you listen closely there seems to be a stream nearby. We have not lost our roots, we have simply outgrown our mother soil. Let's begin the duties of making this place a camp tomorrow but you all have done more than enough to earn a long rest." The wind rustled in the grass and the group took a collective breath. Each cat found the footing they needed to enter the camp. It took less than a minute for each cat to collapse into their hollow and drift to sleep.

That night, Quietflint dreamed once again. This one was not like the others. Her eyes opened and she took in her surroundings, awe filling her from tail tip to nose. The hair on her shoulders raised and her ears twitched. This was no the MoonStone cave. She was standing on a large ledge looking over a valley spit by a river. The rock behind her and under her paws was smooth, black, and reflected each star above her head perfectly as if a mirror. It looked as if she was sitting amongst the stars looking over the land below as StarClan would. 

The stars began to move and twinkle as if many unseen cats walked in front of them. Then two stars lowered closer to her and blinked slowly. Clearlilac manifested from the light, the two stars becoming his eyes. As Clearlilac approached her, she swiveled her ears behind her. Whispers of her ancestors quietly chanted words she could barely make out in unison. "We grant you your remaining 8 lives." Each voice distant, but together they shook Quietflint to the core. "Use them well and with our blessing." 

Their starry eyes stared into the back of her head as Clearlilac touched noses with her. "Welcome to StarCliff, Quietflint. Or-" he looked her up and down with an expression that seemed knowing of her every thought, "should I say Quietstar?" A hearty laugh that reverberated across the land followed. "Well done! The trek was not easy but every cat that came with you I selected myself." He raised his whitened chin in teasing pride.

Quietstar could do nothing but slowly nod. What was there to say that Clearlilac and the cats that watched her didn't already know? "You really do live up to your name." He laughed again. "Anyway, it's about time you returned back to your clan. WillowClan. But I must warn you of something. There is a deeply personal relationship in the clan that will come to an untimely end, however, the young one will recover. She will find comfort in a cat close to you. Go to them now and return to StarCliff in a moon. The path will be clear when you need it." And with a smile, he touched his nose to Quietstar's forehead. A blinding light forced her eyes closed and once she was able to open them again she was in the hollow. Pumaback slept peacefully next to her as the light of a new day shone into Quirtstar's eyes. She sat up and licked her chest to soothe herself. The stretch and yawn that followed cleansed the remaining sleep from her body. 

[cosmicfaeriewitch]

hiii <3

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99% of my reblogs are queued, so pleeease don’t assume I’m online when you see my posts (I say this with the memory of some girl being all butthurt that I didn’t reply to her immediately after she sent me a message (”oh i thought u were ignoring me”... well thanks for completely assuming im just a bitch when really i finally have a damn job and am working my ass off like ?? the fuck?? ill reply when i can(?!?!), damn lol ) )but please feel free to message/send me asks but know that I got a lot going on in my life and I tend to use tumblr as an escape, and sometimes I just don’t feel like carrying on a convo (introvert here, hello) but i WILL reply in due time, i dont just flat out ignore people, instead i block them if they’re being mean/rude/ridiculous bc i have 0 tolerance for that bs lol so no reason for speculation on that ;) and i tend to post mostly positive stuff, nature, my own nature photography, quotes, space stuff, cute things, art of all kinds, witchy/spiritual stuff, my fandoms, etc. i am that kind of blog that sends nice anons to people in hopes of making there day better, the person who doesnt say much if anything toyoubut reblogs from you all the time and likes all ur personal posts/selfies and tries to be as kind, inspiring, uplifting & loving as possible :) thanks for reading, enjoy my blog & the blogs I follow (seriously, they rock! where do u think i get all this content from??) & hopefully i didn’t lose any followers for a long text post lmao have a magickal week guys <3

[sweetseda]

Canning At Home – Tips For True Beginners

When you’re new to canning food at home, the whole process can be intimidating. Not only does it take a good bit of time and space in the kitchen, but there’s also that worry that you’ll do it wrong and get sick later.

I used to feel the same way. But once I’d gone through the process a couple of times, I realized it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Remember this:

When you’re just starting to can at home, you don’t have to try to fill your whole pantry. It’s okay to work in small batches until you get more comfortable canning and find a few favorite recipes.

How Canning Works

Don’t be intimidated by the canning process. In the simplest recipes, it’s really just a matter of boiling your jars in water bath canner to heat the internal contents and destroy any harmful bacteria.

Once out of the boiling water, the lids on your jars create a vacuum seal as they cool and can be stored in a cool dark place for months or years.

Canning at home: basic supplies

Canning fresh produce is a very cost-effective way to preserve your harvest and stock up on a your favorite seasonal items for use year-round. To get started, you just need a few, inexpensive canning supplies. 

So which canning supplies are the most essential and which ones are optional?

Must Have Canning Supplies

Mason Jars

Optional Canning Supplies

Jam and Jelly Maker

Pressure Canner and Cooker

Tired of canning and want more options for preserving? Read 4 Ways To Preserve Tomatoes

Supplies required for canning at home

Canning is a great way to enjoy healthy, nutritious foods throughout the year. It allows you to preserve everything your garden has to offer throughout the year and take advantage of produce you find at the farmers market.

Water Bath Canner

Aside from canning jars, the main piece of equipment you’ll need is a water bath canner. While you can use any large stockpot to boil your jars of homegrown goodness, a water bath canner is often more convenient and can fit more jars.

If you’re in the market for a water bath canner, consider the Granite Ware Water Bath Canner. This large pot has a jar rack that your canning jars will sit on for easy insertion and removal of your filled canning jars.

The 21.5 quart pot is a great size for canning and holds 7 one-quart jars, 9 one-pint jars or 13 half-pint jars. The stepped design of this canner produces more even heat and allows more boiling water to contact the top half of the jars.

This canner is designed to work on both gas and electric burners, but the manufacturer suggests against using it on glass top stoves.

Why you need a water bath canner

Two reasons: size and the jar rack.

The large size means you can can as much as possible at a time. And the jar rack can be lifted and rest along the edges of the pot for easy placement of your jars.

It remains in place during canning to prevent the glass jars from touching the bottom of the pot. Why is this important?

Because having the glass in direct contact with the bottom of the pot may cause your jars to bust open! Let me tell you that is not something you want to clean up. For that reason alone it is well worth investing in a proper water bath canner.

When the water bath process is completed, you can lift the rack with the cans out of the water for easier removal. The jar rack gives you more control over the heat and jars, resulting in better overall canning results.

Canning Recipe Books

The All New Ball Complete Book Of Home Canning comes highly recommended by all home canning experts.

Everyone knows that Ball is one of the biggest names in the canning world. When they publish a book on canning, it’s something worth paying attention to, and the newest edition of this canning reference does not disappoint.

Yes, there are a lot of free resources about canning available online, but there’s just something about having a big book sitting on your kitchen counter that you can reference throughout the canning process. It’s also nice to have and leaf through for inspiration when you’re facing a big batch of produce that needs to be put up.

As expected from a book like this, it has a lot of recipes for a large variety of canned products you can make right at home in your kitchen. What makes this book such an invaluable resource though is all the extra information packed into these pages. 

You’ll find detailed information on the basics of canning and each step of the food preservation process.

Preserve your favorite fruits and veggies for eating all year round.

Safety is crucial when you’re preserving food that you and your family will eat months from now. This book has a lot of information about foodborne illnesses and how to prevent them.

You have to make sure you kill bad bacteria when you can your own food and, to make that happen, you should follow the time tested processes that this book will teach you.

This is a book on canning that you will come back to again and again for canning advice, to review the handy guide on produce weight vs. volume, and of course, to try some of the amazing recipes included.

I highly recommend you add this to your library of cooking and homemaking books.

Put ’em up

Canning For A New Generation

Canning Tools Kit

If you’re new to canning, the idea of handling hot jars submerged in boiling water can be pretty terrifying. Grabbing hot, wet, slippery canning jars with your kitchen tongs and wrestling them out of the pot and onto a folded towel on the counter does sound a bit dangerous.

Fortunately, there are tools that are made just for this purpose. Enter the HIC 5-Piece Canning Set.

Make sure you have a canning kit that includes jar tongs in your canning supplies. These special little tongs wrap around the jar, making it easy and safe to handle even the hottest canning jars.

You also get a set of kitchen tongs for lifting canning lids out of the pot when boiling them to sterilize and handling hot food that needs to get into the jars and a magnetic lid lifter for pulling the can lids out safely.

Another essential for your canning supplies, the included funnel makes it easy to pour liquids into jars without the risk of spilling it all over the jar and the counter. The funnel is nice and wide, making it easy to pour chunky things without making a big mess.

When you’re canning, you need to tighten lids after you get the hot jars from the water bath. The included jar wrench is much safer and easier to use than grabbing some kitchen towels to tighten the lids. 

Canning Jars

Who doesn’t love mason jars? They are, of course, great for their intended purpose, but there are many other uses for these essential canning supplies.

Use ball mason jars as drinking glasses, flower vases, storing leftover food, carrying lunch to work, and more. Older jars that are past their canning prime can be turned into all sorts of arts and crafts around the house.

Ball is the most popular brand when it comes to canning and mason jars. In addition to canning, they are a great storage solution for the freezer as well.

Mason jars are an essential supply for home canners.

With more and more health concerns popping up about plastic storage containers and the risk of contamination into the foods we eat, some homesteaders feel safer using glass instead. Ball jars have yet to break on me in the freezer or in the canner, which is important in my book.

It’s important to note that once you freeze a jar you should no longer use it for canning.

When you start to make things like freezer jam, or use jars as freezer containers, keeping good track of what can go in the freezer and what’s used only for canning is important.

Home Canning Beginner Tip:

Before you start to can anything, think about the serving sizes you end up using for any particular food. 

For example, if you use only half a jar of spaghetti sauce at a time, and then struggle to use it all up before it goes bad, pick a smaller jar when you make and can your own. 

The same goes for jelly. If you’re not a big jelly or jam eater, make small batches and can them in little half-pint jars. This allows you to still make a variety of different fruit preserves and more importantly it makes sure that jelly stays tasty to the last bite.

Ball mason jars come in a huge variety of sizes as well as regular and wide mouth jars. You can order them straight from Amazon and have them delivered to your front door.

With free Prime shipping, this is one of the most cost-effective ways to get them. 

Optional Home Canning Supplies

Automatic Jam and Jelly Maker

If you love your bread maker and rice cooker, you’re going to love the Ball automatic jam and jelly maker. It’s one of those nifty little appliances that can save you a lot of time and effort.

This fancy-do-dah electric appliance heats, stirs, and cooks a batch of homemade jelly or jam on autopilot.You add the ingredients, turn it on and come back to yummy jam, ready to pour into canning jars.

From there, you can process the jars in a hot water canner, freeze the finished fruit preserves, or just start eating it.

This will come in very handy for anyone that loves making homemade jelly but has a hard time standing at the stove stirring posts for long periods of time. 

Other ways to use the jelly maker

While this is marketed as a jam and jelly maker, it is actually a lot more versatile than that. Essentially, it’s an electric cooker with built-in stirring paddles.

When you look at it that way, it opens up all sorts of cooking possibilities. Use it to make spaghetti sauce, small batches of soup, or any type of sauce that involves a lot of cooking and stirring. Now it’s a much more versatile and usable small kitchen appliance.

Fill your pantry with jellies and sauces that were canned at home!

The Ball Automatic Jam and Jelly Maker is a small appliance that won’t take up any more room than your slow cooker on the kitchen counter. It’s also pretty light-weight, making it easy to move it from the cabinet to the counter and back. 

No matter how busy you are, you can turn on this jelly maker and have it take care of the cooking and stirring for you leaving no excuse not to have fresh homemade jam on the breakfast table.

Do you need a pressure canner?

Some foods, like low acid vegetables and meats, are not safely canned in a water bath canner. In those instances, you need a pressure canner.

A pressure canner effectively raises the temperature of the canned contents to 240 degrees Fahrenheit which is high enough to kill the organism that causes botulism. Water bath canning, on the other hand, only raises the temperature to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is fine for acidic foods and jellies because the Clostridium bacteria cannot survive in a low pH environment. But if you want to can your veggies without pickling them, you need to use a pressure canner.

Instead of being submerged in boiling water, a pressure canner uses steam to push all the air out of your canned food and fill the space with boiling water and steam at much higher temps than can be achieved with a water bath canner. Since there is no air in the jar, the heat is distributed evenly to all parts of the jar.

Presto Pressure Canner and Cooker

Pressure canners come in many sizes and price ranges. The Presto Pressure Canner and Cooker is a great choice because it is affordable, has a large capacity, safe and sturdy locking lid, and easy to read pressure gauge.

This pressure canner also has nice safety features like plastic handles so that you won’t burn yourself when the canner is hot and a pressure regulator that releases excess built up steam. You can also use this canner for water bath canning and pressure cooking.

The Presto pressure canner and cooker comes with a canning rack, instruction manual, and recipe book.

Now that you have all the essential canning supplies, what will you can first?

 Here’s a quick rundown of the whole canning process in an infographic. PIN IT!

Essential canning supplies and canning basics infographic by Bed Bath & Beyond

The post Canning At Home – Tips For True Beginners appeared first on You Should Grow.

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