craig, Author at Urban Homesteading

Author: craig

Garden Update: July 2024

Posted on July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 by craig

Every year, my husband says something like “this is not a good year for the garden”. It’s either too hot or too dry or too cold or too wet, but usually it’s all fine in the end.

This year… is not a good year for the garden. We’ve had a combination of too cold and too wet. It’s already the first week of July and our garden is weeks behind compared to last year.

For the most part, this will likely be okay. Things might take a little longer and be harvested a little later in the season, but they’ll be fine. Other things that are harvested late in the season — like popcorn, for example — may not do that well. As always, we will see what happens.

One casualty already has been the black beans and kidney beans. Almost none of them have come up. We’re wondering if it was too wet and the beans ended up rotting. John has replanted a ton this past weekend. They might end up being harvested a little before they’re fully dried but in the past I’ve found I can just run them through a dehydrator and they’re fine.

The plants really enjoying this weather seem to be the underground vegetable crops, particularly the garlic and potatoes.

Potatoes and garlic growing in the back yard.

The garlic is about waist high, which I think is the tallest I’ve ever seen it. In this photo you can also see all the curly scapes growing out of the garlic in the front half of the photo. Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. You want to cut or pull these off before the flower opens, otherwise the garlic will stop growing. I’m planning to harvest all the scapes tomorrow—I’ll pickle a bunch of them and the rest I’ll turn into some fermented garlic scape hot sauce.

Not loving the weather this year is the tomatoes, peppers, and corn. Normally this view would be lush and full, but this year it’s kind of depressing.

The weather seems to be taking a turn for the better, though. Today is supposed to be hot and sunny, as is much of next week, so hopefully we’ll see a growth spurt in these plants.

Food for a year

Really, a few plants not growing isn’t that big of a deal — I go grocery shopping every week, so I can always pick up a can of beans if the crop at home isn’t successful. But we like the challenge of eating only what we grow.

We haven’t had broccoli since, I think, January, when our frozen harvest ran out. We just harvested a little bit this weekend and I’m so excited to have broccoli again.

We’re at the low point in our food cycle. This is the food storage room in my mom’s basement. (We use her place since we don’t have a basement, and in return she has free access to whatever she wants.)

While we’ve got a few things left, it’s quite empty. The freezers are mostly empty too.

In a few months this will be FULL of jars and boxes and the freezers will be stuffed to the brim as well…provided the garden picks up some speed with all the growing. Then we’ll eat well until the spring when our choices narrow as things run out and we’ll start dreaming of the upcoming harvest and new round of amazing food.

Mushroom beds

The BIG new project this year are our new mushroom beds!

We’ve been wanting to grow more plant-based protein, which is partly why we’re upping our beans this year, and mushrooms were part of our plan. We weren’t sure if we were going to get it off the ground this year or not.

I received a great mushroom book for my birthday back in March—Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation by Tradd Cotter—which gives great instructions for how to set up mushroom beds on your property. (Despite the complexity of the title, it’s a remarkably novice-friendly book.) But… I was overwhelmed and decided to make this year the research year so that next spring I’d be ready to go.

In the meantime, I follow a local mushroom spawn producer on Instagram and saw a post about mushroom spawn kits that would be great for a garden. After a few DMs to get my nervous questions out of the way, I picked up the kits and we created our first mushroom bed for black pearl king oyster mushrooms.

Bags of mushroom spawn and sawdust pellets.

With how easy it was to set up—and it’s still to early to see how productive it is—we hit up the mushroom guy for some more, and we’ve set up a second bed for white oyster mushrooms.

I’ll do a full post on at-home mushroom production later this summer. A friend of ours has done an in-the-house mushroom set-up that’s quite impressive, so I’ll take some pics and grab some details from him to share in my eventual mushroom post.

Pride season

For many parts of the world, including Winnipeg, Pride happens in June.

As a fairly-masculine cisgender white gay man, I realize that I have a lot of privilege in society. Folks who have different gender and attraction identities or different gender expressions, or have different intersections with skin colour, socioeconomic status, and disability do not have as easy an experience as I do just existing. I don’t experience much homophobia and discrimination, though it does occasionally come up.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious decision to be openly queer here. I want this website to be a place where absolutely everyone is welcome.

Most homesteading sites would make the same claim, but then they also post Bible verses, make explicit statements about the importance of family and children, and often express a distrust of society. While all of these are perfectly fine to find important and have on one’s site, it does not create a welcoming space for 2SLGBTQ+ people who are interested in homesteading. And when I’ve gone onto some of these homesteaders’ social media accounts, I’ve been further alarmed by the content I’ve seen. Unfortunately, most homesteading sites and folks are not welcoming to queer people—they might in theory be, but not in practice.

I imagine some future people reading this section of this post and demanding what someone’s bedroom activities has to do with growing tomatoes. And, really, if that’s your question then that highlights the problem. If a straight person can post about their spouse and kids and importance of family in their post, then why can’t I post about my husband and the importance of Pride in my post? It’s that old double-standard that continually oppresses queer people and their identities.

If you’ve read some of my posts, you’ve likely seen references to my husband. I don’t hide it.

I’ve decided to take a tiny step forward—I’ve updated the banner graphic at the top of this site to include a progress pride flag.

There may be future inclusive changes and posts, once I figure them out. I know one thing I’d like to do is compile a great list of queer homesteaders and farmers. I follow a great account on TikTok, but a list need to be more than one item long. 🙂

Garden and project photo dump

Here are random photos of the things I’ve been up to the past few weeks!

We’ve added chamomile to the garden this year, so I’m working on plucking these flowers and drying them for tea.

The saskatoons are ripening; when they’re a dark purple, they’re ready. The challenge is to get them before the birds do. Last year on a Saturday evening I looked at the saskatoon bush and thought These look ripe, I’ll harvest them tomorrow morning. Twelve hours later, Sunday morning, the birds had completely decimated the bush, eating every single saskatoon. As I walked up to the bush to take this photo, a robin gulped down a berry and flew away.

In the realm of preserving projects, I finally tackled the chicken broth. I’ve had a few chicken carcasses sitting in the freezer for months and they needed to get used up before this year’s harvest started filling the freezers again.

I took the carcasses, covered them with water, and added dried herbs and seasonings from last year’s garden. Piled on top here, you’ll see parsley, thyme, and a powered seasoning made from dried onion and garlic peels.

A pot of chicken broth with seasonings on top.

Once it’s boiled and then simmers for an hour or two, everything gets strained and the broth is then canned using a pressure canner. I ended up with just over eight litres of broth.

I also made a batch of chive blossom vinegar for a friend. It’s normally made with white wine vinegar, but this batch is made with unseasoned rice vinegar. It has a lovely chive flavour and smell, and a gorgeous pink colour. Over the next few months the colour will fade and turn brown, but the taste and smell will stay the same. I’m hoping to get the recipe up on this site soon.

A bright pink bottle of chive blossom vinegar.

A new-to-me recipe this year is fermented chives. Chives are ridiculously difficult to preserve. Drying or freezing them diminishes their flavour pretty quickly, so it’s very much a use-it-fresh type of plant…which is disappointing because they produce so much chives and you can only eat so much in a meal. These fermented chives turned out pretty nice. If anything, it intensified the chive flavour and smell, and the fermenting has added a bit of a sauerkraut flavour to it. Fermented foods usually last at least a few months in the fridge.

A small jar of fermented chives with a spoon sitting in it.

I’ve also got my annual batch of dandelion wine underway. It’s really cloudy right now, so it’ll take at least a few months to settle and clarify. Normally dandelion wine is made with orange and lemon juice, but I stumbled across a recipe that used lemon juice and ginger and couldn’t resist. So this will be my first batch of dandelion ginger wine. Fingers crossed it tastes good!

A big carboy of golden-coloured dandelion wine

And, lastly, we almost have a gazebo on our deck!

We host a lot of barbecues in the summer but the mosquitoes and wasps make it incredibly unpleasant. We usually have a big mosquito net that drapes over the patio umbrella, but it tears so easily that it barely lasts a summer before we need a new one.

We’ve been talking about getting a gazebo, but we were always put off by the cost…until my mom and step-dad found this abandoned gazebo frame sitting in the middle of a field on public property outside the city. John and my step-dad went back to take it apart and bring it home and they put it together on the deck.

We’ve ordered mosquito screen siding. We couldn’t find the right gazebo canopy since each make and model is different and we have no idea which one this is, so we ordered extra mosquito netting so we can at least wrap the top of this with netting and prevent the bugs from coming in. In a future year we can look at a more formal canopy. All the netting arrived yesterday, so we’ll have it put together this weekend.

And that’s about it for this month’s round-up!

How to Make Dandelion Capers

Posted on June 28, 2024June 28, 2024 by craig

It was only a few years ago that I discovered just how truly versatile—and tasty—dandelions can be.

It started with one project: dandelion wine. I’d just recently gotten winemaking experience under my belt and was eager to try something that wasn’t an expensive store-bought kit. I soon found dandelion wine, and looking out at the dandelions in our then yard (we have no yard space now, only garden), I knew it wouldn’t be hard to collect what I needed.

While the end result wasn’t perfect, I knew the mixed results were largely due to my limited winemaking experience. Every year since I’ve worked on perfecting my dandelion wine and it’s now a year-round staple at our place, and one of the first projects every spring is a new batch.

From there, I started to explore the other offerings of this “weed” that people were so desperate to get rid of.

There was dandelion green pesto—which wasn’t quite our thing but was well-liked by some family members.
Then there was dandelion cordial—which is nice and tastes quite refreshing served over ice.

Soon following was dandelion jelly—or poor man’s honey, as it’s sometimes known. While my husband and I generally don’t eat jelly, this was indeed tasty and it’s an easy giveaway gift.
This year I ventured into dandelion root coffee to great success.

And the remaining dandelion recipe in my arsenal is dandelion capers.

What are capers?

For the longest time, I thought capers were seafood. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but I’d always believed they were from a fish or a clam or an oyster or something. Maybe it was the slightly salty taste they sometimes have.

So when I first heard about dandelion capers, I was beyond baffled.

Regular capers are pickled and seasoned flower buds—nasturtium flowers, to be specific. Suddenly this food that I typically avoided at all cost were mildly intriguing.

And when I learn of a new canning recipe, especially a unique one, I have to try it.

Picking dandelion buds

To start, you want to pick dandelion buds. Not soon-to-bloom buds on the end of long stems. You want the buds that are tightly nestled at the centre of the leaves. Sometimes after you pinch off a bud, there are even smaller ones beneath that.

(This year my step-dad picked all the buds for me, so I don’t have a picture of what this looks like, so you’ll have to use your imagination! I’ll try to remember to update this page with a pic next year.)

The quantity needed is entirely up to you. You can pick just enough for one jar or go bananas and make gallons of capers.

It’s best if you process the buds the same day. However, we couldn’t work that timing out this year so my step-dad froze the buds and I used them within a couple weeks. There does not seem to be a reduction in quality for having been frozen, but I’d recommend not letting them stay frozen for long—ice buildup and freezer burn will certainly degrade the quality of the final product.

When sorting through what you’ve picked, you want to keep the tight bugs that likely don’t have any petals formed yet. A bud that’s close to opening or which you can see hints of yellow poking through are too mature and should go in the compost. Ideally, the buds you want are about the size of a pea or smaller.

Once the buds have been picked, rinsed of dirt and bugs, and sorted so you have all the best buds, you can begin the process of pickling them. From here you can look to the recipe card lower down for the full directions, which include boiling water, vinegar, and salt to create a pickling brine.

You can choose to refrigerator pickle them or water bath can them. Processing in a water bath canner will get you a longer shelf life since they’ll be properly canned, but refrigerator pickling them (just sticking the jar in the fridge and not processing them) will likely result in a crisper texture since they’re not being boiled.

How to use dandelion capers

You can use dandelion capers any place where you’d use regular capers. Which, I must admit, I rarely do. Given my earlier aversion to capers, caper recipes are not in my personal stash of dinner recipes.

With a quick google search you can find some great recipes that use capers.

Personally, with my wide variety of pickled and canned goodies, I often serve them at a barbecue. I’ll have a “choose your own appetizer” spread set out with a baked brie and crackers at the centre, dandelion capers, pickled beets, pickled garlic, and whatever pickled or fermented produce I have in my fridge. It’s a great way for people to taste test a bunch of projects and also a great way to use up something I don’t often personally eat.

Dandelion Capers

Turn dandelions from your yard into tasty, tangy capers.

5 from 2 votes

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Prep Time 20

Cook Time 10

Equipment

Mason Jars

Ingredients

2 cups Dandelion Buds
⅔ cup Vinegar, either regular or cider, as long as it's at least 5% acid
⅓ cup Water

1 tsp Salt

Instructions

Clean dandelion buds and discard any that are too large, close to opening, or in bad shape. Pack dandelion buds into mason jars.
Combine vinegar, water, and salt in a pot and bring to a boil, ensuring salt is dissolved.

Pour brine over dandelion buds, leaving a ½ inch headspace.
Refrigerator pickles:
Put lid on and place jar in the fridge. After a week or so, they will be ready to eat.
Water bath canning:
Wipe rims and screw lids on to fingertip tightness. Process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. When the ten minutes is over, remove pot from heat and let sit for five minutes. Carefully remove mason jars and set on a towel on the counter to sit overnight. In the morning, check that the lids have popped / sealed; if they have, they can be stored in a cool dry place, if any jars haven't sealed, refrigerate them and consume them first.

Notes

Any size mason jar can be used. I tend to use one-cup or half-cup jars.

If you have more or less dandelion buds, this recipe can be easily multiplied or divided as needed.

If you find you’re short on brine, top off jars with vinegar.

How to Make Chive Blossom Jelly

Posted on June 21, 2024June 21, 2024 by craig

It seems like every food gardener has an arsenal of jam and jelly recipes. After all, it’s a sweet, tasty, and easy way to preserve fruit and, in some cases vegetables and herbs, for the year ahead.

The problem is that my husband and I rarely eat jam or jelly, so most of these recipes don’t appeal to us since they’d just sit on the shelf. I still have some dandelion jelly from two years ago that I’m unlikely to ever eat.

Every once in a while, though, I come across a jelly recipe that does appeal to us. We tend to like savoury jellies, partly because they have wider uses than “spread it on toast”. Later this year I’ll do up a batch of hot pepper and wine jelly, which goes phenomenal on a baked brie.

My discovery this year is chive blossom jelly.

The first harvest of spring

Dandelions and edible weeds aside, chives are often the first produce to come up in the garden and the first to be harvested.

So in the spring our garden looks like this…

…with the ground mostly barren and the only plants showing life being the perennials, trees, and bushes.

But the chives are quickly growing and very soon look like this…

They’re the first burst of colour in the spring. And they bring with them a tantalizing aroma that you can sometimes smell just being in the vicinity of them.

There are two common types of chives — onion chives and garlic chives. These are onion chives. (We bought some leek seedlings and planted them and our neighbour says he thinks the plant was mislabeled and we bought garlic chives instead. So now we might have both?)

Onion chives have a green onion taste to them — oniony and fairly strong, but without the harsh bite that green onions can sometimes have in the bulb area. Both the green stalks and the purple blossoms are edible.

The only problem with chives is that they are difficult to preserve. You can freeze them, but they lose their flavour pretty quickly. You can dehydrate them, but they lose their flavour even faster.

I’ve got a batch of chive blossom vinegar on the go as a way to preserve the flavour and I’m attempting a fermented chives recipe I found (and I’ll report back when they’re done). Chive blossom jelly is a new preservation method added to my arsenal.

Frankensteining a recipe

I sort of Frankensteined this recipe together.

There are chive blossom jelly recipes out there, but they all call for low-sugar pectin which, to the best of my knowledge, is not easily found in Canada. The grocery stores don’t have it, Amazon has it for super expensive, the nearby department stores with canning supplies (Canadian Tire, Walmart), don’t have it. I couldn’t find an easy way to adapt a low-sugar pectin recipe to a full-sugar pectin recipe, so I half-invented this and half-adapted this to work with regular pectin.

You start by boiling and then simmering chive blossoms in a mix of water, white wine (optional, you can use additional water instead), and cider vinegar to leech out the flavour and some of the colour from the blossoms. I had some chive blossom vinegar from last year on hand, so instead of using cider vinegar I used the chive blossom vinegar for some extra chive-y taste. After it simmers for a while, you strain out the solids and let the liquid cool to room temperature.

From there it’s a pretty standard jelly recipe involving pectin, boiling, adding sugar, hard boiling, and canning. All instructions are in the recipe card below.

For an extra splash of fun, I picked apart some chive blossoms and added them to the jar before pouring in the hot jelly.

After canning, this is the final result…

Uses for chive blossom jelly

Chive blossom jelly has a very vibrant chive taste and even though it’s a full sugar recipe, it doesn’t seem too sweet to me, which opens it up to several different uses.

There’s, of course, the obvious use of spreading it on toast, but here are some ways I’m looking forward to using it:

As a topping on sandwiches. I make an excellent bagel breakfast sandwich with mayo, cheese, egg, and bacon, and I find a thin layer of savoury jelly often caps it off perfectly.
As a topping on a baked brie. During BBQ season I love to bake brie cheese on the grill and putting a thick layer of savoury jelly on top just adds a little something special to an already delicious appetizier.
As a side for a charcuterie or a cheese board. A little slathering of jelly on a cracker served alongside sharp cheese or cured meats would be heavenly.

Chive Blossom Jelly

Savoury, chive-y, and slightly sweet, chive blossom jelly looks gorgeous, tastes delicious, and can be used for savoury breakfasts, charcuterie boards, and baked bries.

5 from 2 votes

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Prep Time 2

Cook Time 15

Course Appetizer, Breakfast