the resilient pantry

Panic-buying on the one hand and rationing on the other only multiply a crisis. Yet there’s a practical solution that meets a primal need in one classic, simple pattern. Yes. The pantry.

The ills of a pandemic are exacerbated by overbuying and by repeatedly returning for trickles of supplies, causing multiple exposures. Like takeout deliveries half-eaten, tossed, more packaging than nourishment, at once too much and too little, our goods circulate in wasteful, clotted bursts. Yet we have traditional models that could stabilise this crisis and mitigate the next as climate emergency redoubles every hazard.

looking through the open pantry door at the shelves of preserves, dried fruit and nuts and sacks of grains.

Just as kitchen skills liberate us from costly reliance on the prepackaged, just as gardening skills open a world of flavour, nourishment, resilience, the skills of food storage are deceptively simple, revolutionary in their potential. Tried-and-true and transformative.

looking through the glass door into the pantry.

Not everyone has a built-in pantry, yet a cool, dry closet or cupboard can host a store of dried goods. A sack of dried beans, whole grains bought in good times can keep for years, sustaining us.

shelves of dried goods in the pantry.

Not everyone has a root cellar, yet a bin buried in the garden up to its lip and covered can be filled with root veg in season. No refrigerated trucks, no last-minute car-trips, efficiency at its best.

through the open door of the root cellar, down the steps, sit crates of apples.

Not everyone has a deep freeze but many could revive basic skills of preserving fruit in jars, fermenting veg in brines, dehydrating, curing, immersing in oil or alcohol. Transforming the fresh into the stable, a reliable store of deep nutrition to draw on when times are tough.

A few folk still practice this basic, liberating knowledge. Most of us can access, even in isolation, books, sites, videos teaching these traditions.

apples in baskets and cider in carboys and demijohns, keeping cool in the root cellar.


It’s a fine time to sow seeds, forage, support local farmers. We can stock up in at once a noble yet humble fashion. Generosity springs from self-reliance, met needs and community hardiness. A virtuous cycle of sufficiency. With foresight, drawing on the local, we’re reviving a long heritage of adaptability. The circulation of what’s needed smooths into a steadying, nourishing flow.

Then we can stay home, because home is a source of strength and resilience.

green walnut nocino

If there is art in an agrarian practice, it’s in humble solutions that close the loop. Allow the freshly clasped jar of nocino to illustrate.

Nocino is the infusion of young, green walnuts in alcohol, hull and all, plucked, sliced and submerged before any evidence of a shell forms within. The young walnut is more fruit than nut. Picking at this moment gives an impression of scrumping in one’s own orchard. Intoxicating floral-citrus scents linger on the fingers. Just as pickling green plums transforms excess fruit into vegetable delicacy, nocino solves a problem.

a canning jar with halved green walnuts submerged in vodka

You see, two of our three walnut trees suffer from a pest. A permaculture gardener with an encyclopedic knowledge of useful plants told us about this little larvae. Orchardists know this tale. A curse. Tiny eggs, once laid, hatch grubs that burrow into the hull, making a right mess of inky stickiness before falling with the nut to the ground, where it creeps back up the tree to perpetuate the cycle. Codling moth grubs that feast in the core of apples practically wave to say hello.

Seeing as the nut itself is spared, we shrug and pull on raggedy boots and gloves to roll mushy black husks in the grasses, sometimes pleased to find a scrubbed nut ready to be cured and squirrelled away for winter cracking. Mostly, we end with an unpleasant basket of sticky coals set by and let’s be honest, neglected in favour of easier food.

The third walnut is free of pestilence. Pure joy to harvest, cure in the solar drier, crack open by the fire on a winter’s eve. We caught the other trees early, scrambling up to fill our pockets, somewhere between chasing kid goats and shepherding chicks, as tradition prescribes, round about the 24th of June. The nocino infuses on a pantry shelf from one solstice to the next. We’ll sweeten the tipple and partake of it come winter.

Brining likewise captures the green youth and ferments it into an ancient treat. We fancy pickled walnuts and a sip of nocino are the walnut’s answer to cider and an apple tart. Worthy of a wassail.

For now this is our practice in the nuttery, to break the curse. Without a host, may the grubs be foraged by chickens, ducks, and trouble us no longer.

making biochar

As carbon sequestration goes, charcoal-making has extraordinary potential. Last year we had the good fortune to spend a day learning to make charcoal with a local historian and tried out the basics of this ancient practice. From Terra-preta in the Amazonian rainforests, stone kilns in Japan (and all over these islands, which our friend has written a book about), to colliers making clamps in the woods of Britain, it is the foundation of rich culture and the rich soil that supports it.

wood burning to charcoal in a biochar kiln

To store carbon in the soil and support the microbiome, while absorbing water events and releasing it slowly, well. It solves a host of our current problems.

wood burning in a biochar kiln

We inoculated our little pail of charcoal into biochar by layering it in the deep litter of our chicken run to absorb nitrogen and earthworm castings, then feeding the enriched soil to the trees and gardens. We could make charcoal on a micro scale in our chiminea or wood stove, and we’re looking at the piles of prunings that we intended to have chipped and considering whether to direct some of it to this simple kiln that the historian makes. Amazing.

charcoal soaking in a biochar kiln

Yesterday as I broad-forked a bed in the new potager, I turned up some of the biochar, which must’ve been harvested with compost out of the chicken run when I sheet-mulched the bed a few months ago. It’s a pleasure to see it and know it has begun its restorative work, and may well continue to benefit this soil for centuries.