craig, Author at Urban Homesteading

Author: craig

Garden Update: September 2023

Posted on September 9, 2023September 9, 2023 by craig

As the height of summer passes and we inch our way slowly toward fall, we find ourselves entering the busiest part of the year for me. While my husband is the primary gardener, I’m the primary food preserver—and everything needs to be preserved in the next few weeks.

Harvesting and Preserving

We learned our lesson last year. We used to like keeping things in the ground as long as possible, meaning that when we get the notification that frost is coming (usually in mid- to late-October), we then hurry to harvest everything all at once. And that means having to preserve non-stop for days or weeks to make sure nothing goes rotten.

I think I really burned myself out last year.

This year, we’re harvesting things when we think they’re ready rather than leaving them as long as possible. Really, an extra couple weeks won’t make much difference.

This means that this past weekend we harvested all the beets—53 pounds—and I pickled 26 pints / half-litres. We also gave some away to both our neighbours, my mom, and some friends of ours. We still have a small pile left. If I can find the motivation, I might try turning them into beet chips.

This past weekend also saw our potato harvest—234 pounds of Yukon gold and red-skinned potatoes. Thankfully, these don’t need anything done with them, at least not right away. In the past, a restaurant has taken some of our Yukon gold potatoes off of us, so I’m hoping they’ll be interested again this year. The red-skinned potatoes are good for canning, so once things settle down in November/December, I might look at canning some potatoes. These make great last-minute additions to dinner (fry them up like gnocchi) or breakfasts (fry them up like hash browns)—and since canning fully cooks them in the process, adding them to dinner or breakfast just takes as long as heating them up and maybe getting a little crispy on the outside. I’m hoping to convince a coworker to teach me how to make gnocchi, as I’d love to have bags of homemade gnocchi in the freezer, ready to be pulled out for dinners.

The tomatoes are ripening at a nice pace. They keep me busy but don’t overwhelm me. I just finished canning a batch of salsa and I’m stewing up a batch of butter chicken sauce that’ll be canned later today.

Looking ahead, I think this next week or two is going to be the herb-harvest period. We’ve got lots of basil that I’ll turn into pesto, lots of oregano that I’ll dry for kitchen use, some mint I’ll dry for a friend for tea, and rosemary that I’ll likely turn into a batch of rosemary wine. We also have some thyme, but I don’t know if I have a use for it—I could dry it, but it’s not really something I cook with—so I might just leave that one in the garden.

A lot of the other remaining things can wait till I have time. The peppers are slowly ripening but they’re fine sitting on the plant until I’m ready; the carrots and parsnips can wait till we have time; and the black beans and kidney beans are slowly drying and I’m in no rush to harvest them.

Legal Mustard

A few years ago, a wild mustard plant took root in our garden and we decided to let it grow. Though mustard leaves are edible, we never really came to like them. The seeds, though…I taught myself how to collect mustard seeds and make homemade mustard.

The first batch was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I threw it in the back of the fridge and forgot about it. And when the following spring rolled around and we were doing our first barbecue, I pulled out that mustard with a wary look. We gave it a try and ohmygod it was delicious. The flavour clearly matures over time.

Mustard plants grow millions of seeds and no matter how hard you try to collect them all, some always scatter. Year after year our mustard harvest grew as the plants spread. We never had to plant them ourselves—nature took care of it all.

Then, last year, we got a letter from the city about property maintenance bylaws. The letter was very unclear but mentioned tall grass (we have about two square feet of grass that got a little long) and noxious weeds. After researching it, wild mustard is a noxious weed. We had to tear it all out.

Turns out, after we tore it all out and contacted the inspector to verify we’d done everything right, he told us he hadn’t even noticed the wild mustard. The letter was just about the tall grass and the generic language included noxious weeds even though that wasn’t what he flagged for our property.

(Wild mustard is a noxious weed because it resembles canola and can infiltrate canola fields. If a canola harvest has too much mustard in it, the whole lot has to be dumped.)

We’ve still got half a jar of now-illegal mustard in the back of the fridge that I pull out when friends are over.

This year, we discovered the seed catalogue we order from has mustard—a legal kind!

The mustard plants are slowly dying off now—the seeds are harvested when the plant is brown and brittle—and I’m throwing the plants in one of those large paper lawn bags. In a few weeks I’ll work on harvesting the seeds and then set out to return to the world of mustard-making.

Since this is a new variety, the heat level of the seeds might be different. Wild mustard was black and dark brown seeds, which are the hottest. I’m not sure what colour these seeds are yet. But I’m looking forward to the adventure.

Looking Ahead to 2024

We’ve been gardening at this scale for a few years now, but we always learn new things and make new plans.

Next year our front yard will fully be fruit-only. My husband is planning to take out the horseradish plant before the summer is over, which is the only non-fruit/non-flower plant on that part of the property.

In the past, our neighbour who lets us use his yard has talked about moving to somewhere that requires less work and upkeep, and he’s talking about it again. This means we have to start coming up with contingency plans in case he does follow through on the idea of moving. (Given what’s been going on in this part of the city, if our neighbour moves, his house will be torn down, his property divided, and two or three new houses will go up in their place. The garden will be gone.)

This year we started gardening a little strip in our other neighbour’s yard. I think they don’t like mowing the lawn, so they’re eager for us to convert their whole property to garden space. If we lose our big space, this could be the route we go.

We’ve also talked about how we could downsize things and do it all on our property. (Do we really need 234 pounds of potatoes, 130 ears of corn, and 53 pounds of beets?)

Lately, my husband has been connecting with a meditation retreat place just outside the city and has volunteered some of his time to help out in their garden. They’ve offered to let us take some of the space for our own use. It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s a big space and it could be ideal for things that don’t need lots of attention (since we can’t get out there everyday), like onions, carrots, parsnips, and potatoes.

Of course, for all the talk of moving, our neighbour with the giant garden might end up staying there for several more years. But it’s always good to talk about these things so that if and when it happens, it’s not a disaster and we already have a plan in place. It also gets us thinking of what we’re growing and why. Like, this year we grew honeydew melon and realized that neither of us really like honeydew melon. If we’re crunched for space, that’ll be the first to go.

Update since I wrote the draft of this post: I decided to give honeydew melon wine a try—and I had just enough melon!

Honeydew melon wine (green) and corn cob wine (yellow).

Wine Failures

In my recent post about winemaking, I listed the country wines / garden wines I’ve made and the ones that are currently in process.

Well, I’ve had two disasters—one is salvageable and the other, well, we’ll see.

I noticed the airlock on the chokecherry wine wasn’t bubbling. This is concerning as it means that the yeast might not have taken hold and might’ve died off. If that’s the case, then I don’t have a bucket of wine, but rather a bucket of sugary juice that runs the risk of going mouldy.

I do these big batches of wine over at my mom’s place where there’s more room, so I’ll head over there this weekend and see if it’s salvageable. It’s certainly possible that the lid isn’t airtight and the excess gas is escaping elsewhere (and it is indeed fermenting), which is why the airlock isn’t bubbling. We’ll see.

Edit since I wrote up the first draft of this post: The chokecherry wine is indeed fermenting. It smells alcoholic and there have been some positive changes (like there’s no longer a layer of sugar on the bottom). I’m not sure what’s going on with the airlock not bubbling, but wine is certainly being made.

That seems to be the exact problem I had with the Saskatoon wine, though that one is salvageable.

The Saskatoon wine did actively ferment during primary (the first stage of fermentation where the yeast is most active), but after moving it to a new jar (called a secondary), the bubbling seemed to have died off quickly. I left it like that for a few weeks to see what would happen…but no bubbles ever came.

Well, it had certainly fermented earlier, so I knew the yeast had taken hold and survived, so maybe this was a wine that just finished early for some reason? It could have a low sugar content and the yeast ate up all their food quickly.

Anyway, I bottled it and let it sit around for a few weeks. I started to worry, though, that I might’ve bottled it too early. Maybe the lid wasn’t tight enough and gas escaped that way rather than through the airlock?

It didn’t take much convincing my husband when I said we should try a bottle of Saskatoon wine to see if it turned out.

I opened the first bottle…and it shot out like a geyser. There was wine everywhere.

Clearly, I had my answer. The wine had not finished fermenting before I bottled it and it continued to ferment in the wine bottle. This creates a safety hazard because if the pressure builds up too much, it could shatter the bottles. Not only would that be messy, but it’s potentially dangerous.

We opened two more bottles to see if they were the same. They did not shoot out geyser-like.

Anyway, now we had three open bottles of wine, though one was half-empty after the geyser. These are 375 ml bottles (half the standard wine bottle), so collectively it was just shy of a litre of wine.

We got some snacks, poured out the wine, and settled in for the first couple episodes of The Enfield Haunting.

The wine was great! I definitely want to try it again next year and see how it tastes when it’s fully and properly fermented and aged.

There were still three more bottles of Saskatoon wine, but we didn’t want to drink that all in one night. We have a friend that was really interested in trying this wine, so we wanted to save it for our next hangout.

To be safe, I put the three bottles in extra-large Ziplock bags, hoping that this would prevent glass shards and massive spills if they shatter, and then put them in the bottom of the fridge, as the cold air will slow the fermenting if it’s still occurring. When we bring it to our friend’s place, we’ll tell him to put on rubber gloves (in case the bottle shatters in his hand…which has happened to my husband once and required a hospital visit) and do it outside (in case it’s another geyser).

Preparing for Winter

Though Winter is still a few months away, we’ll soon be in fall and then very quickly the snow will fly.

The next month or so will see me harvesting the last of what we’ve got (which is still a lot) and finding ways to preserve it. Last year, we managed to grow enough veggies to last us the year, except for mushrooms, which we don’t grow. I’m hoping this year is the same. Although I’m soon going to an indoor mushroom growing workshop, so mushrooms might soon be off our grocery list.

The only thing we buy in the produce section at the grocery store are mushrooms, apples, oranges, bananas, and ginger (which we’ve got in our garden this year!). That’s it. The rapidly rising cost of fruits and veggies hasn’t really hit us.

As the food preserving winds down in October, I hope to get back into baking bread and bagels. I’ve been maintaining my sourdough starter but haven’t had time to use it to make anything.

I’ve also got other projects I’ve been long neglecting because of the garden. Outside of this, I’m an author and a publisher and while I’ve managed to keep the publishing going, I really need to get back into writing. My favourite part of winter is the slower pace and just enjoying all of the food and drink that we’ve grown and preserved. It tastes so much better when we know we did it all ourselves.

For my husband, preparing for winter means slowly clearing out the gardens and planting the garlic so they come up right as the spring rolls around. As the snow falls, he wedges tree branches in our chain link fence and strings Christmas lights through them, giving it all a sort of enchanted forest look.

And as we get into the real depths of winter, well, that’s when the seed catalogue arrives in our mailbox and we start preparing for the upcoming spring.

A Rough Guide to Making Country Wines

Posted on August 22, 2023September 4, 2023 by craig

Country wines are generally wines made with fruit other than grapes. Considering these wines are usually the output of my garden and I’m not located in the country, I sometimes refer to these as garden wines.

But whether you call them country wines or garden wines or something else, the process is still the same and the output is usually delicious.

I’ve learned over the years that fermenting—wines, kombucha, fermentation as preservation—is as much an art as it is a science.

Yes, there’s the obvious science stuff; fermentation is the process of using beneficial bacteria and yeast to produce a desired effect on foods. In winemaking, fermentation involves yeast turning sugar into alcohol.

However, once the basic science stuff is accommodated, art comes in. For winemaking that could mean tweaking a recipe to get a desired taste, upping the sugar content to increase the alcohol content, paying attention to the wine to get a sense of the fermentation stages and process (since I often find with country wines that the fermentation period varies wildly from the recipes I follow), and more.

So far I’ve tried:

Dandelion wine (now a regular summer project for me)
Lemon wine (a bit lemony, which I guess is to be expected, but it received mixed reviews)
Parsnip wine (surprisingly very good)
Rhubarb wine (a favourite of a friend of mine)
Apple wine (delicious and will definitely be making more)
Lilac wine (unbelievably good)
Saskatoon wine (recently bottled, haven’t tried yet)
Cherry wine (going to bottle soon, haven’t tried yet)
Grape wine (going to bottle in a couple weeks, haven’t tried yet)
Chokecherry wine (currently fermenting, haven’t had it before)
Corn cob wine (just started this batch yesterday, haven’t had it before)
Beetroot wine (just starting this batch today, haven’t had it before)

The Equipment You Need

While country wines are dirt cheap to make—the ingredients are often fruit, sugar, water, yeast, and a few additives—there is a start-up cost with the needed equipment. Even then, there are things you need, and things you can get by without.

Country wines are often small one-gallon batches, which means you’re using smaller (and cheaper!) equipment than if you’re making full five-gallon batches from winemaking kits. (There are even mason jar micro-batch wine recipes if you search the internet enough!) However, if you like a garden wine and have enough fruit, you can always quintuple a recipe and use the traditional five-gallon equipment.

Everything I’ll list here is on the assumption of equipment needed for one-gallon batches:

Fermentation vessels, which are a fancy term to mean jars or buckets. Ideally you have two because you have to transfer the wine from one to the other a few times to remove sediment, but you could get by only having one of you transfer the wine to a temporary vessel (like several jars or jugs) while you clean out your vessel, then return the wine to it.
- I really like these one-gallon glass jars from Amazon—and they come in a two-pack!
Airlocks / waterlocks, which are important to control the flow of air and, more importantly, any unwanted yeasts in the air that could spoil a batch of wine. (There’s yeast all around us!)
- The glass jars linked above come with airlocks! Here are some airlocks sold separately.
Bottles and corks. Since country wines are typically small batches, I like to use 375ml bottles, so the wine spreads out a little better. 375ml is half a standard wine bottle. You’ll also need corks and a corker (a device to put the cork in the bottle). Bottles can be reused, corks cannot.
- I buy my bottles and corks at a local wine store, but here are some 375ml bottles on Amazon, or 750ml bottles if you prefer, and some corks.
- For the corker, I have a big one with a long handle that’s easy to use (like this one!). I received it secondhand from someone downsizing their place, and it’s a bit more expensive. Here’s a cheaper/smaller one on Amazon.
Siphon, to move the wine from one vessel to the other.
- Here’s one on Amazon, and it’s made for one gallon vessels. If you’re doing bigger batches with bigger equipment, you’ll need a longer siphon.
- I actually don’t use this. I have a siphon but it’s for the big 5-gallon jugs, making it quite oversized for a little one-gallon jar. I usually use a clean ladle and carefully ladle the wine from one vessel to the other, leaving most sediment behind. If I also have to filter out chunks of fruit, I set a fine-mesh wire strainer over the empty vessel to catch the fruit as I transfer the wine. When transferring the wine to bottle—usually done by siphoning directly into the bottles—I use a funnel and ladle the wine in. It’s not the best, but it does the job.
Yeast. There are different yeasts meant for different types of wine. To be honest, I’m not the best with planning ahead so I often just use the one I have on hand. **Do not use bread yeast as you’ll get off flavours.**
- Here’s a wine yeast that’s generally good for country wines.
Pectin enzyme, which is needed to break up naturally occurring pectin that comes on some fruits. Pectin is what sets jam and jelly nice and solid, not something you want in your wine.
- Here’s some on Amazon.
Acid blend, which is needed to acidify some wines.
- Here’s some on Amazon.
- Alternatively, you can use lemon juice at a ratio of one tablespoon of lemon juice in place of one teaspoon of acid blend. I use lemon juice.
Tannin powder, to add tannins to some wines. This gives the mouth feel we associate with wine.
- Here’s some on Amazon.
- Alternatively, you can brew a cup of black tea / English Breakfast tea, let it cool, and dump it in. I always go with the tea option.
Yeast nutrient, as not all fruits give the micronutrients yeast needs to thrive.
- Here’s some on Amazon.
- Alternatively, you can throw in a handful of raisins, which is the route I always take.

The Stages of Winemaking

Once you get all the ingredients (which may include fruit/flowers, sugar, nutrients, acid, water, yeast, etc.) into your fermentation vessel, these are the general stages:

Primary Fermentation

Fermentation at the stage can be fast and furious, and sometimes the contents can shoot up the airlock and spill over.

The yeast is hungrily and greedily consuming the sugar and converting it to alcohol.

The fermentation vessel used here—even if it’s the same vessel you use throughout the process—is often called the “primary”. So if a recipe calls for stirring your primary or putting everything in your primary, it’s referring to the stage.

Secondary Fermentation

After a while, usually a few weeks, the speed of fermentation slows. The bubbles in the airlock are slower-paced.

At this point, you’ll usually rack the wine into your secondary. This is a fancy way of saying to move the wine into a new vessel, leaving sediment (or even fruit or flowers) behind.

This is typically done by siphoning the wine from one vessel to the other—or using a ladle like I do.

If you move the vessel before racking it—I usually keep mine in the corner of the counter and have to move it closer—it’s a good idea to let it sit for half an hour or more before racking. Moving can stir up the sediment, so you want it to settle before you rack it.

Racking and Clarifying

Recipes will often have you racking the wine—transferring it to a new vessel—a few times. As the yeast continues to work, sediment continues to accumulate. Some wines produce a lot of sediment (like dandelion wine) and others not so much (my saskatoon wine, currently fermenting, seems to give little sediment).

Bottling and Aging

Eventually the wine will finish fermenting. Regardless of the timeline given by the recipe, figure this out for yourself. Watch the airlock closely; if there are no bubbles in a five to ten minute period, the wine is likely done and the yeast has died off.

The risk of bottling too early is that if the yeast is still active and producing carbon dioxide as a byproduct of fermentation, pressure builds up in the bottle and it could explode. I once bottled a batch of dandelion wine too early—it ended up coming out sparkling like a moscato, but could have easily exploded. I was lucky!

Transfer to bottles, either with a siphon or a ladle and funnel, and then insert a cork.

Most wines need to age, which means just sit around in their bottles, for anywhere from a few weeks to a year. You can certainly drink it before it’s done aging, but the taste might not be as good. The difference aging makes can sometimes be drastic. I tasted my apple wine while bottling, opened and drank a bottle midway through aging, and enjoyed some fully-aged—and each of these three tastes were wildly different.

Learning the Process

Learning to make wine feels intimidating. However, the way to learn is to just dive in and do it.

If you can invest in the equipment necessary, a good starter is a full wine kit from a wine store. Those have easy to follow instructions and very little goes wrong. That’s how I got my start, and it gave me the confidence to move on to country wines. (The downside is that these kits are made for five-gallon equipment, not the one-gallon equipment you’d be buying for country wines.)

If you’re a first timer or have never been comfortable with the process, but want to try it, find a country wine recipe with clear instructions and that tells you how to identify the steps, such as knowing when primary fermentation is over and it’s ready to rack into the secondary. The resource section below will help you find such recipes.

Country Wine Resources

This website will be a resource as I get recipes uploaded. Click on Recipe Index in the menu and look for the wine section. (As of writing this, the wine section doesn’t exist yet… but it will!)

Practical Self-Reliance—this is my go-to homesteading resource and highly recommend it. Ashley has several wine recipes with clear instructions, including information on substitutes for special ingredients and what to do if you don’t have all the equipment. Her Dandelion Wine recipe was my first country wine.

I now do five-gallon batches of dandelion wine because it’s so well loved.

Jack Keller’s archive—Jack was a leader in the country wine community online and wrote a very popular blog filled with recipes. After his passing, his community archived all of his country wine recipes in a downloadable PDF meant for sharing widely. I’ve got a copy saved here that you can download for yourself. These are more for the experienced winemaker, or at least for the brave soul that likes to experiment, because some of them feel like fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants directions.

Tasty Experiments

Country wines don’t usually taste like store-bought wines, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less enjoyable. You’ll find out which ones you love and which you don’t care for. My husband loves my dandelion wine and a friend of ours loves my rhubarb wine.

But it’s the experimenting that makes this extra fun and the final product extra rewarding. It’s looking at something in your garden and six months later pouring it into a glass to impress your friends. It’s about making something special and unique, something you can’t buy, something that can only come from someone putting in the time and effort to create something delicious.

Garden Update: August 2023

Posted on August 19, 2023August 19, 2023 by craig

It’s becoming abundantly clear to me—as if I somehow hadn’t already learned my lesson—that it’s near impossible to do anything else but garden during garden season.

Keeping up with this site has been a challenge. I’ve been making recipes and taking photos and making notes, but finding time to sit down and type it all out has become quite difficult. I suspect that once the end of fall hits and we roll into winter, that’s when I’ll be able to sit down and write about all of my kitchen adventures.

When I tell people we have a big garden and it keeps us busy, I don’t think they truly understand the scale of it until they see it. I had some new friends come to our place for the first time this summer for a BBQ. I gave them the address, but then added “there’s no number on the house, so look for the garden, you’ll understand when you see it”.

Most properties in our area have just plain grass front yards. There are a few front yard gardeners in the area, but they still come nowhere near matching our scale.

The first thing that’s immediately noticeable, especially in late summer, are the sunflowers. My husband lines our front fence with sunflowers and we easily have the tallest ones in the neighbourhood, with them regularly reaching up to 15 feet in height. Along one side of our property is our wall of corn. So when you’re pulling up to your house and you’ve never been there before, it’s like a cube of greenery. And once you pass through the front gate, it’s been described as almost like a secret garden, likely aided by the fact that the sunflowers sort of hang over the entryway, making it look almost magical.

The Crops and the Harvests

The purpose of our front yard has evolved over the years, but it’ll be our fruit garden moving forward. Here’s where we have in the front:

Those sunflowers I mentioned along our front fence
Snap peas
Scarlet runner beans
Saskatoons (also known as juneberries or service berries)
Raspberries
Blueberries
Strawberries
Grapes
Watermelon
Horseradish (not a fruit but it’s where we planted it years ago)
Goji berries (we planted the bush this year, haven’t had fruit yet)
We also tend to plant squash in the front to fill up the remaining space. In future years, this remaining space will likely be taken up with more fruit bushes. Currently, though, we have:
- Acorn squash
- Butternut squash

The front yard is also our most floral area, with a lilac bush, a rose bush, a double flowering plum tree (which just gives us flowers, no fruit), lilies, pots of flowers, and a handful of other things.

Along the side of the house, we have:

Corn
Snap peas
Basil
Rosemary
Thyme
Parsley
Mint
Dill

Our back yard is bit of a mishmash:

Various flowers and non-edible plants
Borage (an edible flower/plant but we mostly grow it to keep the bees happy)
Ginger
Garlic (and garlic scapes!)
Green onions / spring onions
Mustard
Spinach
Celery
Pumpkin
Peppers
- Bell peppers
- Banana peppers

That’s all we can fit on our property, but we don’t stop there.

Our neighbour to the west is a lifelong gardener but isn’t able to manage his entire garden anymore, so he lets us plant what we want as long as we take care of it. We do, and we share some of our harvest with him, and we help him maintain the patches of produce he’s growing for himself.

On that property, we have:

Beans
- Black beans
- Kidney beans
Tomatoes (several types and sizes)
Popcorn
Peppers
- Bell peppers
- Banana peppers
- Jalapeno peppers
- Cayenne peppers
- Scotch bonnet peppers
Squash
- Butternut squash
- Acorn squash
- Pumpkin (both small edible pumpkins and big jack-o-lantern pumpkins)
Melon
- Honeydew melon
- Watermelon
Potatoes
- Yukon gold potatoes
- Red-skinned potatoes (good for canning!)
Cucumber
Alaskan peas (good for canning!)
Onions
Shallots
Beets
Broccoli
Brussels sprouts
Swiss chard
Rhubarb
Horseradish

This list still isn’t over.

Our neighbours on the east side have asked us to help them garden a bit—partly because they hate yard work and partly to cut their grocery bill a bit. Since it’s primarily us that would be tending to it and we’re already stretched thin, at this time we’re just doing a little strip along the shared fence between our properties. We share our harvest with them, particularly if it’s something we’ve grown on their property; one of the folks living there loves the corn.

Over there, we have:

Corn
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Parsnips
Carrots

They’re eager to get rid of their grass, so as a solution for next year, they’ll likely put a tarp over their grass and we’ll plant all our squash and melons around the perimeter, filling their yard with the big leafy plants—essentially, the effect of a giant garden, but with minimal work since it just requires watering around the edges.

And… that’s still not it.

That’s what we’re growing, but that’s not the limit of what we’re harvesting.

My husband up on the ladder picking cherries

I’ve also managed to gather:

Apples from a friend’s trees (200+ pounds with more coming this week!)
Sour cherries from a tree on that same friend’s property
Grapes—boxes and boxes of grapes—from a friend’s vine
- While we have grapes, so far we get just a few bunches a year, most of which the birds eat
Saskatoons, foraged by my step-dad from a local park
- We have our own Saskatoon bush, but the birds ate every single berry before I had a chance to harvest them. I distinctly remember looking at the bush on a Saturday evening and thinking “Hmm… some of these are ready for picking, I’ll start harvesting tomorrow morning so I get them before the birds do.” The next morning, the bush was bare.
Chokecherries, also foraged by my step-dad from a local park
- With this, he had the specific request that I make chokecherry wine because he has good memories of his mom doing the same. Here’s hoping my wine lives up to that memory!
Pin cherries, also foraged by my step-dad from a local park

This has been and will likely continue to be a year of abundance. Last year with approximately the same number of plants, we had an abundance of broccoli but everything else did just okay. This year, everything is in abundance… except the broccoli. At this point I have more than a year’s supply of certain vegetables, and there’s still more coming.

The Preserving Plans

With a garden as big and as overly-productive as ours, the huge challenge is always: How the heck do you preserve all of it so you don’t end up throwing out tons of food?

Well, the answer to that will slowly be revealed over the coming year as I upload all my recipes here. However, I will say that it’s definitely a challenge.

Our little house doesn’t have a basement. (We have a little dug-out crawlspace where the furnace and hot water tank are, but it’s prone to flooding in storms and in the spring melt, so we can’t store stuff there.) Until recently, we only had a side-by-side fridge/freezer. This year I bought a 3.5 cubic foot deep freezer that fits nicely in our kitchen, doubling our freezer space.

However, I rely heavily on my mom’s house. She has a cold storage room in the basement that’s perfect for the potatoes and a deep freezer twice the size of ours that’s great for the rhubarb and various other things that get frozen.

But if we froze everything, we’d need a dozen freezers.

When my husband started in on this ambitious garden project (which began as just a strip in the back yard), I quickly taught myself farm wife skills, to borrow a phrase from a friend. I’ve written about my food processing journey here, but over the years I’ve learned what I like frozen, what I like canned, what I like dehydrated, and what’s fine to just sit as-is.

The biggest challenge has been to get an understanding of what my husband and I like to eat. Sure, there are hundreds or thousands of recipes online to preserve food, but if you don’t like the end result then it’s the same as just not doing anything.

For example, there are lots of great jelly and jam recipes, but we don’t eat jelly or jam. (The one exception is this Inferno Wine Jelly that tastes amazing on a bagel breakfast sandwich.) We’re also not really dessert people, so there’s no point in canning up a bunch of fruit pie fillings. These dislikes of ours immediately cut out a lot of uses for the fruit that we grow.

This Year’s Theme

One challenge I gave myself this year was to try making a bunch of different wines. It’s a great way to use up some of the produce and it ultimately saves us a ton of money down the road. (Here in Manitoba, alcohol is quite expensive.)

The wines I’ve made and plan to make this year include:

Dandelion wine (done and aging, but I’ve made it before and know it’s good)
Apple wine (super delicious and more coming)
Lilac wine (nicely sweet and floral)
Cherry wine (still fermenting)
Corn cob wine (got some cobs stored in the freezer)
Grape wine (notoriously difficult to make but I’ll try it!)
Parsnip wine (made it before, quite nice)
Rhubarb wine (a favourite of a friend of ours)
Chokecherry wine
Rose hip wine (not sure about this one for this year)
Hot pepper wine (just came across this idea yesterday, so I need to dig in more before deciding to do it or not)

In addition to wine, I have various recipes for flavouring store-bought alcohol. So far all the ones I’ve tried have been incredibly good. These recipes will show up on this site, likely in the winter. So far I’ve tried or will soon be trying:

Rhubarb ginger gin (a crowd favourite)
Sour cherry liqueur (mind-blowingly good)
Sour cherry gin (fantastic over ice)
Apple cinnamon brandy
Apple pie liqueur
Dandelion cordial
Hot pepper vodka

Looking Ahead to September

As August slowly reaches its end and we head into September, and then on into the fall, the busiest time of the year for me is about to be here. The tomatoes are just starting to ripen and soon I’ll have boxes and boxes of them. The potato plants are dying off, which means in a few weeks we can dig them up. And the kidney beans and black beans are forming now, and they’ll eventually mature and dry and be ready for harvest.

My husband has his own routine for the end of summer and oncoming of fall. He carefully puts away all the sticks he’s used to brace plants, he prepares the gardens for the winter, and he plants garlic cloves so they pop up first thing in the spring.

The best part of winter, though, is enjoying the fruits of our labours—all of those home-grown and preserved vegetables, the fancy drinks and wines that remind us of summers when the weather is hitting -40 C, and perhaps most importantly, sharing this abundance with family and friends.

But as winter sets in, there’s always one thing on our mind…planning for the upcoming garden season.

How to Preserve Saskatoons (Serviceberries, Juneberries) in a Sugar-Kombucha Brine

Posted on July 9, 2023July 9, 2023 by craig

Saskatoons are a blink-and-you’ll-miss-them crop.

We have a large saskatoon bush in our front yard. About a week ago, I was looking at the bush on a Saturday afternoon. The berries were starting to ripen—they’re perfect when they’re so dark-purple that they’re almost black—and decided I’d start picking the ripest ones the following day.

Well, Sunday morning rolls around and I head outside to discover that the birds had stripped the entire bush in less than twenty-four hours. Not only did they eat all of the ripe and almost-ripe berries, but they ate all of the completely-unripe berries too.

I had plans for those berries. I make a super-tasty saskatoon and Grand Marnier jam that some friends look forward to every year, and I had hoped to try making a batch of saskatoon wine.

Thankfully, a family member came to the rescue. He knows a good spot to find wild saskatoons and not long after the birds had devastated my crop, I was handed buckets and buckets of berries. I had enough for the jam and the wine, with plenty left over.

“Saskatoons” is apparently a very regional name for these berries. Whenever I would search for Saskatoon recipes online, the options were extremely limited—basically just pies or jam. My husband and I aren’t really dessert people and I’ve never baked a pie in my life, so I never knew what to do with these and we’d just eat them as-is.

One day I encountered a blog post about something called serviceberries and there was an off-hand anecdote in the post about how some people know them as saskatoons or juneberries. Suddenly I had the key to finding more recipes and posts about this little short-season fruit.

If you’ve never had saskatoons before, I sort of think of them as similar to a blueberry. However, that similarity is more in the size, shape, and colour, though to me the taste isn’t super dissimilar.

My saskatoon bush produces nice, plump, juicy berries. The wild ones are considerably smaller, as is often the case with wild versus cultivated fruit.

Back to the cooking adventure:

After making the jam (which I didn’t photograph, so I won’t get a blog post about it this year, but if you’re curious, it’s this recipe), setting up the wine (which I’ll post about in several months when it’s ready to drink so I can also comment on taste), and flavouring a batch of kombucha with saskatoons and blueberries, I was still left with more saskatoons than I knew what to do with.

I decided to give preserving them a try. It had worked well with blueberries, so theoretically I might get the same result with saskatoons.

I pulled up the recipe and set out to experiment. The photos in this post are of a double-batch of the recipe at the bottom.

To start, mix unflavoured kombucha, sugar, salt, and water together and set aside. Rinse the berries and then put them into the fermentation jar. Pour the brine on top, make sure everything is submerged (preferably with a weight), close it (with an airlock), and let it sit for a few days. Taste it daily until desired doneness, which for us was three days, same as with the blueberries.

This was a bit of a disaster in the process, requiring quick thinking to make things work.

The first is that since I wanted a double batch, it was too much for my fermentation kit. That was easy enough to solve—I’ll just use a bigger jar.

I got everything mixed up and put inside. When I went to put the fermentation weight on top of the berries, that was my next problem—the weight was designed for a wide-mouth jar and I was using a standard-mouth jar. I also didn’t have any wide-mouth jars on hand to just switch jars.

You can usually use a ziplock bag filled with water as a weight, but there wasn’t much room in the jar, so I decided to risk it and skip the weight. I made sure to stir the mixture with a spoon every twelve hours or so, to push the top berries underneath so nothing was floating on top too long.

Then came the problem with the lid. The fermentation lid, similar to the weight, was manufactured for a wide-mouth jar, so it didn’t fit the jar I was using. Luckily I have some wine-making equipment on hand, so I poked a hole in a mason jar lid and stuck an airlock in it. (In the absence of that, the next best thing would be to loosely put on a two-part mason jar lid. Theoretically, the weight of the lid would keep it down and keep out unwanted air, but also be loose enough to allow gas build-up inside to release.)

All potential disasters overcome, the project succeeded.

Once the berries are ready and fully fermented, I replaced the makeshift airlock lid with a regular lid and stuck it in the fridge. If you’re using a fermentation kit, you might want to transfer the berries to a new jar to free up the kit for the next fermentation project.

The fully fermented berries are wonderful on their own. The kombucha sugar brine gives it a sweet juicy taste, and as they continue to ferment (albeit more slowly) in the fridge, they may develop a fizzy texture felt on the tongue when eating them—some folks dislike this and some enjoy this.

Other than eating them straight out of the jar, they make a great topping for yogurt, ice cream, overnight oats, or any other food where you want a little bit of fresh fruit mixed in.

Even if the birds hadn’t stripped my berries in under twenty-four hours, the saskatoon season is so incredibly short. Last year, the birds left the bush alone and I got to harvest the berries—I got buckets of them off only one bush—and we enjoyed our saskatoon harvest for about a week and a half. After that, they were finished with until this year.

This spring we planted two more saskatoon bushes in our yard. Either we’ll have so many berries that even if the birds raid a bush we’ll still have some for ourselves, or we’ll just attract more birds and they’ll all know our yard is the place to be. As frustrating as it is to have the birds abscond with the harvest, we do appreciate that someone enjoyed the berries, even if it can’t be us.

Sugar-Brine Fermented Saskatoons (Serviceberries, Juneberries)

With sugar, kombucha, and a few other ingredients, saskatoons (also known as serviceberries or juneberries) can be easily fermented and last for weeks in the fridge.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 5 mins

Fermenting Time 3 d

Course Fruit

Cuisine Fruit

Equipment

1 Fermenting Jar or Fermenting Kit See notes for alternatives

Ingredients

2 cups Saskatoons / Serviceberries / Juneberries
6 Tbsp Kombucha, unflavoured
¾ tsp Salt
6 Tbsp Sugar
9 Tbsp Water

Instructions

Mix all ingredients except for the berries.
Clean berries and then put them in the fermentation jar.
Pour the kombucha-sugar mixture on top.
Put the fermentation weight on top of the blueberries.
After twenty-four hours, taste-test daily until desired doneness. For us, we determined this was after three days, but the length of time will vary based on the temperature in your kitchen and various other factors.
Transfer to a clean jar and store in the fridge.
I'm not sure of the shelf life, but the jar in our fridge has been there a month and they're still good.

Notes

A fermentation kit usually has a jar, a weight, and an airlock. This is the one I have and it worked perfectly for this. (I can’t find it on Amazon, but if you’re in Canada, I got it at Canadian Tire. Alternatively, here’s a more expensive and more complete kit from the same company available on Amazon, though it looks like it’s several lids and weights but you provide your own jar.) If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can use any jar that’s big enough to hold all of this, and then use a Ziplock bag filled with water as a weight. You might get scum forming on the bag and that’s okay.

Keyword juneberries, preserving berries, saskatoons, serviceberries

How to Make Rhubarb Ginger Gin

Posted on June 11, 2023June 12, 2023 by craig

It’s just about rhubarb season here!

Some folks are already harvesting theirs but for some reason the plants on our property always seem to be a few weeks behind everyone else’s—like, my lilac is just about to start blooming, but everyone else’s has already bloomed and the flowers have fallen off.

Using up rhubarb has always been a challenge for us. Last year we got 95 pounds and that wasn’t even all of it. Technically we don’t have rhubarb on our property, but both neighbours have it and neither wants it, so we get it. I harvested only one neighbour’s patch and did only one harvest to get that 95 pounds—if I’d done both patches and two harvests, I likely would have ended up with somewhere around 150 pounds.

For many people that sounds like heaven. For us, though… we don’t eat sweets very often, so we really have no desire for rhubarb crisps, rhubarb pies, or rhubarb jellies.

I’ve made a rhubarb-based barbecue sauce and a rhubarb relish that were both amazingly delicious, and I’ll likely feature those recipes here eventually. (I think I have enough leftover from last year to last us through this year, so that might be a next year project.)

The gin, though…

Venturing into rhubarb alcohol, I tried a few things—rhubarb wine (recipe coming eventually), rhubarb schnapps, rhubarb gin, and rhubarb ginger gin. All of them are delicious but by far rhubarb ginger gin is the most popular.

When I make a batch and end up with just over two litres of gin, it’s easy for that to be polished off in as little as two weeks. Everyone loves it.

It’s an incredibly versatile drink too. So far, I’ve had it the following ways:

Straight-up, with or without ice
Topped with just a splash of lemon juice for brightness and freshness (it really changes the drink)
Mixed with Coke
Or, if I’m feeling fancy, the Bee’s Knees Cocktail, which is the gin shaken with a splash of lemon juice in a shaker with ice and served in a glass rimmed with natural sugar and bee pollen (recipe coming eventually)

Making it couldn’t be easier.

You take a big jar (I use this jar, and though there’s no fermenting happening, I set up the airlock to keep it airtight)—and if you’re in a pinch, a large pitcher with a lid or with plastic wrap to cover it will work too—and throw in the gin, rhubarb, ginger, and sugar (all quantities listed in the recipe below). Give it a stir or a shake and let it sit on the counter out of direct sunlight for about four weeks. You’ll want to stir or shake it every once in a while to help the sugar dissolve, but it’ll do that on it’s own over the four weeks anyway—for the last batch, I completely neglected it and it was fine as always after four weeks.

Bottling it can be a bit difficult. I take a big two litre glass measuring cup and rest a wire mesh strainer on top, then carefully pour the contents of the jar into it. When the measuring cup is half full, I pour it into the bottles. I repeat this process till all the gin has been bottled.

It will be a bit cloudy, unfortunately, but it’s so tasty no one really cares. If presentation is important to you, you could likely run this through a coffee filter, or if you have a siphon for wine-making, you could transfer all the liquid to a new jar and let it settle for a day or two, then siphon it into bottles, leaving behind any sediment.

For bottles, I have grolsch bottles that I got from Ikea—these are the bottles with the flip top. They have them at Dollarama too, but the seal isn’t as nice, and I see them on Amazon sometimes, but I’m not sure of their quality as I’ve never purchased them. The ones at Ikea are really nice.

However, you can use whichever bottles you have on hand. If you’ve got some fancy antique bottles, use those. If you don’t care about the presentation, you could just re-use old gin bottles. Whatever you want to use is fine!

I’ll follow-up with a post later this summer on some ways to use the rhubarb ginger gin (basically describing the drinks in the bulleted list above), so watch for that post! I’ll try to remember to come back and update this post when I do that.

If you’re curious about this drink, I very highly recommend giving it a try—I’ve yet to come across someone that doesn’t care for it.