craig, Author at Urban Homesteading

Author: craig

5 Easy Crops for the Beginner Gardener

Posted on July 8, 2025July 8, 2025 by craig

We recently had some people over and they saw our garden for the first time. Their question — and everyone asks this question when they first see what we do — was “How did you get started on this?” Our garden takes up two and a half properties (ours, a neighbour’s, and a piece of another neighbour’s) with somewhere north of 50 different fruit, vegetables, and herbs, bringing in well over 1,000 pounds of food on an annual basis.

For us, it started as a row of squash and a row of potatoes, and once we had that mastered, it expanded rapidly from there. If you’re new to gardening and urban homesteading and not sure where to start, here are 5 easy crops for beginners, including some that work for extra small spaces like apartment balconies.

While these can all be grown from seed, some of these work better as seedlings bought from a greenhouse or garden store, especially if, like us, you don’t have room or experience in seed starting indoors.

1. Potatoes

Four large bags and two large bins full of potatoes

This is what started us on this homesteading journey. What I enjoy about potatoes is that when properly taken care of, and that process isn’t too difficult, potatoes are a pretty consistent crop.

We use starter potatoes with eyes — either store-bought or the neglected potatoes in the back of our pantry. If your seed potatoes have a lot of eyes on them, you can cut them into smaller pieces where each piece has 2-3 eyes, and allow the pieces to callous for a few days. If you plant them directly after cutting they may rot in the ground.

To plant, be sure your potato bed has a lot of bulky soil around it. Make a dish in the soil about 4 inches deep. In the middle, dig a hole 8 inches deep, and place the potato or potato piece in the hole so that the eyes are up and the cut side is down. This is called the mother potato, because as it grows, it will rot and the new potatoes will form around it. Cover the hole with dirt, but keep the 4-inch dish in tact, and water daily so this dish is full.

You really have to soak potatoes in the beginning. For the first week, fill the bowl a few times until the water does not sink into the soil in under 1 minute. Once you see green leaves coming up, you can reduce watering to once every 2 days. This allows the potato plant to grow better roots, as the roots will reach out further in search of water, delivering more water to the plant and letting it grow more leaves and flowers. Potatoes plants put their energy into the potato to survive the winter and regrow in spring, so the more leaves and flowers, the bigger and more numerous will be your potato harvest!

We like to put a stake with the potatoes right away, because when the plant grows, we loosely tie the plant to the stake. We’ve found over the years that if we don’t tie them, a windy storm could blow the plant over and then it stops growing and slowly dies — though, that said, the potato is fine and can be harvested. However, if the plant is tied and doesn’t blow over, the plant will keep growing and potatoes will grow larger and more plentiful.

When you see about 2 feet worth of foliage coming up, heap the extra soil over into the 4 inch dish. You can pull other adjacent soil up to form a hill. The hill will ensure maturing potatoes are covered. If they get exposed to the sun, they will turn green, which is toxic for consumption.

One other reason we like to stake our potatoes is, when you pull the potato plants into hills, the stake reminds you where the centre of the plants—and most of the roots—are. This makes it easier for watering.

When you see flowers forming, this means the potatoes are growing underground. When potatoes are done flowering, usually they will fall over and die. One year, however, due to staking the potatoes, we ended up having them flower twice, and the potatoes were huge—a few were nearly 24 ounces!

To harvest, wait until the plant starts to die and turn yellow. Then carefully dig up the potatoes and break off the plant if they’re still joined. Loosely brush off dirt. Let the potatoes sit in a cool, dark, humid place for a few weeks for the skin to harden. Then potatoes can be stored in a cool, dark, dry place for upwards of six months before they start to go soften and sprout. If you’d like to explore other options, you can pressure can potatoes.

If you’re wanting to replant potatoes the following year, collect egg-sized potatoes in a paper bag and keep them in the fridge over winter. In late April, take them out on a tray and keep them moist with a mist spray bottle. The eyes will develop just in time for planting.

2. Squash

Along with potatoes, squash was a key crop in the beginning of our homesteading journey and it’s been a constant in the garden ever since. We now grow acorn, butternut, pumpkin, and spaghetti squash, but in the past we’ve done zucchini and kobocha.

Squash can be very showy in the garden because it can very large and feature large, brightly coloured flowers. We typically plant our squash in the front yard and weave through the spaces around the fruit bushes, or at the edge of our back garden where there’s a bit of dead space for it to expand into.

We plant squash seeds directly into the ground, but we’ve seen squash seedlings at the garden store, which can be great if you’re starting a little late or if you don’t have the greatest luck with planting seeds. Squash requires a lot of water. Despite what you might think, you only have to water at the base. I used to at least sprinkle the leaves a bit, thinking they needed moisture, but they don’t.

You can save yourself a lot of hassle if you make a sizeable mound of soil, about 1-2 feet across, and then flatten the top into a bowl about 8-12 inches deep. Plant the squash along the outside of this bowl, about 1-2 inches from the top. When watering squash through the year, you just fill this bowl to the top. This way, as the squash sprawls — and it may spread out 20-40 feet, or more, in several directions — you’ll always know where the roots of each squash are.

When it gets toward the end of the season and it’s damper and cooler at night, you might encounter a fungus that looks like white dusty splotches on the leaves. You can try and trim off the infected parts, but it unfortunately spreads rapidly. Sometimes we’ve had healthy squash come off of these vines and sometimes not. Putting some epsom salt in a spray bottle with water and spraying infected leaves may help prevent the fungus from spreading — however, this may be a folk remedy and have no basis in science, so feel free to take or leave that advice.

However, if you use the circular bowl setup, you’ll minimize how much of the plant is wet. The white fungus is a mold and thrives on moisture and cooler temperatures. You can’t avoid the morning dews, or overnight rains, that will give the mold its ideal growing conditions, but at least you can minimize the chances that it will spread.

Squash can be harvested at any time, by cutting them from the vine, leaving a few inches of stem attached to the squash. If you’re starting to get that fungus, it might be good to harvest all the squash on the affected vine and quickly dispose of the vine. We tend to leave our squash on as long as we can so they become bigger, however, this can lead to a less concentrated flavour. Squash stores well in a cool, dark, dry place for several months. We harvest in September and October and usually find they start going mouldy in February. To counter this, we peel, chop, and freeze the squash in January to minimize loss.

Here on the site I have recipes for pumpkin puree and pumpkin butter, if you’re looking for ideas.

3. Garlic

Washed heads of garlic that have streaks of purple in them

Garlic is one of my favourite crops to grow, mostly because it’s so darn easy.

Garlic can be planted in the fall or the spring. If you’re buying starter garlic from a garden store, look for hardneck garlic for fall planting, but either hardneck or softneck can be used for spring planting. You can also plant garlic from the grocery store—you’re better off planting in the spring in case it’s a variety that can’t withstand the winter, but we’ve always planted in the fall and they’ve always overwintered successfully.

Though you can plant garlic in the spring, it’s best planted in fall, provided the ground is dry and the weather is cool. If planting in the fall, cover the bed with about 1-2 feet of old plant foliage from harvest. We find squash vine and potato plants perfect for this. This covering acts as insulation in the spring. Garlic requires a good soaking to get started, so the winter snow piling up on the foliage will melt, soaking the garlic, while the insulation will protect the budding garlic from weather variations in pre-spring. When the weather has become more consistently warm overnight — usually about mid-May or so — you can pull back the foliage and free the new garlic shoots.

If you have a wet fall, or warm weather that carries on too close to the first snow, then planting in spring is fine. You don’t want to risk that the fall rains and above zero temperatures will sprout the garlic — then have it die over the winter. Just note that you really have to soak the garlic if planted in spring, or it may rot. Spring garlic will mature a few weeks later than fall garlic.

To plant garlic, break a bulb into individual cloves and leave the skins on. Plant vertically with the pointy end up, a couple inches into the ground, with each clove spaced about six inches apart. Water well. Garlic also works well in a pot if you’re in a small place or an apartment with a balcony or even just a sunny window.

When garlic comes up, if it’s hardneck garlic you should get a flower stem. This is known as a scape. Harvest the scape before the flower opens or else the garlic will stop growing. They can easily be cut or snapped off—and then grilled on the BBQ or chopped and added to roasted veggies. To preserve these you can pickle them, make jam, or even a hot sauce.

When the garlic plant is about 2/3 yellowed, usually in the last few weeks of July, and clearly in the stages of dying, it’s time to harvest. With a shovel or pitchfork, gently loosen the soil. Grasp the garlic plant stem near the base and pull up, loosening the soil more if it doesn’t come out easily.

Chop the plant off the garlic bulb and then let the garlic sit in a cool, dry place with plenty of ventilation to cure for long term storage, then store in a cool, dry, dark place. We’ve had garlic last upwards of a year before it starts to go bad, meaning you can keep enjoying your harvest until the next year’s harvest.

4. Peas

There are two types of peas to consider — peas where you eat the whole pod (like sugar snap peas or snow peas) and peas where you shell the peas and don’t eat the pod. We grow both here in our garden. We enjoy snap peas, so we grow them along our fence and harvest them throughout the summer for snacks. But we also grow shelling peas — while snap peas can be shelled and the peas frozen, the variety we have isn’t good for canning, so we grow Alaskan peas for shelling and canning as they hold up better to the canning process.

Peas work well both in a garden and on an apartment balcony or even in a sunny window. If you’re going with container gardening, ensure your flower pot has some depth to it as the peas will have considerable roots. Peas love to climb, so putting them along a fence or a balcony railing, or even over a bookshelf if growing indoors, will help immensely.

Water regularly and make sure it gets lots of sun. Be sure to pick the peas as they grow, because if the plant produces a lot of fully-mature peas, it may feel like it’s done its work for the season and call it quits and die. But if you pick the peas as they mature, then the plant feels like it has to keep working to put out more peas.

Peas do not like heat in their early stages, so plant them as early as you can so they can get established in the cooler spring weeks. Usually, peas and potatoes are the two crops we have in the ground right away.

Peas are best preserved by either freezing or canning. For both methods, edible pods don’t survive well, so you’re best to shell the peas (technically optional for freezing, but required for canning). For canning peas, this can only be done in a pressure canner and is relatively easy. If you’re looking for something a little different, you can ferment peas in edible pods for a unique and tasty snack.

5. Chives

Chives are a tasty garnish on dishes, and pastel purple blossoms can be used to create unique foods, like a vibrantly pink vinegar or a savoury jelly.

While you can grow chives from seed, we know someone who has attempted this and found it difficult. However, chives are easy to find at your local garden store, so it’s likely best to start with one already growing.

If you plant them outside, chives are a perennial and will return every spring. And once fully established, it requires very little care. For the first year, be sure to water it plenty to help it establish itself in your garden, but after that you can water as needed. When I’m watering the garden, I sometimes don’t bother with the chives because they seem to do very well on their own.

Harvest them as needed, with either scissors or simply breaking chives off. If using the flowers for a project, be sure to wait until they’ve fully opened. Once opened, I find there’s about a one to two week window until the flowers start to fade and fall off.

Chives don’t preserve all that well. Freezing reduces their flavour and dehydrating reduces the flavour even more. Fermentation is possible and it creates something like a chive-flavoured sauerkraut, which can be an interesting garnish on dishes and sandwiches.

The chive blossoms present more options. I make chive blossom vinegar and chive blossom jelly. This year I’ve also thrown some chive blossoms in the freezer to attempt these chive blossom biscuits (though I may rework the recipe to make it a sourdough biscuit).

The best advice? Explore and have fun.

Whatever plants you choose to start with — whether it’s one of these or something different — choose a plant you’ll enjoy eating because then you’ll enjoy the work that goes into helping it grow.

Looking for preserving ideas?

I recently released Preserving Your Urban Harvest, a guide to canning, fermenting, and freezing, including 73 recipes for 21 favourite garden crops. Click here to find out more.

The cover of Preserving Your Urban Harvest by Craig Jamison

5 Ways to Preserve Tart Cherries

Posted on June 30, 2025June 30, 2025 by craig

With summer in full force here, cherry season isn’t far behind. We don’t have a cherry tree on our property. We’d thought about it and discussed it, but our garden space is so small, a tree would take up too much room. Thankfully, a friend’s parents have a cherry tree on their property and don’t want any of the cherries, so they call us up every summer to come and pick them.

For us, tart cherries are ready for picking in late July. I remember this specifically because in 2023 we went and frantically picked all the cherries before heading to the theatre for the Barbie movie. We arrived all sweaty and gross—because it was one of the hottest days in July—and the car smelled of fresh cherries when the movie was over.

Last year, we harvested over 45 pounds of tart cherries from their one tree. Unfortunately, the tree is slowly dying, so it’s likely our harvests will get smaller every year, so we might have to look around our neighbourhood to see who has a cherry tree and offer to harvest their cherries for them.

Big pots holding hundreds of freshly picked cherries

With 45 pounds of cherries—or even with a much smaller amount—an urban homesteader needs an arsenal of recipes to preserve those cherries. Here are my top five ways to preserve tart cherries.

1. Cherry Juice

Interestingly, my post on how to can cherry juice is my most popular post on this site. As well, presently, if you search “how to can cherries” on Google, the Google AI summary references this post. Given all the attention it gets, I recently went back and tightened it up a little bit.

These instructions are specifically for tart cherry juice, as that is what I was working with. But after a little digging, I learned that these same instructions should work for sweet cherry juice as well. Both tart and sweet cherries are acidic enough for water bath canning.

A jar of cherry juice sitting on a deck railing

We use primarily use tart cherry juice as an additive to homemade kombucha.

Click here to read my post about canning tart cherry juice, or check out the recipe below.

Canned Tart Cherry Juice

5 from 1 vote

Tart cherry juice is easy to make and safe to can, and makes an excellent base for mixed drinks or even enjoying as-is.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Cook Time 5

Course: Drinks

Ingredients Equipment Method Notes

Ingredients

Tart Cherry Juice

Equipment

Water Bath Canner
Mason Jars, with Lids and Rings

Method

Heat juice to simmering.

Fill clean, pre-warmed mason jars, up to half-gallon size, with tart cherry juice, leaving ¼ inch headspace.
Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Place on lid and screw ring to fingertip tightness.
Place jars in a water bath canner, fill with water until submerged by 1-2 inches of water. Bring to a boil. Once water is boiling, start the timer. For jar sizes up to one litre / one quart, processing time is five minutes. For half-gallon sizes, processing time is ten minutes. If the water ever stops boiling, bring to a boil again and restart the timer. For elevations of 1,001-6,000 feet, add five minutes to processing time.

When process time is up, remove pot from heat and let sit an additional five minutes.
Using a jar lifter, carefully remove jars from canner and place on a thick towel on a counter or table and let sit undisturbed overnight.
The next morning, check if jars have sealed (lid is depressed), and store in a cool dark place for up to a year. If jars have not sealed, place in the fridge and consume promptly.

Notes

While there are no lab-tested recipes specifically for tart cherry juice, this information from Oregon State University Extension Service lays out guidance for safely canning fruit juice and specifically names cherries as an example. While this post is about tart cherries, sweet cherries are within the safety range for canning (a pH of lower than 4.6), but a quick check with a pH testing strip is always recommended.

Need to juice cherries first?

If you have a steam juicer, which is a set of three interconnected pots to extract juice from fruit and vegetables—which I highly recommend— you can juice cherries with your steam juicer. I have a full set of instructions here. (In the photo below, these cherries were frozen until I was ready to juice them, which is why they look a little frosty.)

If you don’t have a steam juicer, this post from Alpha Foodie explains a handful of other ways to juice cherries. However, the benefit of the steam juicer is that you don’t have to pit the cherries. You don’t even have to pull the stems off. So if you’re going to be juicing a lot of cherries or if you have a tree and will be doing this yearly, it would be to your benefit to invest in a steam juicer. They’re basically all the same, so I can’t really recommend a certain brand, but here they are on Amazon.

It’s important to note that I tested the acidity of my cherry juice before canning. If you’re using a juice extraction method that involves adding a lot of water, you may want to invest in some pH strips to ensure your acidity is well below 4.6 for safe canning.

2. Canning Cherries

If you prefer to eat your cherries whole, you should try canning cherries. I did this for the first time last year and the process was remarkably easy (once I got past the very lengthy process of pitting the cherries). You can find my post about the whole process here.

Following directions for canning tart cherries from another site, I went with a fairly light syrup when I canned them, but they came out incredibly tart. I’d recommend using a heavier syrup for tart cherries. But if you’ve got sweet cherries, a lighter syrup is probably best because the fruit is already pretty sweet.

Canned cherries definitely lose some of their texture and freshness. I don’t think I’d open a jar of canned cherries and eat them whole like I would with a handful of fresh cherries. But these are good to throw in fruit salad, to top ice cream with, or to use place of a maraschino cherry in cocktails.

Click here for the full post on canning cherries, or use the recipe card below.

Canned Cherries

5 from 1 vote

Canning cherries is simple and easy to do, and keeps that fresh taste of summer preserved for the depths of winter.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 1

Cook Time 15

Course: Fruit

Cuisine: Fruit

Ingredients Equipment Method

Ingredients

11 pounds Cherries, Sweet or Tart, weighed before pitting
Sugar, as per preference in the instructions below

Equipment

Water Bath Canner

Mason Jars with Lids and Rings, quart size or smaller

Method

Wash, stem, and pit cherries. Tart cherries may turn brown after pitting, so they can be temporarily put in a large bowl of water with a splash of lemon juice mixed in.
Prepare syrup, as per your preference, dissolving sugar in water. This can be done on the stove, heating until fully dissolved.
Very light syrup: ¾ cup sugar, 6½ cup water
Light syrup: 1½ cup sugar, 5¾ cup water
Medium syrup: 2¼ cup sugar, 5¼ cup water
Heavy syrup: 3¼ cup sugar, 5 cup water
Very heavy syrup: 4¼ cup sugar, 4¼ cup water
Cherries can also be canned in water only. The National Center for Home Food Preservation recommends medium syrup for sweet cherries and heavy syrup for tart cherries.

For raw pack canning:
Fill jars with cherries and syrup, leaving half-inch headspace. Debubble and add syrup if needed. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Put on lids and screw rings to fingertip tightness.
For hot pack canning:
Add cherries to pot of syrup and bring to a boil. As soon as mixture boils, fill jars with cherries and syrup, leaving half-inch headspace. Debubble and add syrup if needed. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Put on lids and screw rings to fingertip tightness.
Put jars in a water bath canner, fill with hot water until jars are submerged beneath 1-2 inches of water. Bring to a boil on the stove. Once boiling, process for the indicated time below. If at any time the water stops boiling, bring to a boil again and restart the timer.
For raw pack canning (quarts or smaller):
0-1,000 ft: 25 minutes
1,001-3,000 ft: 30 minutes
3,001-6,000 ft: 35 minutes
6,001+ ft: 40 minutes
For hot pack canning (quarts):
0-1,000 ft: 20 minutes
1,001-3,000 ft: 25 minutes
3,001-6,000 ft: 30 minutes
6,001+ ft: 35 minutes
For hot pack canning (pints or smaller):
0-1,000 ft: 15 minutes
1,001-6,000 ft: 20 minutes
6,001+ ft: 25 minutes
Remove canner from heat and let sit five minutes. Carefully using a jar lifter, remove jars from canner. Place jars on a thick towel on a counter or table overnight. In the morning, check that jars have sealed. If so, jars can be stored in a cool dark place for up to a year. If any jars have not sealed, place them in the fridge and consume promptly.

3. Cherry Liqueur

In my never-ending quest to look for creative ways to use garden produce for food and drink, I quite often end up making alcohol recipes. A few years ago I stumbled across this cherry liqueur recipe on Serious Eats.

This recipe calls for sweet cherries, but since I have tart cherries I make it with what I have. I follow the recipe exactly, just swapping out the cherry types. This is an absolute winner of a recipe. If I pull out a bottle of this at a barbecue or a family gathering, the bottle is very quickly emptied.

The only alteration I make the recipe is in step two where you make a cherry syrup and store it in the fridge for a week. I’m always concerned about things like that growing mould, so I freeze it for a week instead.

I didn’t make cherry liqueur last summer and I deeply regretted it because it’s so amazingly good. It’ll be near the top of my preserving list this year.

4. Cherry Wine

If you have some experience with winemaking, I highly recommend making a batch of cherry wine. While most folks would likely think of cherry wine as a sweet drink, it works amazingly with tart cherries too.

Practical Self-Reliance has a great cherry wine recipe to get you started.

Like with the cherry liqueur, I didn’t make a batch of wine last year and regret it. Wine will also be high on my to-do list this year. And like cherry liqueur, if I bring out cherry wine at a barbecue or family gathering, it’s very quickly gone because it’s so addictively delicious.

5. Cherry Jam

Tart cherries make a lovely jam for spreading on pastries or morning toast. The Frugal Farm Wife has a great, easy-to-follow recipe on their site.

The recipe requires that cherries be pitted and stemmed before making jam. Sometimes sour cherries will go brown if they’re cut, so by the time you’ve pitted them all, some of your earlier cherries might be an unsightly colour. To help prevent this, you can put pitted cherries in a bowl of water with a splash of lemon juice—this will help preserve the colour while you pit the whole batch, so everything is gorgeously red when you’re ready to make your jam.

Preserve Your Garden Harvest With Confidence

If you’re like me and you have a garden full of dozens of different plants (we typically have 50+ different crops), then you need a great guide to get you started on preserving your harvest. I recently released my first cookbook, Preserving Your Urban Harvest, which includes 73 recipes to preserve 21 common garden favourite crops. The cherries section features the two recipes above—cherry juice and canning cherries. You can click here to find out more and order your copy.

What To Do With Too Many Saskatoons

Posted on June 25, 2025June 25, 2025 by craig

It’s almost saskatoon season here in this part of Canada and it can be a bit of a game of chance if we’re going to have an overabundant harvest or nothing at all. It’s always a race to harvest the saskataoons on our bush before the birds do, but the birds are much more efficient than I am.

I distinctly remember one Saturday evening a couple years ago where the saskatoons were near perfect ripeness and I said to myself “I’ll harvest these tomorrow morning before the birds get to them.” When I went out with my harvesting bowl a mere 18 hours later, the bush had been stripped bare of saskatoons and we had a grand harvest of about half a cup. (The year before this, we had harvested somewhere around six litres.)

If I’m particularly determined to enjoy saskatoons and the birds have beaten me to it, there are parks nearby with plenty of saskatoon bushes that I could raid. These berries tend to be smaller than the ones I have here, but they’re just as delicious and just as abundant.

On a year where we get a small harvest, we don’t bother with figuring out how to preserve or cook or use the berries—we just pull them out as a snack at a barbecue. But on those years where we get six litres or more, we need a list of recipes so that we make the most of those saskatoons!

From my understanding, saskatoons are more of a regional name for these berries. Depending on where you are, you may know these as juneberries or serviceberries. When looking for recipes online, you’ll likely have better search results using these other more common names.

Baking recipes

While I don’t tend to bake with saskatoons, I think it would be fair to say that most people’s first thought of what to do with saskatoons is to make pie or other baked goods—so let’s start with some of these!

Saskatoon pie

It’s very likely every Canadian prairie family has their own variation on the traditional Saskatoon pie. This is my step-dad’s recipe, which makes two pies:

Crust ingredients:

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cups margarine or shortening
1 large egg

1 tablespoon vinegar

Crust instructions:

Knead flour and margarine to make a fairly dry and loose crumble.

Add egg and vinegar and knead until it forms a stiff dough. Add a splash of water if needed to keep the dough rollable and workable.
Divide into two parts and roll out two bottoms and two tops.

Pie ingredients:

8 cups saskatoons, cleaned and stemmed
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Pie instructions:

Place bottom crusts in two 9-inch pie plates and trim edges.
Place 4 cups berries in each pie.
Mix flour, sugar, and cinnamon and pour half of mixture over each pie. Sprinkle a tablespoon of lemon juice over the berries in each pie.

Moisten the rims of the crusts. Place top crust on each pie and crimp-seal around the edges, trimming off excess. Make a small hole in the top of the crust to allow steam to escape.
Bake at 350 F for 45 minutes or until pie looks done.
Serve as-is or with ice cream.

More baked goods

In my searching for recipes I stumbled upon this great site with a whole list of saskatoon berry baked goods, including biscuits, breads, turnover, and more.

Preserving recipes

As this blog likely indicates, I’m a fan of preserving food so we can enjoy it throughout the year. There are, unfortunately, surprisingly few saskatoon preservation recipes, but I’ve got a couple to get you started.

Preserving saskatoons in kombucha

This is a recipe of my own invention and it turned out remarkably well.

A few years back I had started exploring fermentation methods of preserving blueberries, attempting both a salt fermentation and a kombucha fermentation.

After succeeding with that—and liking the kombucha fermentation better—I decided to try the same with saskatoons. And, thankfully, it worked! With this kombucha fermentation, I was able to keep delicious saskatoons in my fridge for weeks, impressing my saskatoon-loving family members who thought the season was long gone.

You can find my recipe for kombucha-fermented saskatoons here.

Saskatoon jam

Perhaps the most common home preservation choice when it comes to saskatoons is to make jam.

The Bernardin website has a great recipe for saskatoon jam, found here.

Alcohol recipes

One of my favourite garden produce projects is to turn food into alcohol. At any given time I have anywhere from four to eight different types of wines stocked away and a few different liqueurs. When we have guests over, this makes for a very impressive (and delicious) accompaniment to dinner.

Saskatoon wine

Last year I attempted my first batch of Saskatoon wine using this recipe.

It turned out very delicious, but my main learning from the project was to wait until fermentation fully stops rather than following directions to the letter. I had bottled the wine when directed, but fermentation hadn’t finished and had continued while in the bottle. Upon opening, two of our bottles gushed upward like a geyser, even striking the ceiling once. It was a mess to clean up. (In hindsight, I could have used a Campden tablet to cease fermentation before bottling, but I generally don’t use them.)

It’s a recipe I will make again and once I’ve mastered it (and perhaps tweaked it a bit), I’ll have a version here on the website.

Saskatoon liqueur

On the same site I’ve already linked to twice in this post, I also came across a saskatoon liqueur recipe that could be described as saskatoon schnapps. You can find that recipe here.

If I can manage to get the saskatoons before the birds this year and have a large harvest, I’ll give this a try too!

More food preserving recipes

If you haven’t already checked out my new cookbook, Preserving Your Urban Harvest, please do so! It includes 73 recipes to preserve 21 garden favourite crops, including saskatoons!

The cover of Preserving Your Urban Harvest

Each produce has two to four recipes, to help get your started on your food preservation and urban homesteading journey. The saskatoon section includes the above kombucha-fermented saskatoons and a saskatoon and Grand Marnier jam.

Summer is Finally Here: A Garden Update for June 2025

Posted on June 19, 2025June 19, 2025 by craig

It’s almost hard to believe that less than a month ago, the ground was all black earth and we were just starting to get things going for the year. Now, in the middle of June, the garden is fully planted and we’ve already begun harvesting a few things. Summer has come on very fast.

Most dramatic is our front yard. These are mostly perennial bushes and flowers, so they’re among the first things to come up. When the rest of our property is mostly newly-sprouted plants, the front yard is fully grown and thriving. The front yard also keeps the bees busy—between flowers on the mustard, strawberries, raspberries, and decorative flowers, there is lots of food and opportunity for pollinating insects.

The front garden with its many flowers and bushes.

Early harvests

The front yard is also where I’ve done some harvesting already.

First were the chives and chive blossoms. I’ve focussed mostly on the pastel purple blossoms and have made some chive blossom jelly and chive blossom vinegar. I’ve also frozen some blossoms with plans to try making some biscuits with them in the next few weeks.
Strawberries have started ripening too. It’s just a few here and there right now, but there are several dozen green ones that are only a week or two from being ready. I’m cleaning, chopping, and freezing these so they can be enjoyed later, either on ice cream or in oatmeal.

Chamomile, while not a perennial plant in this climate, has come back and fully established itself in our garden. Similar to mustard and borage, chamomile self-seeds, so wherever you first plant chamomile, that’ll likely be your chamomile patch going forward. It’s only been a few weeks and I think I’ve already harvest as much chamomile as I harvested last year. We definitely didn’t have enough last year, so we’re looking forward to the larger harvest this time around.

Everything is planted

While we tend to receive gifted plants throughout the summer that we replant in our garden, so planting is never truly over, we’ve finished the bulk of it.

Our front garden is largely perennials or self-seeding plants that regrow every year (like mustard and chamomile). Our patch along the side of the house will be beans and peas this year (versus corn and peas last year). The corn has moved to a far distant patch in our neighbour’s yard in an attempt to prevent the squirrel from raiding our crop and destroying everything.

The squirrel is resourceful, though, and has already found the corn. And rather than wait for the corn to fully grow and develop, it’s started attacking the small sprouts that are coming up. With the help of a friend, we collected some pop bottles to create little safety domes over the corn to protect them for the first few weeks. (Since it looks like we’re growing pop bottles, I call it our “soda patch”.)

Our back garden this year consists mainly of garlic, a few squash, broccoli, peppers, and Brussels sprouts, with a collection of a few other random things.

The neighbour’s garden is where we’ve got the corn, popcorn, tomatoes, potatoes, beets, onions, cucumbers, and canning peas, as well as a random assortment of a few other things.

Our neighbour's garden with an assortment of plants, including a large potato patch.

And our other neighbour’s yard, where we do a strip along the shared fence, we’ve got peas and squash.

In the meantime, while we wait for things to grow and flower and produce food, we are keeping the bees happy with our mustard. It grows plenty of vibrant yellow flowers and the bees and other pollinators love it. On particularly busy days, you can hear the buzzing from several feet away because our mustard patch is the social hub for these insects.

Books to add to your library

I’m a writer at heart, so while I love writing this blog and will continue to do so (and it’ll continue to be 100% free), I can’t help but also put things into book format.

I recently released Preserving Your Urban Harvest, which collects 73 of my favourite recipes for 21 favourite garden crops. Some of the recipes are already here on this blog and some are not. Whether you’re new to food preserving or experienced, you’ll likely find some tasty recipes to enjoy.

If you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, I’m currently working on a book of wine recipes so you can “drink your garden”, which I hope to publish this summer. After that is a sourdough cookbook with a whole wide range of recipes. And then I may have a few other ideas after that. So stay tuned!

Out Now: My First Cookbook!

Posted on June 13, 2025June 13, 2025 by craig

I’m excited to announce that my first cookbook is out now!

I’m a book lover by nature and while this site will continue to grow and will continue to be 100% free, I can’t help but write it all down in book format, accompanied with full page photos. Preserving Your Urban Harvest contains 73 recipes for 21 common home garden favourites, with some recipes found here on this site, but with so many more not found here.

I’m releasing in paperback first and will follow up with an ebook in the near future for those who prefer a digital cookbook.

Here’s the cover:

Cover of Preserving Your Urban Harvest cookbook, which features four jars of preserved foods

And here’s the blurb:

Preserve your harvest. Enjoy it all year.

Whether you’re growing tomatoes on a balcony, or tending a backyard garden, Preserving Your Urban Harvest shows you how to make the most of your crops with 73 simple, delicious and time-tested recipes.

From apples to tomatoes, this book covers 21 common garden favorites with easy methods like water bath canning, pressure canning, fermenting, pickling, and more. Create pantry staples and creative treats—without needing a farmhouse or a root cellar.

Inside, you’ll find step-by-step instructions for:

Butter Chicken Curry Sauce

Fermented Garlic Scape Hot Sauce

Bread and Butter Pickles

Pressure Canned French Fries

Saskatoon and Grand Marnier Jam

Written by self-taught food preserver Craig Jamison, who shares years of hands-on experience preserving garden produce with his husband, this book is for anyone who wants to turn homegrown food into year-round abundance.

Ready to fill your pantry with flavor, not just food? Let’s get preserving!

Paperbacks are available right now on Amazon! Click here to get yours now!

I’m already hard at work on my next book about making wine from your garden crops, and then I’ve got a few other ideas after that—so if cookbooks are your thing, there are plenty coming from me in the future!

How to Make Chive Blossom Vinegar

Posted on June 12, 2025June 12, 2025 by craig

Chives are one of the first plants to come up in the garden every year. They have a lovely aroma and a delicious taste—sometimes I’ll just pluck one and eat it as I walk around the garden. In late May and early June, the chives start flowering with a gorgeous pastel purple flower.

When used fresh, chives are excellent on eggs or sprinkled atop any dish that could benefit from a burst of green colour and the soft bite of oniony chive flavour. But preserving chives is remarkably difficult. While it is possible to dehydrate them, they lose a lot of their flavour in the process. I’ve chopped and frozen some, but the flavour again starts to fade. The best way to enjoy chives is to enjoy them fresh.

A chive plant with pastel-purple flowers

For those set on preserving them, though, there are a few options. I’ve done up a batch of fermented chives a few times (using this recipe) and they come out tasting like very oniony sauerkraut, which has its place on the table with certain dishes.

The pastel purple blossoms are where some unique preservation options come up. The first is chive blossom jelly, which I’ve got here, or if you prefer a low-sugar version you can find that here, though the required low-sugar pectin is difficult to find in Canada. The second is chive blossom vinegar, which is a unique showstopper—it’s vibrantly pink, has a tantalizing aroma, and a delicious taste.

I typically use chive blossom vinegar with dinner—I’ll add a dash of it to the pan to help deglaze, plus the acidity adds a brightness to the flavour of whatever I’m cooking. It would work very well in a simple homemade oil and vinegar salad dressing and would also add a unique taste when sprinkled on fries.

How to make chive blossom vinegar

The first thing you’ll need is chive blossoms. Unfortunately, one of the only ways to get these is either by having your own chive plant or knowing someone that does, as I’ve never seen chive blossoms available for sale anywhere.

You’ll need about two cups, plus some chives for extra added flavour.

A Pyrex measuring glass filled with chive blossoms and chives

The only other ingredient you’ll need is vinegar. You’ll want a mild vinegar so that the taste of chives is allowed to shine. I typically make this with white wine vinegar, but I’ve also made it with unseasoned rice vinegar. I’d likely avoid white vinegar as it can be a too harsh. While I’ve never made it with apple cider vinegar, that may work well to hav an apple/chive taste, though the colour likely won’t be as vibrant.

Step one: Combine all ingredients

You may want to give your chive blossoms a rinse in case any insects or dirty have come along for a ride. Once patted dry, add the blossoms and chives to a large jar and top with two cups of vinegar. Put the lid on and tightly close it.

A mason jar filled with vinegar, chives, and chive blossoms

Step two: Let it sit

This recipe is remarkably easy, because all you do is let it sit for two weeks in a dark place at room temperature. It’s good to shake it daily, so I like to keep it in the cupboard right in front of my pots and pans, so whenever I go to make dinner, it’s in my way and I remember to shake it.

Step three: Strain and bottle

After two weeks, the vinegar should be bright pink and have an amazing chive aroma. Strain the vinegar, dissolving the solids, and transfer the vinegar to whichever bottle you want to use to store it.

A bottle of chive blossom vinegar; the vinegar is a brilliant pink colour

Step four: Enjoy

Use the vinegar as you might use any flavoured vinegar. You’ll find uses that work for you, such as salad dressing, deglazing pans, or a homemade fresh salsa (don’t use it for canning since you can’t be sure of the acidity level).

Over time, the colour will fade and the vinegar will turn brown. This is purely a colour change; the taste should remain just as vibrant and amazing and you can continue to use it as you like.

Chive Blossom Vinegar

5 from 2 votes

Brilliantly pink and with an amazing aroma and taste, chive blossom vinegar is a showstopper of a condiment.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 10

Infusing Time 14

Course: condiments

Ingredients Method

Ingredients

2 cups Chive Blossoms

1 handful Chives
2 cups Vinegar with a Mild Flavour like White Wine Vinegar or Unseasoned Rice Vinegar

Method

Wash and pat dry chive blossoms to remove insects or dirt.

Combine all ingredients in a large jar and tightly close.
Store in dark place for two weeks, shaking daily.
Strain vinegar, discarding solids. Transfer vinegar to a bottle or jar.

What To Do With Too Much Rhubarb

Posted on June 6, 2025June 6, 2025 by craig

Home gardeners who grow rhubarb know that once the plant establishes itself, you soon have too much rhubarb. We don’t have rhubarb in our garden, but both of our neighbours do, and neither one wants their rhubarb, so we harvest it all. Last year was the first year we tried to harvest all of it, as it’s usually too much to bother doing that. We ended up stocking away over 100 pounds of it in our freezers. I had to figure out pretty soon what to do with too much rhubarb.

Depending on your climate and your specific rhubarb plants, you may have already harvested yours or are looking at doing so pretty soon. For us, a few of our plants seem to be a month behind anyone else. When everyone else’s lilac bush is full of purple blooms, ours is just warming up for the season—and then when everyone else’s blooms fall off, that’s when ours looks gorgeously purple. Our rhubarb is similar—we tend to harvest it in July or August, so it’s more of a mid-summer crop for us rather than a spring one.

Here are some of the projects I undertake with rhubarb, as well as a few great ideas from around the internet that haven’t quite made it on this site yet:

Freezing rhubarb

The first and easiest is to simply freeze the rhubarb. It freezes well and holds together decently when thawed and frozen rhubarb is good for most uses. If you prefer to pickle rhubarb, you shouldn’t freeze it first because it will affect the texture, but for juicing, jelly-making, and alcohol uses, frozen rhubarb is fine.

After harvesting the rhubarb and chopping off the toxic leaf, I wash and dry every stalk, then chop them into one-inch lengths. I set them all out on a towel for a few hours to fully dry, then bag them up, date them, and freeze them.

Bags of chopped rhubarb ready for the freezer.

I’ve gone on to use this frozen rhubarb for juicing, kombucha flavouring, wine making, gin flavouring, and jelly making. My step-father likes to make rhubarb crumble and rhubarb pie and will use our frozen rhubarb for this and the results are just as good as fresh.

Rhubarb ginger gin

Of everything I make, this is by far the most popular. Rhubarb ginger gin is sweet and juicy with just a hint of warmth from the ginger and it makes for easy drinking. It mixes phenomenally well with Coke.

The process is simple—combine gin, rhubarb, sugar, and ginger in a large jar and let it sit for a month, then strain, bottle, and serve. You can find the full recipe and instructions here.

If you’re not a ginger fan, you can omit the ginger and make rhubarb gin. I’ve also done this and the results are a little sweeter.

Rhubarb schnapps

Not much of a gin fan? You can also make rhubarb schnapps. It’s a very similar process, but it uses vodka instead of gin. This recipe isn’t on my blog since I haven’t made it in a few years (as I’m much more of a gin drinker than a vodka drinker), but this looks like a great version here.

Rhubarb juice

Rhubarb juice cans easily. And if you have a steam juicer, that makes the process phenomenally easy.

This post explains how to extract rhubarb juice and safely can it.

Rhubarb juice is acidic enough to be canned as-is, but most people add sugar to sweeten it and balance the taste. For myself, I tend to use the rhubarb juice in other recipes (some of which are below), so I can unsweetened juice so I’m never unsure of how much sugar to add for the future recipes.

Rhubarb jelly

One such use of unsweetened canned rhubarb juice is rhubarb jelly. I will sometimes make rhubarb jelly for some folks that request it and the process is very easy when I already have pre-canned juice on hand and don’t have to juice the rhubarb as part of the recipe.

An easy step-by-step guide to making and canning rhubarb jelly can be found here.

Rhubarb wine

There are two staple wines I make every single year—dandelion wine and rhubarb wine.

Rhubarb wine is a great starter recipe for folks new to home winemaking. You can find a complete recipe with instructions here.

A bottle of rhubarb wine with two glasses that are half filled with wine.

While the recipe is easy to make as is, as the first step is to just dump sugar and chopped rhubarb in a bucket and let it extract the juice, I’ve found I get far superior flavour if I use the canned rhubarb juice I made. While wine made from rhubarb chunks is delicious, it seems the chunks sometimes add just a hint of bitterness to the final taste—but using only juice removes that bitterness and I’m left with a wine that is incredibly smooth, juicy, and delicious.

I may experiment with the rhubarb wine recipe a little bit this year. Last year after mis-understanding a recipe, I threw some ginger into a dandelion wine batch and ended up with a surprisingly delicious dandelion ginger wine—the ginger is just a background note but complements it perfectly. I suspect I’d get the same amazing result with rhubarb ginger wine. So if that’s a success, it will appear on this site eventually.

Pickled rhubarb

One of my favourite things to do in home preserving is to pickle things. I pickle cucumbers, hot peppers, beets, carrots, cauliflower, and more. Pickled rhubarb is one of those more surprising ones with a unique flavour and texture. You can find a good recipe for it here.

Dehydrated rhubarb

Every home preserver has their preferred preserving method. For me, it’s canning. But for some, it’s dehydrating. Dehydrating rhubarb is easy and because it shrinks so much (since a lot of what makes up rhubarb is water), dehydrating can be a real space saver if you have a lot of rhubarb. This site has easy-to-follow instructions, as well as some ideas of how to use your dehydrated rhubarb.

More to come…

As this site grows, I’ll come back here and update this list with more fantastic ways to use up your overwhelming rhubarb harvest.

How to Make Sourdough Pizza

Posted on May 27, 2025May 27, 2025 by craig

It seems I’ve really gotten into a sourdough kick over the past couple months. I’ve baked some bread, made English muffins, baked some cookies, made some crackers, experimented with spaetzle…and now I decided to tackle pizza! I’ve always found the thought of making homemade pizza from scratch to be somewhat overwhelming. But I figured now was the time to teach myself how to make sourdough pizza.

As with most of my sourdough projects of late, I hopped onto Zoom with my bestie and we worked through the recipe together. What’s nice about doing it together is that we compare the results and discuss the steps as we go, so we figure things out faster.

How to make sourdough pizza

The first and most important thing you need is a healthy and active sourdough starter. If you’re new to sourdough and don’t have a starter going, check out my post about that here. It can take up to a couple weeks to have a really active starter.

The night before doing this recipe, you’ll want to feed your starter so it’s active and bubbly in the morning when you start making your dough. It’s okay if the starter has fallen by the morning; we don’t need this at the height of its activity.

This recipe makes one regular size pizza. You can either double it if you’d like for two pizzas, or split the dough in half when you roll it out for two individual size pizzas.

This recipe can be made with a simple pizza pan and does not require a pizza stone or any other specialized equipment—but if you have those, you can use them.

Step one: Make your dough

In a bowl, combine 1/4 cup of your starter, 240 grams (2 cups) of flour, 3/4 cup water, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. (I didn’t have olive oil on hand so I used vegetable oil and the results were fine.)

Mix it with a spoon until you get a shaggy dough, then mix it a bit more by hand using the stretch-and-fold method. If you find your dough is too sticky, you can work some extra flour in. Tacky dough that feels sticky but doesn’t actually make a mess of your fingers is fine; sticky dough that adheres to your fingers is too wet.

Step two: Two sets of stretch and folds

Let the dough rest for about 10 minutes, then do a set of stretch and folds.

Let the dough rest for an additional 10 minutes, then do a second set of stretch and folds.

Step three: Let rest and rise

Place the dough ball in a lightly oiled bowl (to prevent the dough from sticking to the bowl) and let it sit at room temperature for about 8 hours, or until it’s approximately doubled in size.

Step four: Stretch out dough and form your crust

Preheat your oven to 475 F.

If you’d prefer to make two individual sized pizzas, split the dough ball in two.

On a floured surface, roll out your dough until it’s thin and the size of your pizza pan (or the size that you want). Roll up the edges to make a ridge around the pizza.

Step five: Top and bake your pizza

For my pizza, I spread on some pizza sauce (which is my pasta sauce repurposed for pizza), pepperoni, mushrooms, and cheddar cheese.

Bake for 13-15 minutes or until the crust looks cooked and the cheese is bubbly. Turn on the broiler and let broil for about 3 minutes to darken the top of the crust.

Remove from oven and let sit for a couple minutes before slicing and enjoying.

Sourdough Pizza

5 from 2 votes

Easy to make and delicious to eat, sourdough pizza is a staple at our house. This recipe is for one pizza or two personal pizzas. Feel free to double or triple the recipe as needed.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 8 30

Cook Time 20

Course: dinner

Cuisine: Italian

Ingredients Method

Ingredients

¼ cup Active Sourdough Starter
240 g All-Purpose Flour (2 cups)
¾ cup Water

1 tsp Salt
1 Tbsp Olive Oil

Method

Place all ingredients in a bowl. Stir with a spoon until it comes together as a shaggy ball

Gently work the dough with your hands. If the dough is too wet, add flour as you go. It should be tacky, but not sticky. When you pull your hands away, the dough should stick to itself, not clump on your fingers. Sometimes I need to add a lot of extra flour.
Once you have a tacky ball of dough, let it rest for ten minutes. Then do a round of stretch and folds, going around the dough two or three times. You may need to add a little extra flour.
Let it rest another ten minutes, then do another round of stretch and folds, adding flour if needed.

Transfer the dough ball to a lightly oiled bowl (to prevent dough from sticking to the bowl), cover with plastic wrap or a towel, and let rest for eight hours, or until dough has doubled in size.
Preheat oven to 475℉. Roll out dough on a floured surface, stretching it to larger than your pizza pan. Transfer dough to pan and roll the edges to form a crust around the pizza.
Add sauce and toppings.

Bake for 13-15 minutes at 475℉, or until cheese is bubbly and crust is beginning to brown. Turn on the broiler in the oven and let it broil for about 3 minutes, to brown the crust a little more.
Remove from oven and let sit for a few minutes before slicing and serving.

Spring is here! A garden update for May 2025

Posted on May 12, 2025May 12, 2025 by craig

I think we can finally say it—spring is here and garden season has begun! Normally we wait till the May long weekend to make that declaration because weather can still be rocky in early May and there’s still a chance of frost, but this year has been warmer than usual so far and the garden is already in the swing of things, even though we haven’t done much yet. The trees and bushes are starting to bud, the chives have come up, flowers are starting to grow, and all the birds are back.

Garlic

We finally planted our garlic. We typically do a fall planting, let it overwinter, and then it’s the first thing to grow in the spring. Last fall was warm and wet and we ran the risk of the garlic simply rotting and opted for a spring planting. Ideally, we would have done it a little earlier since garlic can handle a little cold, but nevertheless, it’s in the ground.

This year’s garlic is in a new spot. We like to rotate our crops to test out different areas of the garden for the different foods. Rotating crops is also good for soil health since different plants both take and deposit different minerals into the ground. I’ve noticed that last year’s garlic patch has garlic currently growing in it. I must have missed a half dozen heads of garlic during last year’s harvest. We will likely dig them up and move them to the garlic patch, because where they are now would be in the way of this summer’s crops.

Mushrooms

We’ve also set up our mushroom beds! Last year, we tried growing mushrooms at the bases of a few of our trees. We laid out lots of sawdust, spread out the grain spawn, and gave it a good water. We got one small clutch of oyster mushrooms and that was it.

This year, we’re trying three different types of mushrooms—wine cap, shiitake, and pioppino—to see if any do better than others. And this year we’re also upping our mushroom setup. Mushrooms really need better conditions than what we’d set up last year, so we’ve changed our tactic this year. We laid out a layer of dead and decaying squash vines and leaves from last year, a layer of wood chips we bought at the hardware store, the grain spawn, more wood chips, and more leaves and vines. We gave it a good water. The directions say it’s best to cover with a clear tarp for the first while, so I’ll get one and set it up soon. Hopefully we get some mushrooms or even a bountiful harvest—this is one of the crops we really want to succeed but have difficulty with every year.

Making a plan

I ordered seeds a few months ago and they’ve been patiently sitting our kitchen, waiting to be put in the ground. Next is to purchase seedlings and live plants. We tend to go on or around the May long weekend to pick up what we need, and we focus on things that we have trouble growing from seed, or take too long to grow from seed, such as chamomile, hot peppers, herbs, leeks, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. It sounds like a small list, but we inevitably come home with two to three times the amount of things we set out to buy.

My husband will start tilling the ground and planting seeds and plants in the next few weeks. In early June, my step-dad will come to the city and immediately be put to work in our garden—the two of them quickly power through the whole project and get this massive garden installed in a matter of two to three days.

Barren garden, waiting to be tilled and planted

Assessing our stock

The preservation recipes I undertake every year will vary based on what’s coming up in the garden, but also on what we still have on the shelves in our food storage room. While canned foods are theoretically good indefinitely as long as the seal on the jar hasn’t been broken, I find for many things the quality degrades after a year and a half to two years. (As well, some canning companies recommend using food up within 18 months, as the seal may degrade past that date.) So, for example, I still have a lot of hot sauce in storage from last year that will be fine for the coming year, so I will likely skip hot sauce this year. On the other hand, we’re almost out of green tomato chutney, so I’ll make a big batch of that to last the next couple years.

This is also the opportunity to assess if there’s anything we thought we would use up but just ended up not. This happened a few years ago with peony jelly—it’s a nice recipe and I’ve found a few folks who love it and happily took it off my hands, but if I hadn’t, I would have ended up throwing out the jelly because we simply don’t use it up ourselves.

Assessing the inventory of food we still have has also been interesting in the sense that there is still a LOT left and it feels like we have too much…but then I realize that harvest is still a few months away and for some things they’re not really harvested until October, which is a full four months away. We will very likely have an overlap of old thing still around while we’re preserving new things, so we’ll have to make sure we’re clearly marking the dates on things so we use the older ones first.

Preserving food is an odd cycle, but a predictable one. In October, I’m exhausted and never want to do it again. In February I’m relaxed and enjoying the bounty of our harvest and could see myself doing more canning when the time comes. And now in May I’m eager for things to just grow already so I can harvest and make all of these wonderful things.

Here’s hoping 2025 is a bountiful year for all of us!

How to Make Sourdough Discard Crackers

Posted on May 1, 2025May 1, 2025 by craig

We hosted a dinner party recently and it evolved into a potluck where our guests were bringing the salad, sides, and the main course. We whipped up a dessert, but we were feeling like we should be doing a bit more since we’re the hosts, and it felt like our guests were doing all the hard work. So, I decided to add some appetizers to the menu and whip up a batch of sourdough discard crackers to serve alongside some hummus and toum.

As anybody who maintains a sourdough starter knows, you end up throwing out a lot of the starter. Every time you feed it, you discard a portion of it. While flour and water aren’t expensive, it does feel like a waste, so sourdough discard recipes are great ways to use up this discard instead of throwing it out. I recently made sourdough discard chocolate chip cookies, and as I grow this site more discard recipes will appear on the recipe index page.

These sourdough discard crackers come together quickly and easily and are highly customizable when it comes to the flavourings. I used a few teaspoons of Herbs de Provence, which is a traditional French and Mediterranean blend of herbs, typically including thyme, rosemary, savory, marjoram, oregano, and tarragon. But if I didn’t have Herbs de Provence on hand, I would have gone with just rosemary. I made these crackers on a Zoom call with my bestie who was also making it in her kitchen—she went with salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese, and they turned out excellent too.

How to make sourdough discard crackers

The first and most important thing you will need is a sourdough starter. If you haven’t got one going yet, you’ll need to do so and maintain it for at least a week before you start using it for recipes like this. You can find instructions on making a starter here.

For the dinner party I made these crackers for, I whipped up a double batch. I fed the starter an extra large helping the night before so I’d have a lot of discard on hand. Thus, all the photos in this post are for a double batch.

Step one: Setting up

Preheat your oven to 350 F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Melt two tablespoons of butter and let it cool slightly.

Step two: Mix the ingredients

Put a bowl on a kitchen scale and hit the tare / zero button. Then add 200 grams of sourdough starter discard, which will amount to approximately 3/4 cup of discard.

Add the melted butter, 1/4 teaspoon fine salt, and 2 teaspoons of dried herbs (or hard cheese like parmesan).

Give everything a good mix until it’s well combined.

Step three: Spread out on parchment paper

Scoop or pour the batter onto the parchment paper lined baking sheets.

Spread it out really thin. This can get a little tricky with the dough sticking to your spatula or knife and pulling up the parchment paper, so you may need to hold down the parchment paper as you do this.

Sprinkle the top with 1/4 teaspoon flaky or coarse salt. I went with coarse sea salt, but if you have a flavoured sea salt or butcher’s salt (coarse salt with dried herbs mixed in), these would work well too.

Dough is thinly spread and ready for the oven

Step four: Bake the crackers

Put the baking sheet in the oven.

Optional: After ten minutes, if you want to score your crackers to make nice squares or rectangles, take the baking sheet out and gently run a knife or pizza cutter through it. If you prefer to break the crackers afterward for a more rustic look, skip this step.

Crackers may take as short as 20 minutes or as long as 50 minutes, depending on the variations in oven temperature and how thinly the dough was spread. Crackers are ready when they look dry and hard and are starting to turn golden brown. I found it took about 30 minutes to reach this point.

Step five: Let cool and enjoy

Let the crackers cool completely and then break them into appropriate sizes. Crackers can be eaten immediately or stored in an airtight container for about a week.

Sourdough Discard Crackers

5 from 2 votes

These crackers are not only a great way to use up sourdough discard, but they're also delicious and easy to make.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 10

Cook Time 50

Course: Snack

Ingredients Method

Ingredients

200 grams Sourdough Discard (about ¾ cup)
2 Tbsp Unsalted Butter

¼ tsp Fine Salt
2 tsp Dried Herbs or Seasonings (such as Herbs de Provence or black pepper and parmesan cheese)
¼ tsp Coarse Salt

Method

Preheat oven to 350℉ and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Melt butter and allow to cool slightly.
Into a bowl, weigh out sourdough discard using a kitchen scale.

Add melted butter, fine salt, and herbs or seasonings, and mix until thoroughly combined.
Spread dough thinly onto parchment paper. Sprinkle the top with coarse salt.
Put in the oven and bake for 20-50 minutes, or until starting to turn golden brown. If desired, after the first 10 minutes, remove the sheet from the oven and score the crackers with a knife or pizza cutter.

When done, remove from oven and allow to cool. Break crackers into appropriate sizes. Crackers can be consumed immediately or stored in an airtight container for about a week.