🕳️ The Well

💧 Water, kept

1. Making it safe is its own one-pager (boil · bleach drops · sunlight). Print that one twice.
2. Store treated water in food-grade containers, filled to the brim (less air, less growth), capped, dark and cool. Rotate every 6–12 months.
3. Count 4 litres per person per day — half to drink, half for food and washing. Two weeks' worth is the floor worth having.
4. Rain off a roof: first-flush diverted (the first minutes wash the roof), screened against mosquitoes, and treated before drinking like any wild water.

🌱 The planting wheel — staple crops, set to your frost

🫙 Keeping the harvest

1. Fermenting (safest first craft): vegetables + 2% brine (1 level tablespoon salt per litre of water), everything held under the brine (a weight — a clean stone works), loosely covered, cool room. Bubbles in days; sour and keeping in 1–4 weeks; cold storage after. Cloudy brine is normal. Slimy, pink, or truly foul → throw it out and scrub the jar.
2. Drying: thin slices, airflow, out of direct sun (or lowest oven, door cracked) until leathery-crisp. Store airtight and dark. Herbs hung in bundles; beans dried hard on the vine.
3. Water-bath canning — HIGH-ACID ONLY (fruit, jams, pickles in real vinegar, tomatoes with added lemon juice): full rolling boil covering jars by 3 cm, proper times from a tested recipe, lids that pop down as they cool. Any lid that didn't seal goes to the fridge and the week's meals.
4. Low-acid food (plain vegetables, meat, broth) requires a PRESSURE canner. Full stop. A water bath cannot reach the temperature that kills botulism spores, and botulism is invisible, tasteless, and deadly. No pressure canner → ferment, dry, or cellar it instead.
5. The root cellar (or any cool, dark, slightly-damp corner ~0–10°C): potatoes, carrots and beets in damp sand, cabbages, squash (squash likes it drier). Check weekly; one spoiler spoils neighbours.

🌰 Saving seed — next year lives in this one

1. Save from open-pollinated plants ("heirloom"). Hybrid (F1) seed grows, but grows a stranger — fine to eat, unreliable to depend on.
2. Save from your best plants, not the leftovers — earliest, healthiest, truest. You are breeding for your own ground.
3. Dry-seed crops (beans, peas, lettuce, brassicas): let pods/heads dry fully on the plant, then a week more inside. Wet-seed (tomato, squash, cucumber): scoop, ferment tomato pulp 2–3 days in a jar of water (the mould is the process — it eats the sprouting-blocker), rinse, dry on a plate a full week.
4. Store bone-dry, airtight, cool, dark, LABELLED with crop and year. Most seed keeps 3–5 years; onion and parsnip barely 1–2 — grow those out every year.
5. Squash family crosses enthusiastically — one variety per kind, or expect surprises in year two.

🌽 Planting in company

1. The Three Sisters: corn first; beans two weeks later climbing the stalks and feeding the soil; squash sprawling beneath, shading out weeds and holding water. A whole diet in one bed, older than every book.
2. Onions and garlic edge the carrot and cabbage beds — their smell confuses the flies that hunt by scent.
3. Flowers are workers: marigolds among the tomatoes, anything blooming near the squash for the pollinators the harvest depends on.
4. Keep apart: beans from the onion family (each stunts the other); potatoes from tomatoes (same blights, shared ruin).
5. Rotate: don't grow a family in the same ground two years running — the ground remembers, and so do its pests.